[HN Gopher] Artemis II is not safe to fly
___________________________________________________________________
Artemis II is not safe to fly
Author : idlewords
Score : 794 points
Date : 2026-03-31 02:23 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (idlewords.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (idlewords.com)
| johng wrote:
| Great read and interesting article. Hard to believe that NASA
| would risk astronauts lives simply to save face, but that appears
| to be what's going to happen.
| jojobas wrote:
| Was there ever a risk-free spaceflight? Pretty sure even with
| this finding this flight would be safer than any Apollo.
| everyone wrote:
| Saturn 5 had a flawless record. The leftover space shuttle
| parts which SLS is cobbled together from, not so much. SRBs
| are inherently dangerous, theyre designed to quickly launch
| nukes from silos, not people. And Orion is just a typical
| modern Boeing project. So far its fallen at every hurdle
| right?
| evan_a_a wrote:
| Orion is a Lockheed (CM) and Airbus (ESM) project.
| everyone wrote:
| Yeah, I thought it was Starliner on top. I dont know
| anything about Orion then. SLS is very crappy and
| disappointing, its using shitty old space shuttle tech, +
| its ridiculously expensive in terms of payload to orbit,
| but it will probably work.
|
| I didnt know, cus I just dont give a shit about this
| stupid project.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Saturn 5 came close to catastrophic failure at least once.
| It had partial failures. Its sort of perfect record is
| mostly down to luck and not launching very many times.
|
| Of course, six decades later, we should be able to do a lot
| better.
| saghm wrote:
| You seem to be ignoring the "just to save face" part. I'd
| argue it would be a worse thing for our bar for how safe it
| should be to be raised significantly from when we had been in
| space as a species less than a decade to now that it's been
| 65 years.
| tonymet wrote:
| Never risk free , but Soyuz hardly lost any crew over its 50+
| years
| wiseowise wrote:
| Yeah, and where is it now?
| idlewords wrote:
| The next two Soyuz launches are this Wednesday and
| Saturday.
| IndrekR wrote:
| 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.
| tonymet wrote:
| The 2 were early, and fewer lives were lost. The shuttle
| was unnecessarily risky , and NASA was aware from its
| inception
| cr125rider wrote:
| But that's exactly what happened with Challenger
| jaggederest wrote:
| And Columbia, too, when they made the decision to reenter
| without inspection, and reenter instead of waiting for
| rescue.
| fishgoesblub wrote:
| A rescue was impractical and potentially riskier no?
| paleotrope wrote:
| Riskier? Didn't they all die. Maybe if you ended up with
| 2 stranded shuttle crews, but correct me if I'm wrong,
| and I probably am, but couldn't the shuttle fly without
| any crew?
| idlewords wrote:
| It couldn't, for a funny reason. Everything on a Shuttle
| flight could be automated except lowering the landing
| gear just before touchdown, which had to be done by hand
| from inside the cockpit.
|
| There are rumors (that I've never been able to run down)
| that the astronaut corps insisted on this so the Shuttle
| could not be flown unmanned.
| gambiting wrote:
| And Buran(soviet copy of the shuttle) could and in fact
| did fly completely unmanned. In a way it's a shame the
| collapse of the soviet union killed that program, because
| a crew less shuttle would have been a huge asset to have.
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| I'm not surprised more people don't know about the X-37,
| but it's in effect the distillation of the Shuttle
| program to a very effective vehicle: Crewless, reusable,
| cheap, and effective.
|
| Bureaucratic requirements and institutional jockeying
| largely ballooned the Shuttle into something it was never
| supposed to be.
| renewiltord wrote:
| You can do a less risky thing and die or do a more risky
| thing and live. What happened doesn't determine which
| thing is riskier just like I can call a 1 and roll dice
| and land it and you can call tails and flip a coin and
| not get it.
|
| The outcome doesn't determine the risk. I agree that this
| kind of office politics / face savings definitely is the
| cause of these two things.
| gambiting wrote:
| I'm sure I watched a documentary that said it basically
| wasn't feasible to launch the other shuttle. All checks
| and preparations would have to be done in absolute record
| time, with no mistakes and under timelines never
| attempted before. But even if they tried, you have the
| obvious question of - we know the core issue isn't solved
| and we're about to launch the second shuttle with the
| exact same design into orbit, if it suffers the same
| problem then what? But afaik the second one while
| important wasn't as much of a blocker as the first one.
