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Artemis II is not safe to fly

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Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#111

Post by xp84 »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #80
eru wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About the last point: At this point in time, manned space exploration should come out of our entertainment budget. The same budget we use for football or olympic games.

could the government rent out monopoly grants for televised football on the moon in exchange for sponsoring manned space exploration?

If the NFL were to somehow become involved, you can bet that they'd somehow manage to turn the financials around and get some of that sweet government money flowing in their direction, just like the dozens of taxpayer-funded or otherwise tax-advantaged stadium deals in the past 25 years that allow us to thank Big Football financially for gracing us with the presence of football teams.

It is astounding to me how such a successful, rich group of companies manage to get subsidies in quantities that groups you'd think deserve or need it more, from valuable science endeavours to orphans dying of cancer, can only dream of.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#112

Post by waterTanuki »

> That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget. The charismatic new Administrator has staked his reputation on increasing launch cadence, and set an explicit goal of landing astronauts on the Moon before President Trump’s term expires in January of 2029.

This is the most frustrating part. The Pentagon can fail the same audit multiple times and be missing trillions of taxpayer dollars but NASA has to move heaven and earth to show their relatively paltry $100B budget isn't going to waste. I'm tired of the double standards.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#113

Post by GMoromisato »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #87
GMoromisato wrote: post #77

This is a more balanced take, in my opinion: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/nasa-chief-reviews-ori... Camarda is an outlier. The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe. Former astronaut Danny Olivas was initially skeptical of the heat shield but came around. And note that the OP believes it is likely (maybe very likely) that the heat shield will work fine. It's hard for me to r…

for human spaceflight we want a lot more than "likely" (>50%). The standard is usually "extremely likely" (~1/100 to 1/1000 chance of failure)

Maybe. What was the probability of Loss of Crew during Apollo? There were 9 crewed missions and 1 almost killed its crew (I will omit Apollo 1 for now). I could argue that Apollo had a 1 in 20 chance of killing a crew. Indeed, that was one reason given for cancelling the program.

The first Shuttle launch probably had a 1 in 4 chance of killing its crew. It was the first launch of an extremely complicated system and they sent it with a crew of two. Can you imagine NASA doing that today?

In a news conference last week, a NASA program manager estimated the Loss of Mission chance for Artemis II at between 1 in 2 and 1 in 50. They said, historically, a new rocket has a 1 in 2 chance of failure, but they learned much from Artemis I, so it's probably better than that. [Of course, that's Loss of Mission instead of Loss of Crew.]

My guess is NASA and the astronauts are comfortable with a 1 in 100 chance of Loss of Crew.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#114

Post by cromwellian »

throw-23 wrote: post #48

As someone who is actually (still) a fan of basic research, Artemis looks like a fun time for the 1% with a $100 billion dollar price tag, except that since it's only 4 astronauts and support staff, it's less than 1%. I opposed messing with NASA funding for a long time, but arguments referencing spin-off tech and so on wear thin. Spin-off occurring lately would/could only be captured by existing billionaires anyway,…

NASA's budget is 0.35% of the Federal Budget. The US Government spends the equivalent of 20 years of moon mission spending on ICE. They're spending 2x that on Iran war. They blew $200 billion in PPP Loan fraud in 2020 alone.

I'm tired of nickle and diming science funding. You had scientists like Sabine Hossenfelder cheerleading NSF cuts cause of "waste" on string theory and particle accelerators. NSF is 0.1% of the federal budget, and it has funded a remarkable number of world changing inventions over the last 40 years.

We don't spent JACK on space. Look at the huge returns from the Hubble and James Webb. Why aren't we building HUGE HUGE space telescopes as immediate followups? We should have 50 James Webb equivalents. NASA once had plans for a "Terrestial Planet Mapper", a bunch of giant space telescopes flying in formation that combine their signals for truly incredible resolution, good enough to image planets around distant solar systems to a few pixels.

We've now seen plenty of planets in the habitable zone with nearby signatures of biological precursor molecules. We've found asteroids with sugars and amino acids in them. Give NASA 10x the budget and end these damn wars. The Pentagon failed 7 audits and can't account for $2 TRILLION and we're talking about humans in space a waste? It's a drop in the bucket, and it provides a beacon for humanity to dream.

The Apollo projects created a whole generation of people who wanted to go into STEM, that's the biggest ROI.

NASA, the NSF, the NIH, et al, are not the problem. Their spending is insignificant, NASA+NSF is < 1% of the budget.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#116

Post by necovek »

eru wrote: post #106
cultofmetatron wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree. some of our best technologies came about to solve problems related to space travel which we later found useful for mundane problems at home. gps, digital cameras immediately come to mind. The only other phenomena I can think of with similar effects on human progress is war... I'll take a space race thanks

Have you heard of opportunity costs? About war: in our universe we got the first digital computers because of military efforts during the second world war. However, without a war IBM and Konrad Zuse and others would have gotten there, too. With much less human suffering.

I believe you are making the same argument: the GP prefers space race over war for large technological development at less or no human suffering.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#117

Post by IndrekR »

tonymet wrote: post #18
jojobas wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was there ever a risk-free spaceflight? Pretty sure even with this finding this flight would be safer than any Apollo.

Never risk free , but Soyuz hardly lost any crew over its 50+ years

2/156 lost for Soyuz in 59 years, 2/135 for Space Shuttle in 30 years. Same rate. People often underestimate how intense STS actually was.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#118

Post by arppacket »

idlewords wrote: post #98
GMoromisato wrote: post #77

This is a more balanced take, in my opinion: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/nasa-chief-reviews-ori... Camarda is an outlier. The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe. Former astronaut Danny Olivas was initially skeptical of the heat shield but came around. And note that the OP believes it is likely (maybe very likely) that the heat shield will work fine. It's hard for me to r…

If you play a single round of Russian roulette with a revolver, it is likely you will not die, but it is also not safe to do that. The same idea applies here. The foam shedding/impact problem was heavily analyzed throughout the Shuttle program, and recognized as a significant risk. Read the CAIB report for a good history. That report also describes the groupthink dynamic at NASA that made skeptical engineers "come ar…

It looks like they did some worst case testing that was reassuring, so that it isn't Russian roulette? Any comments on that? I suppose their composite testing and temperature projections could also be wrong, and their trajectory changes might not be mitigating enough for the heat shield chunking, but that's a few different things all simultaneously being wrong for a catastrophic failure to occur.

The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry.

What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#119

Post by eru »

necovek wrote: post #116
eru wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of opportunity costs? About war: in our universe we got the first digital computers because of military efforts during the second world war. However, without a war IBM and Konrad Zuse and others would have gotten there, too. With much less human suffering.

I believe you are making the same argument: the GP prefers space race over war for large technological development at less or no human suffering.

Well, getting your toes cut off is better than losing your whole foot, yes.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#120

Post by tonymet »

1shooner wrote: post #29
tonymet wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ve killed dozens during the shuttle program , or did you forget ? Also a number during Gemini, Mercury and Appollo. Terrible safety record , and 5x worse than Soyuz . Shuttle fatality rate was 1/10. Approaching Russian roulette odds

>They’ve killed dozens during the shuttle program Columbia and Challenger crew totaled 14, who else are you referring to?

Oh 14 totally acceptable
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