521–530 of 667 posts
> This will be second flight of NASA’s SLS rocket, and the first time the 20-year-old Orion capsule flies with people on board. THEY REUSE THESE CAPSULES?!
Um, yeah. Welcome to the 21'st century, did you enjoy your long nap?
This seems like the only one, and according TFA, it sucks.
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…
It's kind of sad that we've become so risk averse. Risks should be fully disclosed but let the adventurers adventure. Would Columbus' ship ever have been allowed to sail in the modern day? Proximity wingsuit flying and free-climbing is legal and people choose to do it even though the probability of death is extremely high. Spaceflight is significantly safer and far more beneficial to humanity, yet we block it. No one…
Or to put it another way, if you were the manager on the day of the Challenger launch issuing the "go" command over the objections of the Thiokol engineers saying it was unsafe to launch in below-freezing temperatures, would you have done so with paeans to Christopher Columbus? That's the sense I get from your post.
I'm literally guest lecturing at a Harvard class tomorrow on systemic failures in decision making, using the Columbia and Challenger disasters as case studies, and changed my slides last night to include Artemis II because it could literally happen again. This broken safety culture has been around since the beginning of the Shuttle program. In 1980, Gregg Easterbrook published "Goodbye, Columbia" in The Washington Mo…
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> And if it doesn't blow up due to heat shield failure, TFA (and its references) will be forgotten. The HN hivemind will remember, he's a well known user with a well known site. Let's hope there is no accident, but after the landing there will be reports anyway. We will take a look at the report of the shield and see if it shows a problem in spite it didn't explode, and compare with the prediction in the article. He…
I'm not super happy with the pattern of thinking in these numbers; arguing 1/100000 vs 1/100 for "accidents" is again a boolean thing. They probably had a very specific definition, which does make this viable, but we don't have that definition here. So the numbers are meaningless to us. And not having that definition, "accidents" is a sliding scale… e.g. I'm pretty sure astronauts injured themselves banging various b…
You can pick a more strict safety criteria, but the result would be (something)/135 >= 2/135 > 1/100 >> 1/1000000
I haven't kept up with Artemis development but I've read extensively about Challenger and Columbia. These two parts of the article stood out to me: > Moon-to-Mars Deputy Administrator Amit Kshatriya said: “it was very small localized areas. Interestingly, it would be much easier for us to analyze if we had larger chunks and it was more defined”. A Lockheed Martin representative on the same call added that "there was…
> Challenger: no gasses were supposed to make it past the o-rings no matter what, > but when it became clear that gasses were escaping and the o-rings were being > damaged, there was a push to suggest that it's an acceptable level. Interestingly, the article https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz... > by heat shield expert and Shuttle astronaut Charles Camarda, the former Director of Engineering…
I'm literally guest lecturing at a Harvard class tomorrow on systemic failures in decision making, using the Columbia and Challenger disasters as case studies, and changed my slides last night to include Artemis II because it could literally happen again. This broken safety culture has been around since the beginning of the Shuttle program. In 1980, Gregg Easterbrook published "Goodbye, Columbia" in The Washington Mo…
Considering how much humanity has allegedly advanced since then, I don't understand what are we gaining thats caused us to have to abandon safety.
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Oh wow what a tragedy. You think maybe there's reasons for that mandate? Like maybe it saves children's lives? But sure everything would be better if any moron was allowed to decide how to keep their own kids safe.
The evidence on car seats is extremely weak and they prevent only a handful of injuries. You'd be better off redesigning roads or having more collision protection systems in cars. As self-driving cars get better to the point where they can communicate and eliminate many human errors, there's probably no need for car seats at all. In many situations they make things more dangerous, not less.
Isn't this true for every safety measure?
I don't need a guard on my table saw if I don't stick my thumb in it. Don't need a helmet if I don't fall off of my bike.
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There’s been plenty of coverage of this issue, and this article discusses some of the changed they made: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/the-artemis-... The only thing the author of this blog piece has to offer that’s new is his very strong personal intuition that the new design hasn’t been properly validated, without any engineering explanation about why the testing the performed won’t adequately sim…
Their testing procedures failed to predict the char loss before the flight, so they don't seem very reliable.
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Your implied frustration at a relatively easy change backed by experts and mountains of data is another point in favor of > humans are so oblivious to safety
We have 4 kids. Before we had our 3rd, we needed to buy a new vehicle solely because we couldn't fit 3 car seats into the back of our old car. And when traveling with kids, carrying 4 gigantic car seats plus your other luggage is not exactly as easy as you might think! It essentially rules out solo parent travel with all 4 kids. Transferring car seats between two cars, or installing car seats in a taxi, is a serious…
Look at what lengths you went to in order to justify and defend what is, by your own arguments, the demonstrably less safe option.