| It just wasn't possible in time - it's not like the first
| shuttle could stay in orbit indefinitely too.
| steve-atx-7600 wrote:
| Astronauts are smart folks. They can vote with their feet.
| bch wrote:
| What a horrible (preventable) position to be in, though.
| tonymet wrote:
| 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
| mikelitoris wrote:
| It's the American roulette
| shrubble wrote:
| *Freedom Roulette
| wat10000 wrote:
| 135 missions, 2 fatal accidents, that's not 1/10.
| tonymet wrote:
| It is if you're dead
| kelnos wrote:
| That... doesn't make any sense.
| tonymet wrote:
| If the odds were only 1% , how did 14 people die ?
|
| You're not including the lives in your risk assessment .
|
| There were 135 events and 14 people died .
|
| If you were asked to join mission 136 would you say yes
| or no?
|
| Which risk profile fits: 1% fatality or 10%?
| wat10000 wrote:
| By that logic, the fatality rate in NYC skyscrapers on
| 9/11 was something like 1500%, since there were <200
| skyscrapers and ~2,700 people died.
|
| It doesn't make any sense. Your numerator and denominator
| need to use the same units. The rate of fatal accidents
| was 2/135. The rate of crew fatalities was 14/355. The
| rate for crew-flight fatalities (separately counting
| multiple flights by the same person) was 14/852.
|
| If you were evaluating your risk for another flight, the
| number of crew aboard doesn't affect the risk and it's
| pretty reasonable to assume that an accident results in
| either a 0% or 100% fatality rate, so the relevant figure
| would be the fatal accident rate of 2/135. If your flight
| follows that profile then that's your probability of
| dying in an accident.
| tonymet wrote:
| You still haven't explained how so many died and why the
| program ended.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I didn't and don't intend to. I was just addressing your
| incorrect figures.
| tonymet wrote:
| How can your model be correct when it doesn't explain the
| world ?
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Wat
| 1shooner wrote:
| >They've killed dozens during the shuttle program
|
| Columbia and Challenger crew totaled 14, who else are you
| referring to?
| tonymet wrote:
| Oh 14 totally acceptable
| staplung wrote:
| In total, a little over _one_ dozen astronauts died on
| shuttle flights (14). No astronauts died during Gemini or
| Mercury. Three died in a test on Apollo 1. The shuttle
| failure rate was nowhere close to 1 /10. In fact, it was 1/67
| (2 failures out of 134 flights).
| anitil wrote:
| This is a concerning read, I'm not quite sure what the driving
| motivation is for Artemis, but the following answered at least
| part of my question -
|
| > 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
| ta8903 wrote:
| I understand why NASA might be a little antsy but 100B over 25
| years doesn't seem like a lot for America for a long horizon
| project.
| radu_floricica wrote:
| It's 100b just to begin - the full bill would be multiples of
| that.
|
| And there are options now.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| The author seems to have a pretty extensive history of... strong
| disdain for Artemis II. While has mentioned concerns about the
| heat shield before it was in the context of a laundry list of
| complaints, and it was nowhere close to the top.
|
| I'm not a rocket scientist, but then neither is the author.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| This comment in dripping with elitism. We trusted the rocket
| scientists and what did that get us? The Challenger disaster.
| /s
| kristianp wrote:
| If I recall correctly the Author worked at NASA.
| sph wrote:
| Which somehow is supposed to make him more authoritative than
| NASA itself?
| idlewords wrote:
| I never worked at NASA. Maybe you're confusing me with Casey
| Handmer, who has also written on this topic?
| themafia wrote:
| > if a commercial crew capsule (SpaceX Dragon or Boeing
| Starliner) returned to Earth with the kind of damage seen on
| Orion, NASA would insist on a redesign and an unmanned test
| flight to validate it.
|
| Are you sure about that?
|
| https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/05/24/spacex-swapping-heat-s...
| wat10000 wrote:
| Your link says it failed in testing, not in flight.
| themafia wrote:
| Did they demand an unmanned flight just to prove it worked?
| Or did they accept an entirely new design based on modeling
| and ground tests and then immediately flew it with crew on
| board?
|
| Then again I'm not one of those people who roots for NASA to
| fail for some reason.
