Artemis II is not safe to fly • Hacker News Board

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#541

Post by aeternum » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 9:01 PM UTC

Analemma_ wrote: post #538

aeternum wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. How do you explain so many people believing it is safe? The problem is risks are far too easy to brainstorm, anyone can come up with endless risks that it takes endless time to mitigate. If I were the manager for challenger, I wo…

> How do you explain so many people believing it is safe? The article itself answers this question: institutional incentives leading to heavy social pressure to agree with the groupthink and declare something is safe when it is not. And we know that the scenario it lays out is highly possible, because it has already destroyed two Space Shuttles. Now that this has happened twice, the burden of proof is on the people s…

>the burden of proof is on the people saying it's not happening again

This specifically I take issue with. You had a bug in your software before so now the burden is on you to formally prove your software is bug-free.

The burden of proof should remain on the naysayers. Take a plasma torch to the heatshield pock marks and see how long it takes to burn through. Do experiments just as Feynman did with the o-rings. Let the outcome of the experiment, not office politics decide.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#542

Post by wat10000 » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 9:37 PM UTC

tonymet wrote: post #539

wat10000 wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't and don't intend to. I was just addressing your incorrect figures.

How can your model be correct when it doesn’t explain the world ?

Probabilities don't explain why they are what they are. If you flip a coin a bunch of times and find that it lands on heads 52% of the time, that doesn't tell you anything about what's going on with that coin to bias it. It's not supposed to. That's a different field altogether.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#543

Post by Analemma_ » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 9:38 PM UTC

aeternum wrote: post #541

Analemma_ wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you explain so many people believing it is safe? The article itself answers this question: institutional incentives leading to heavy social pressure to agree with the groupthink and declare something is safe when it is not. And we know that the scenario it lays out is highly possible, because it has already destroyed two Space Shuttles. Now that this has happened twice, the burden of proof is on the people s…

>the burden of proof is on the people saying it's not happening again This specifically I take issue with. You had a bug in your software before so now the burden is on you to formally prove your software is bug-free. The burden of proof should remain on the naysayers. Take a plasma torch to the heatshield pock marks and see how long it takes to burn through. Do experiments just as Feynman did with the o-rings. Let t…

I'd say when two conditions are true:

1) you have an established pattern of behavior of ignoring safety concerns (Challenger, Columbia), and

2) people are alleging that you are doing the same thing now, with independent auditing from the OIG backing them up,

that's sufficient to shift the burden of proof back onto you.

Your attempt at a gotcha with the heatshield is just ridiculous: everyone already agrees the heatshield works in small-scale testing. That's the entire problem! It failed on the actual mission and NASA couldn't explain why, so instead they pivoted to trying to explain why the failures don't matter.

(EDIT: As an addendum, I'll also add that you don't even need to go back to Columbia to find an example of NASA lying about safety to protect reputations. Remember when they insisted for months that the Starliner mission was going just fine, and then eventually they said the astronauts weren't coming back on it, and then it landed and the final report was that there multiple failures leaving it on the knife edge of total catastrophe? And remember how that was less than two years ago? You're a maniac if you take the safety claims of this organization at face value)

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#544

Post by FrustratedMonky » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 9:41 PM UTC

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #365

jessewmc wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not saying it is right, or correct.

Just that it happens.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#545

Post by mr_toad » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 10:03 PM UTC

irjustin wrote: post #96

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

1/100 is absolutely terrible. Shuttle had 1.5% failure rate. Bonkers. [edit] For comparison, commercial aviation has something like 1 in 5.8m or 6x 9's of reliability.

There have been 412 manned space flights, ever, by anyone, anywhere.

A large commercial airport handles many times that number of flights every single day. Worldwide there are a hundred times more flights per day than the number of manned space flights in history.

I suspect every model of commercial plane has flown far more flights than all the human rated rockets put together.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#546

Post by palata » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 10:04 PM UTC

mmooss wrote: post #436

MisterTea wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This broken safety culture has been around since the beginning of the Shuttle program. It's broken everywhere. I have worked in some dysfunctional shops and the problem I see time and time again is the people who make it into management are often egoists who don't care about anything other than the financial compensation and clout the job titles bestows upon them. That or they think management is the same as being…

> people who make it into management are often egoists > they were incapable of accepting humiliation I agree mostly but here is a different take on it: I think these are normal human feelings and behaviors - not the best of us, but not unusual either. If we want to get good things done, we need to work with and through human nature. Power corrupts everyone and shame is generally the most painful thing for humans. Pu…

> Putting people in a position where they need to treat their power with absolute humility or accept humiliation (and a major blow to their careers) in order to do the right thing is going to fail 99% of the time.

