421–430 of 667 posts
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I'm sure the other astronauts are really looking forward to fly with a person showing signs of tolerating massive risks.
Each and every one of them is fully aware that it’s a massive risk and has made their peace with that. You’re getting strapped to a giant rocket. It’s inherently dangerous
> The trouble is that the heat shield on Orion blows chunks. Not in some figurative, pejorative sense, but in the sense that when NASA flew this exact mission in 2022, large pieces of material blew out of Orion’s heat shield during re-entry, leaving divots. Large bolts embedded in the heat shield also partially eroded and melted through. Fun wording. This isn't news, concerns have been raised about Artemis II saftey…
The point of the blog post is that those concerns have not been adequately addressed.
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> more than 95% of all satellites launched are launched by SpaceX Another way to look at this number is that they are responsible for 95% of the light pollution caused by orbiting objects.
Lets just ban lightbulbs so we don't have light pollution.
Not that I don't think it's cool to have a web of spacecraft enveloping the planet and bringing high-speed communications to everyone everywhere - it's pretty impressive to point up and show a train of satellites to a kid - but astronomers have been complaining about them and they are right.
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Hang on, without a dog in this fight, have I asked the people who trained their whole lives to drive cool cars if this particular cool car, which they were not involved in designing or building, is safe to drive? Is that what you are asking?
They asked if the astronauts "want to risk it", not if it was actually safe. Those are very different questions. The astronauts are, in fact, the world's leading experts on whether or not they personally want to risk it, so it's not entirely unreasonable to think that they could answer that question. It just depends on whether you think that the fact that they accept the risks is reason enough to let them fly a poten…
Artemis II is not safe, at least by the standards we apply to things. It's the third flight of a capsule, on the second flight of the rocket, and the first flight of things like the life support system.
At the end of the day, one of the reasons astronauts are respected is they understand those risks, and go into space anyway. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to minimize risks - but at some point the risk becomes acceptable, and the cost of reducing it too great.
To paraphrase a quote from Star Trek - risk is their business.
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It is bound to happen again and again considering humans are so oblivious to safety.
humans are so oblivious to safety It seems that in modern times, humans focus on safety almost to the exclusion of everything else. As much as the more traditional salutations "godspeed" or "have a nice day", we're even more likely to hear "drive safe" or "have a safe trip" or "be safe". We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe. Surely you've heard the mantra "...if it saves jus…
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As an aside, do you have any suggestions for "state of the art" reading on safety culture?
I just had a conversation about engineers not understanding the need for grounding. I'm wondering if every generation has to relearn the basics for themselves through experience. Each generation has to make the same mistakes. Because book learning doesn't seem to do it for some things.
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The most frustrating part of the whole thing is that when you read Charles Camarda’s thoughts after his meeting with NASA in January, it could have been written in 1986 or in 2003. https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDU... It’s pretty clear at this point that the shuttle was already broken at design. But seeing the same powder keg of safety/budget/immovable time constraints applied to a totally…
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> We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe. Are we? People saying "have a safe trip" is pretty weak evidence. The counter evidence is just about everything else going on, at least in the US. Relaxed worker safety standards, weakened environmental protections, and generally moving as fast as possible.
My kids are going to be legally mandated to be in car seats until they’re about 12 years old.
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> test the new heat shield which will replace the Artemis II design in an unmanned re-entry as well. NASA desperately needs more options. They shouldn't need to expend an SLS to launch an uncrewed Orion with a test heatshield on a trajectory equivalent to a moon return. They should be able to launch that on top of a Falcon Heavy. A Falcon Heavy can launch 63 tons to LEO and a fueled Orion plus service module weights…
I'd prefer if we just wrote off space-x and pretend they don't exist.
Now imagine the public good will if the US could have built a network of LEO satellites providing communications to everyone on Earth regardless of nationality, with equal access and funded by governments so that all their residents could have access to it for free (once they buy an antenna made in the US).
Some will say it'd be communism. I would say it could be part of a Pax Americana that doesn't involve coups, but is based on willing cooperation.
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…