| happyopossum wrote:
| None of what you're saying happened.
|
| They had a heat shield on the capsule that failed testing,
| so they swapped out the _interchangeable_ heat shield for
| one that passed testing.
|
| There was no entirely new design, there was no new material
| science, it was the same heat shield that the previous
| crewed capsules have used without the manufacturing defect.
| themafia wrote:
| > SpaceX's next Crew Dragon mission (Crew-5) will fly
| with a different, updated heat shield structure after a
| new composite substrate failed acceptance testing
|
| I don't know what "new" or "different" or "updated" or
| "structure" mean then anymore.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Looking at other articles, nobody else mentions an
| updated structure. I think that was a misunderstanding.
| This was a manufacturing defect caught in testing and
| they used a different unit as a result.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| The article seems compelling, but experience tells me to get both
| sides of a story before judging.
|
| Anyone know if there's a detailed response from NASA to the
| article?
| floxy wrote:
| https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2026/03/30/nasas-artemis...
|
| "countdown clock started ticking down" "to a targeted launch
| time of 6:24 p.m. on Wednesday, April 1."
| akamaka wrote:
| 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 simulate real world performance.
| cubefox wrote:
| Their testing procedures failed to predict the char loss
| before the flight, so they don't seem very reliable.
| akamaka wrote:
| Yes, the original procedures didn't find the problem, but
| it says they were eventually able to duplicate it in the
| lab and the new material has passed that test.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| I'm fairly confident NASA doesn't read Maciej's blog. However
| I'm confident that many people there read the Google doc he
| linked to. I suggest you do too.
| tennysont wrote:
| While I appreciate independent bloggers, I think that the
| HackerNews community should expect big claims, like a NASA
| cover up:
|
| > NASA's initial instinct was to cover up the problem.
|
| to at least warrant a link.
| bsilvereagle wrote:
| > "Our test facilities can't reach the combination of heat flux,
| pressure, shear stresses, etc., that an actual reentering
| spacecraft does. We're always having to wait for the flight test
| to get the final certification that our system is good to go."--
| Jeremy VanderKam, deputy manager for Orion's heat shield,
| speaking in 2022
|
| This is a strange claim, considering NASA used to have 2
| facilities that were capable of this - one at Johnson and one at
| Ames. They were consolidated
| (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160001258/downloads/20...)
| but it seems like the Arc Jet Complex at Ames is still
| operational https://www.nasa.gov/ames/arcjet-complex/
| idlewords wrote:
| The Orion heat shield is sixteen feet across. NASA's test
| facilities can only test small material samples in these
| facilities, not capture how the entire heat shield will behave.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| How does SpaceX test it? Have they needed to solve this
| problem?
| rkagerer wrote:
| By blowing up unmanned spacecraft and letting the ones that
| survive catch fire?
| margalabargala wrote:
| SpaceX tests these in prod. Kinda like Artemis I did.
| eru wrote:
| And this is actually a decent strategy, but you can only
| really do this when you have lots of unmanned flights.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Nothing stops you from doing this with manned flights
| except that it's not culturally accepted currently.
|
| But maybe that changes as NASA will demonstrate with
| artemis 2 and 3 (which will then use another newly
| desiged heat shield).
| idlewords wrote:
| They do iterative flight testing. Starship is I believe on
| its twelfth flight test; the first one was in 2023.
| hvb2 wrote:
| By having a much higher launch cadence and then analyzing
| the flight hardware afterwards.
|
| Also, they don't have anything human rated going beyond
| LEO. Coming back from the moon means you're going
| significantly faster and thus need a better heat shield
| pas wrote:
| ... so the real problem is that to get back _and slow
| down nicely_ would require so much more launch mass,
| right?
|
| (By slow down I mean to change to an orbit that has more
| drag and wouldn't take forever to return to Earth.)
| SyzygyRhythm wrote:
| There were 19 successful unmanned Dragon 1 missions before
| Crew Dragon, and an unmanned Crew Dragon mission before the
| first crewed one (actually two missions, but one didn't
| reenter from orbit). The heat shield material and design
| was essentially the same and so there was a great deal of
| flight heritage.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| In particular I don't think its physically possible to
| test Orion components in flight very many times. It
| relies on SLS which chews through 4 space-shuttle engines
| every time, which even with unlimited money I don't think
| you could acquire a large supply of very quickly.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Not only that, but it has to reach much higher altitudes
| in order to also reach the much higher re-entry
| velocities that it will have IRL. That makes testing
| Orion very expensive. Testing Crew Dragon was much much
| cheaper.
