Artemis II is not safe to fly • Hacker News Board

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#641

Post by whackernews » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 7:26 AM UTC

palata wrote: post #546

mmooss wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 n…

Just a bit of casual racism and misandry here. Raising because I’m sick of purple getting away with this now why don’t you check yourself.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#642

Post by M95D » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 7:42 AM UTC

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #629

trey-jones wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Even a history of safety success contributes to this. We haven't had an accident in 3000 days, what was dangerous about this job again? Also what's this stupid policy for anyway, I've never seen anybody even come close to (non-dangerous-sounding fate) while working here. But probably the policy is in place because it used to happen before the policy was in place. It's just not obvious to people who have never s…

Complacency kills! It's why it's usually the old farmers that die in stupid ways. I'm also reminded of the Yale machine shop safety supervisor who died by getting herself wound around a lathe spindle. Working alone, late at night on powerful rotating machinery wearing loose clothing.

Link?

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#643

Post by waweic » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 11:11 AM UTC

eqvinox wrote: post #251

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…

TFA is ridiculous with its stance. Yeah, there's this aspect of the design they can't test in their labs. It might even be an important aspect. But safety isn't a boolean "safe"/"not safe", it's a risk assessment, and I'm quite sure there are 100 (or 10000) other things they didn't test for. As long as they're taking all of this into their risk calculations… it's fine. And if it doesn't blow up due to heat shield fai…

Does a jammed toilet fan count as failure?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603657#47610348

In that case, go on claiming rocket engineering m4d ch0pz.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#644

Post by eqvinox » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 12:03 PM UTC

waweic wrote: post #643

eqvinox wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TFA is ridiculous with its stance. Yeah, there's this aspect of the design they can't test in their labs. It might even be an important aspect. But safety isn't a boolean "safe"/"not safe", it's a risk assessment, and I'm quite sure there are 100 (or 10000) other things they didn't test for. As long as they're taking all of this into their risk calculations… it's fine. And if it doesn't blow up due to heat shield fai…

Does a jammed toilet fan count as failure? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603657#47610348 In that case, go on claiming rocket engineering m4d ch0pz.

OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#645

Post by wolvoleo » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 1:56 PM UTC

chasd00 wrote: post #498

wolvoleo wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither is true IMO but musk just picked the right development model. Big space never did this because the current megaproject cost plus is just what they want, a blank check. Witn SpaceX Musk was mainly wasting his own money especially in the beginning. So it made sense. It just makes sense, it's not even a 'shortcut'. Ps yes he did get some grants but not beefy unlimited ones.

Another thing SpaceX has going for it is when their tests fail everyone just points and laughs at Musk. When a NASA launch fails the taxpayers don't want to pay for it any longer.

The laughing was at the start, before Falcon 9 made it into orbit.

There was very little laughing at the starship RUDs. I think it's pretty clear that this development model is far superior now.

Don't forget that big space had a big incentive to paint it as useless, to protect their pork barrel.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#646

Post by MeetingsBrowser » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

Miraste wrote: post #638

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.cdc.gov/child-passenger-safety/publications/inde... Experts almost always set policy better than non-experts doing their own research. Especially on complex topics. There is no point in two amateurs arguing over a topic they don't understand. All I can do is refer to the publicly available reasoning and studies of experts, which have evidence and conclusions opposite of the amateur conclusion above.

Child car seat regulations are state laws passed by state politicians. They are not experts in any sense of the word, and generally don't bother with evidence or studies when creating said laws.

Just follow the CDC recommendation then, which is to keep kids in a car seat until 11-12 years old.

I'm not arguing all laws are good or make sense. In this specific case, the law lines of up with the recommendation of experts studying the topic.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#647

Post by MeetingsBrowser » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 2:29 PM UTC

adamsb6 wrote: post #634

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.cdc.gov/child-passenger-safety/publications/inde... Experts almost always set policy better than non-experts doing their own research. Especially on complex topics. There is no point in two amateurs arguing over a topic they don't understand. All I can do is refer to the publicly available reasoning and studies of experts, which have evidence and conclusions opposite of the amateur conclusion above.

Risk tolerance is a value judgment, not an empirical fact waiting to be discovered. Competent experts could tell you how much safer you would be if you wore a helmet to drive your car. They can't tell you how much you should value that extra bit of safety.

Personal risk is a value judgement. The government steps in when your decisions impact the life of an unconsenting third party, like a child.

Can you point to a single competent expert who recommends the average driver should wear a helmet while driving? Again, there is a difference between one study showing helmets reduce injury in crashes, and an expert reviewing the problem as a whole and making a recommendation.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#648

Post by bookofjoe » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 2:34 PM UTC

retroformat wrote: post #581

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?

Although not especially “current,” Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies is a 1984 book by Yale sociologist Charles Perrow, which analyses complex systems from a sociological perspective. Perrow argues that multiple and unexpected failures are built into society's complex and tightly coupled systems, and that accidents are unavoidable and cannot be designed around. Several historical disasters are anal…

I'm a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist (38 years in practice). I read Perrow's book several years after it was published. I was struck by how relevant his points of failure were to the practice of anesthesiology, the concept of the danger of tight coupling. I referred to this book over subsequent decades in my presentations on Grand Rounds, but to my knowledge none of the residents or other attendings ever read it.

Read a sample here: https://www.amazon.com/Normal-Accidents-Living-High-Risk-Tec...

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#649

Post by bookofjoe » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 2:39 PM UTC

M95D wrote: post #642

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complacency kills! It's why it's usually the old farmers that die in stupid ways. I'm also reminded of the Yale machine shop safety supervisor who died by getting herself wound around a lathe spindle. Working alone, late at night on powerful rotating machinery wearing loose clothing.

Link?

>Michele Dufault, a 22-year-old physics and astronomy major from Scituate, Massachusetts, was asphyxiated after her hair caught in a lathe in a Sterling Chemistry Laboratory machine shop, where she was working by herself in violation of the existing safety rules.

https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/3288-after-a-fatal-a...

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#650

Post by garaetjjte » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 3:26 PM UTC

ibejoeb wrote: post #198

idlewords wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apollo command module used Avcoat, the same material as Orion. But there are two key differences: 1. The application method is different. Apollo applied it to a metal honeycomb structure with very small cells, while Orion uses blocks of the material. (NASA tried the honeycomb approach for Orion, but it was too labor-intensive). 2. Orion is much bigger and heavier than the Apollo command module. The informal conse…

How reliable is this information? Just out of curiosity, do we know if the honeycomb method worked before it was deemed too labor intensive? Because I'm told that using this block method results in chunks blowing out. I'm also having a problem with this set-up: Apollo is at the upper size limit for avcoat; Orion is way bigger; use avcoat. Reading a real front-fell-off aura from this project. It makes me wonder if spe…

Apparently, it worked too well in Lockheed Martin opinion.

>Temperatures on re-entry “were lower than we expected” on EFT-1, Hawes told reporters here during Lockheed Martin’s annual media day.

>That data supports a Lockheed Martin proposal to scrap the current heat-shield design, which features a 5-meter-diameter honeycombed frame, in favor of an alternative composed of rectangular heat-resistant tiles glued together with a silicone-based adhesive, Hawes said.

https://spacenews.com/lockheed-martin-pressing-to-simplify-o...