I don't know... we select those people. Usually not for their ability to treat their power with humility, though.

That's my argument in favour of quotas (e.g. for women): the way we select people in power now, we tend to have white old males who have the kind of relationship we know with power.

By deciding to select someone different (e.g. a woman), we may realise that not all humans are... well white old males. Not that we should select someone incompetent! But when we put someone in a position of power, I am convinced that many competitors are competent. We just tend to chose "the most competent" (with some definition of "the most"), which may not mean anything. For those positions, maybe it's more that either you are competent, or you are not.

Say from all the "competent" candidates, we systematically selected women for a while. We would end up with profiles that are not "white old males", and we may realise that it works just as well. Or even better. And that maybe some humans can treat power with humility.

And if that got us to accept that those are desirable traits for people in power, it may serve men as well: plenty of men are generally not selected for positions of power. Forcing us to realise this by having quotas of minorities (say women) may actually help "white old males who can treat their power with humility" get recognised eventually.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#547

Post by palata » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 10:13 PM UTC

arppacket wrote: post #118

idlewords wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

I think the point of the article is that there is no particular need to send humans in Artemis II.

Sure, they made tests. But it's not the same as trying in real conditions. The argument is that if they were able to predict everything with tests before the real flight, then Artemis I wouldn't have had those issues. But we know what happened.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#548

Post by palata » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 10:19 PM UTC

ethmarks wrote: post #326

tclancy wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I know we all have a lot of respect for astronauts, but the fact is that they blindly trust whoever tells them "it's safe enough" that it is, actually, safe enough.

Artemis II doesn't need astronauts to do its flights. Astronauts are trained to survive in a spaceship that does not need them to do anything at all. That it is their dream to survive in such a spaceship does not say at all that they have any valid idea of how much risk they are taking.

We can say "maybe the astronauts would accept to fly knowing that they have a probability of 1/30 of dying" all we want, but that doesn't answer the question here, which is: what is the probability that they die?

The article says "we don't really know: the first test flight was very concerning, and we used the exact same methods to prepare the second flight, so we won't really know how unsafe it is until we try it".

Sure, they have made tests on the ground. But the first flight proves that those tests are not enough, otherwise Artemis I wouldn't have had those issues in the first place.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#549

Post by LorenPechtel » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 10:42 PM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #358

chadd wrote: post #292

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…

It’s fundamentally a human coordination problem that cannot be solved The more populated and complex an organization gets it becomes impossible to maintain a singular value vector (get these people around the moon safely) Everyone finds meta vectors (keep my job, reduce my own accountability) that maintain their own individual stability, such that if the whole thing fails they won’t feel liable

There's a deeper problem behind a lot of this:

The problem is that it is treated as if people's jobs are to do X. What happens when someone says given the problem constraints it's impossible to safely do X? The naysayers get replaced, X gets done anyway.

Actual safety only comes when there is an external agency who monitors safety and accomplishing X is not part of their objective.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#550

Post by SlightlyLeftPad » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 10:44 PM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #358

chadd wrote: post #292

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…

It’s fundamentally a human coordination problem that cannot be solved The more populated and complex an organization gets it becomes impossible to maintain a singular value vector (get these people around the moon safely) Everyone finds meta vectors (keep my job, reduce my own accountability) that maintain their own individual stability, such that if the whole thing fails they won’t feel liable

100% agree, and I definitely see this in the tech industry and it all begins and ends with psychological safety. Right now there’s job pressure in tech which creates this toxic sense coming from management that they can fire any one at any time because they don’t like you. It essentially fosters this culture to not rock the boat or “piss off the wrong person.” The result is, you keep your mouth shut or significantly risk being penalized on your annual performance review. Add inflation and the ever-rising cost of living. For an individual contributor or even front line management, the choice is very clear. This is obviously a recipe for catastrophe when you’re dealing with human lives.

When you’re a rocket scientist at NASA, you also have relatively few alternatives other than SpaceX or Boeing.