| pavon wrote:
| SLS is required to get Orion to the moon, but there are
| other options for LEO tests. Exploration Flight Test-1
| was performed on a Delta IV Heavy, and Falcon Heavy is
| also capable of launching Orion to LEO (and now New
| Glenn, although that wouldn't have been an option at the
| time NASA needed to start work on another Orion test).
| swiftcoder wrote:
| SpaceX has a reusable launch vehicle, so they could afford
| to fly a whole mess of unmanned flights before they stuck a
| human in there
| jccooper wrote:
| Crew Dragon flew an automated demo flight before flying
| with crew. It was proceeded by 20 flights of Dragon 1 over
| 10 years.
|
| Starship's heatshield has already been tested full-up half
| a dozen times. Many changes have been made as a result.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| They launch rockets
| kristianp wrote:
| > 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 in the past 3+ years since Artemis I and before
| then as well.
| decimalenough wrote:
| The point of the blog post is that those concerns have not been
| adequately addressed.
| sublinear wrote:
| I think the point is to re-roll as many times as needed for
| clout.
| nick_ wrote:
| The blog post points or the flawed spacecraft? /s
| delichon wrote:
| I am very not brave but I'd volunteer. The trip is far more
| awesome than anything I have planned for the rest of my life. And
| if the shield fails on reentry it would only hurt for a few
| seconds. So if the crew and the backups and their backups read
| this and have second thoughts, ping me.
| dataflow wrote:
| > I am very not brave but I'd volunteer.
|
| >> Artemis II could fly just as easily without astronauts on
| board
| healthworker wrote:
| I think they were saying they would sign up just for the
| experience, even if it's unnecessary to the program.
| dataflow wrote:
| But that was exactly the point I was responding to, no? If
| NASA was fine with skipping the astronauts, then they would
| just send it unmanned, not find a random volunteer.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| especially not one that may chicken out ( "very not
| brave" ) and destroy the cabin from the inside out by any
| means necessary (bashing at walls, pissing in cracks,
| etc.)
| oulu2006 wrote:
| This is an interesting comment -- your life is precious
| brother, you might have something in store down the road :)
| gedy wrote:
| Depending on one's age, maybe not honestly? (Not the OP)
| bertylicious wrote:
| In your opinion: at what age does someone become unworthy
| of life?
| gedy wrote:
| That's definitely not my point, what I meant was it's not
| unreasonable for someone who's older - maybe children
| have grown, at our nearing retirement, etc. - why not
| take a risk to fly to space?
| wiseowise wrote:
| If they're that age, they're not qualified to be in the
| crew anyway.
| qingcharles wrote:
| John Glenn was 77 when he flew on the Space Shuttle...
| dundarious wrote:
| Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
| stickynotememo wrote:
| the old lie
| lostlogin wrote:
| The young die.
| wiseowise wrote:
| I wonder how many young minds were twisted by old hypocrites.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I too played rome total war!
| dundarious wrote:
| I haven't, but I read the Wilfred Owen poem about young men
| dying for nothing in WW1.
| lostlogin wrote:
| My theory is that this is something I'd say/do aged 20, and
| laugh at aged 60. I'm slightly closer to 60 and am into the
| 'No' zone.
| bertylicious wrote:
| I'm sure the other astronauts are really looking forward to fly
| with a person showing signs of suicidal ideation.
| phantom784 wrote:
| I read this as "accepting a risk of death in exchange for
| getting to have the incredible experience of flying to the
| Moon", not that they _want_ to die.
| tgv wrote:
| There are different outlooks on risk, but the attitude can
| certainly be described as cavalier towards life, and may
| signal something stronger.
| Havoc wrote:
| Suicide ideation and someone willing to take massive risks
| for something awesome are very different things
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm sure the other astronauts are really looking forward to
| fly with a person showing signs of tolerating massive
| risks.
| Havoc wrote:
| 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
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I don't actually think astronauts take massive risks.
| They take massively well-understood and meticulously
| mitigated risks.
