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Artemis II is competency porn

lizplank.substack.com

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Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#3

Post by moffkalast »

daymanstep wrote: post #2

I can't stop thinking about this article while reading this: https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....

Clearly in retrospect they made the right call to go ahead though. The heat shield held up fine.

Arguably NASA played it extremely safe this time round, high first orbit, no direct TLI, no lunar orbit that you can't come back from if the engines don't fire back up. I think they're very aware of the poor quality of modern manufacturing they're working with, which is why it's all the more impressive that everything went as planned, Outlook aside.

It's still extremely dumb they're throwing away RS-25 engines for this, but no competence survives contact with political management.

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#8

Post by rbanffy »

I will still wait for the heat shield analysis. Doing a crewed flight was not what I would have done - I’d use a Falcon Heavy to put one or more dummies through different trajectories to make sure we have enough experimental data to extensively model the shield behaviour, especially in non-nominal entries.
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