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Artemis II safely splashes down

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Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#431

Post by GMoromisato »

dmix wrote: post #425
mvkel wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Landing on Mars is the artifact of all of the innovation required to get to Mars. We benefit from the innovations, not the landing per se. Memory foam, smart phone cameras, tech miniaturization in general, GPS, baby formula, cordless tools... just a tiny sliver of things we use daily that are directly attributable to the pursuit of space travel. It is far from useless

I fully support humans landing on Mars and large budgets but I don't think anything gets exaggerated in these discussions quite like the commercial technology ROI of space programs.

I totally agree. If the only reason to land on Mars were the derivative technologies, I would push for just working on those technologies directly.

And the public is not fooled. Whatever benefits they got from Apollo (Tang? Zero-G pens?) were not worth the cost. But no matter how long the USA lasts, it will always be remembered as the country that landed humans on the moon.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#432

Post by brianjlogan »

pjc50 wrote: post #310
brianjlogan wrote: post #82

As an American I feel like I've been going through a bit of an identity crisis from what I remember growing up. Probably the rose tinted glasses of being a child but being from Florida I always had a sense of amazement and wonder as I heard the sonic boom of the shuttle returning to earth. Really felt like I was coexisting in this incredible scientific powerhouse of a country full of bright and enabled peoples that k…

From one of the ground staff for Artemis: https://bsky.app/profile/captnamy.bsky.social/post/3mi36brfw... "1968 and the country was on fire. Vietnam. Assassinations. Civil unrest. Protests. Apollo 8 was the one bright event of a terrible year. 2026 and the country is on fire. Iran. Corruption. Fascists. Civil unrest. No Kings. I hope Artemis II will stand out as a bright spot for our country." Some more background on…

Oh I didn't realize that was the same year!

That was indeed quite a year. The Rest is History podcast on it was quite good.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#433

Post by d1sxeyes »

jjk166 wrote: post #385
d1sxeyes wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you doing better is independent of the risk involved. The chances of you getting 3/4 heads or better is around 31%, so theres ~69% chance you’ll do worse next time round. Doesn’t change the fact that each coin toss is still 50/50.

> Doesn’t change the fact that each coin toss is still 50/50. That assumes a fair coin. The fact is you don't know what the odds were of getting heads or tails for that particular coin, all you know is that you got 3/4 heads. And in this analogy, a few hundred coins have every been made, in maybe a dozen styles, none of which have been fair, so you have no good reason to believe that this particular coin should have…

But the idea we're exploring is that the coin is fair (i.e. the 1/1000 estimate is correct, and the Apollo missions were unlucky).

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#434

Post by d1sxeyes »

stetrain wrote: post #426
d1sxeyes wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you doing better is independent of the risk involved. The chances of you getting 3/4 heads or better is around 31%, so theres ~69% chance you’ll do worse next time round. Doesn’t change the fact that each coin toss is still 50/50.

The original discussion was about acceptable mortality rate. Artemis's target is 1 in 30, which is better than the empirically observed mortality rate of the actual Apollo missions. The mortality rate is a target. And if that target is an improvement over the actual outcome of the Apollo missions, I think it's difficult to say that the target is weaker than Apollo's, which was the claim up the thread that I was respo…

I think we're approaching this from different angles. 1 in 30 is better than the observed rate, but worse than the estimated rate.

FWIW, the 1/12 is also actually off, the long-term mortality rate for Apollo astronauts is high.

But so is the 1/1000, Nasa's own estimates were so bad that they decided it was bad optics to keep doing them - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190002249/downloads/20...

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#435

Post by whackernews »

palata wrote: post #404
hermannj314 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A diverse and inclusive crew, a publically-funded mission, an emphasis on science and discovery, and government investment in a long-term strategy, not a quick politcal win. This current administration has made sure these things never happen again, Artemis is very much the swan song of an America that has died. I am not interested in watching our corpse twitch and calling it life.

> an emphasis on science and discovery Sorry, what science and discovery is that bringing? I mean it's technically really cool , but I fail to see the science and discovery there.

Why don’t you look it up instead of guessing? I mean even on the surface level, for me, exploring space is the most “science and discovery” thing you can do!

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#436

Post by card_zero »

api wrote: post #383
antonvs wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder sometimes if that’s another thing to toss in the Fermi paradox bucket Here we are, half a century after the first moon landing, doing a flyby of the moon in preparation for landing and supposedly for establishing a base there that makes no sense. We’re not even close to being able to send humans to the nearest planets, and even if we did send people to Mars, in one of the most pointlessly dangerous and exp…

It’s a logical extrapolation if you think life is a natural phenomenon. It would be exceedingly weird to see no evidence for it, but of course we have not been looking long or far. And yes, space flight is brutally hard. Look up the history of sailing. Look up the Polynesian indigenous peoples and how long that took, through multiple waves of exploration, or the people who walked across a land bridge to North America…

Natural doesn't mean likely. Say life rarely gets started, because it requires some kind of accidental evolutionary engine involving rivers and clay crystals, some unusual conditions of weather and geology. Then say life rarely gets complex and big, because mats of bacteria can be the dominant species indefinitely. So the universe is mostly dead, and the living parts are mostly slime. Then say actual human-like intelligence, the kind that tries really hard to imagine new things to meddle with and new spaces to explore, such as exploring the space space, is a freakish mutation and is unlikely to be adaptive at first. So it rarely happens and then usually dies out straight away. The rare instances of complex life, then, are mostly just floating around in oceans wiggling their complex limbs fecklessly. So those are two terms in the Drake equation, with an extra one about complexity added in the middle, and they multiply together to make things very unlikely by an unknown amount. We don't know what the numbers are. It might be natural that there isn't any sign of life out there, if the small probability of spacefaring life is smaller than space is big.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#437

Post by inglor_cz »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #428
inglor_cz wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Artemis II never escaped Earth’s pull." Hmm. Maximum speed attained by Artemis II when they left their initial orbit was about 11.1 km/s IIRC. While this is somewhat less than true escape velocity from Earth (11.2 km/s) and you are technically correct, it is also enough of a speed that if you fly away in any random direction (and not a carefully calculated one), perturbances from the Sun and other massive objects wi…

The sun’s pull on the ship at the outside limit at the moon, is obviously negligible compared to the pull of the Earth. This should be obvious, because otherwise the moon would have left long ago. Why is this so difficult to understand? Honestly I think that misleading NASA graphic did a lot of damage. You throw in acceleration, which I never mentioned and doesn’t matter. The Artemis II never left Earth’s gravitional…

I wonder if you are replying to a different comment. I never mentioned acceleration in mine.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#438

Post by palata »

hermannj314 wrote: post #427
palata wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an emphasis on science and discovery Sorry, what science and discovery is that bringing? I mean it's technically really cool , but I fail to see the science and discovery there.

From NASA >> Under Artemis, NASA will send astronauts on increasingly difficult missions to explore more of the Moon for *scientific discovery*, economic benefits, and to build on our foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars. Yeah fuck me for thinking this was about that that.

Do you think they would say "with the same budget we can obviously make better science with unmanned missions, but people find the manned ones cooler"?

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#439

Post by palata »

whackernews wrote: post #435
palata wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an emphasis on science and discovery Sorry, what science and discovery is that bringing? I mean it's technically really cool , but I fail to see the science and discovery there.

Why don’t you look it up instead of guessing? I mean even on the surface level, for me, exploring space is the most “science and discovery” thing you can do!

Curiosity, Perseverance, Rosetta. Those are science and discovery.

Sending people in space? Mostly cool engineering.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#440

Post by palata »

GMoromisato wrote: post #408
palata wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but we really are gearing up for Mars. Which again is cool, but useless. And actually counter-productive, because we risk contaminating Mars with organic stuff coming from the Earth.

"Useless" and "counter-productive" are value judgements, not objective conclusions. My opinion is that landing humans on Mars could be the start of a new age of exploration, which would massively benefit humanity. And the risk of contamination is worth the potential reward. That's just my opinion, of course, but it happens to be NASA's opinion as well.

> but it happens to be NASA's opinion as well.

Of course, not only they depend on it, but also they love doing that. And as an engineer of course I find it cool. That's not a reason to say it's useful though.

> landing humans on Mars could be the start of a new age of exploration, which would massively benefit humanity. And the risk of contamination is worth the potential reward.

How informed is that? Let me say two things:

1. There may have been life on Mars. That we could discover an analyse with robots. Now the day a human lands on Mars, this ruins it. If we ever find a trace of life on Mars after that, we will never know if we brought it there or not. In terms of science, that is a massive loss.

2. Are you aware that if we ever reach Mars, it's the final stop? The next solar system is more than 4 light-years away. At the speeds we can reach, it would take tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands) of years for a ship to get there. See the problem? And that's the closest one.

Going to Mars is not helping us go further: there is nothing further, just empty space. Unless we revolutionise fundamental physics (but sending humans to Mars does nothing in that direction, you need physicists to discover new theories for that).

So why go to Mars? You think we can bring an atmosphere there and make it like the Earth? We demonstrably cannot survive on Earth, and somehow you think that we can take an empty planet like Mars and build an Earth from scratch there? Really?

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