|
| Maybe this is a perspective or semantics thing, but I
| think it's distinct and important. They're not Mavericks
| they're Icemans.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _They take massively well-understood and meticulously
| mitigated risks._
|
| Hopefully they're well-understood and meticulously
| mitigated risks. Because if they're not... well there's
| always modern day Boeing.
| spiralcoaster wrote:
| Right, so let's add more risk by flying side by side with
| some nutjob with no regard for their own life. Sounds
| reasonable.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| > The trip is far more awesome than anything I have planned
| for the rest of my life.
|
| If you would give your live for a single awsome trip (and
| you would still have multiple years to live), then you are
| likely suicidal.
|
| Even if it is rational because your live sucks so hard, I
| would still have to classify you as suicidal.
| MoltenMan wrote:
| ...no? It's the same as when you say you'd 'die for
| somebody'. I don't want to die, but if I had to die to
| save my family I would. That's not being suicidal.
| Similarly, if space is important enough to you to take
| this risk (which realistically is a pretty low risk!) I
| wouldn't call that suicidal either. I take the risk of
| death driving in my car every day; that's the nature of
| life.
| rhcom2 wrote:
| Is jumping on a grenade to save another person suicidal?
| Or is it just a matter of you not agreeing with the
| rational?
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| No. You save another person. An awsome trip isn't the
| same.
| Dr_Incelheimer wrote:
| HN generally skews towards the life-affirming/death-fearing
| quadrant so I don't think many will relate to you here. It
| still seems safer than being in an active warzone which
| hundreds of millions of people somehow manage to tolerate.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| You would probably not IRL and if you would anyway it would
| just mean you're not qualified for the flight. Nasa needs smart
| people who wants to live and succeed their mission, not people
| who are ok to die because muh space exploration
| wmf wrote:
| Related: NASA's Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage by Casey
| Handmer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794242
|
| Is Orion's heat shield really safe? New NASA chief conducts final
| review on eve of flight.
| https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/nasa-chief-reviews-ori...
| arppacket wrote:
| Looks like they did some reassuring testing for the worst case
| scenario: The Avcoat blocks, which are about
| 1.5 inches thick, are laminated onto a thick composite base of
| the Orion spacecraft. Inside this is a titanium framework that
| carries the load of the vehicle. 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.
| oritron wrote:
| 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 a healthy margin remaining of that virgin Avcoat.
| So it wasn't like there were large, large chunks."
|
| Followed by:
|
| > The Avcoat material is not designed to come out in chunks. It
| is supposed to char and flake off smoothly, maintaining the
| overall contours of the heat shield.
|
| This is echoes both Shuttle incidents. 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.
|
| There was a similar situation with heat shield damage and
| Columbia.
|
| In both cases some models were used to justify the decision, with
| wild extrapolations and fundamentally, a design that wasn't
| expected to fail in that mode /at all/.
|
| I know the points that astronauts make about the importance of
| manned space exploration, but I agree with this author that it
| seems to make sense to run this as an unmanned mission, and
| probably test the new heat shield which will replace the Artemis
| II design in an unmanned re-entry as well.
| eru wrote:
| 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.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| could the government rent out monopoly grants for televised
| football on the moon in exchange for sponsoring manned space
| exploration?
| eru wrote:
| Which government? The moon doesn't belong to any one
| government.
|
| Though the US could just do it. Who's to stop them from
| selling these pieces of paper?
| trhway wrote:
| just wait until influencers start flying there. Not on SLS
| of course. Flyby on Starship cattle class - say 100 people
| (500 for LEO and "SFO to Shanghai" while for Moon - several
| days would require better accommodations, thus 100) - at
| $5M/launch, 10 launches (9 of them - tankers) - thus $50M 3
| day roundtrip for 100 people. Half a mil per person.
| xp84 wrote:
| 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.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Is there any research on the effect of apparent
| gravitational field strength on sports? I'd be willing to
| bet that rocketry and artillery takes account of 50mm/s2
| difference at the equator. While the difference is
| obviously tiny, the margins in modern sports are also
| miniscule.
|
| Do Fijian rugby games see a 0.5% increase in longest drop
| goal distance?
| red369 wrote:
| I have no idea about the 0.5% increase in drop goal
| distance, but tongue-in-cheek, I would say only 0.5% as
| many attempted drop goals - given the Fijian team's
| emphasis on a ball-in-hand style of play instead of
| kicking the ball away.
|
| On a slightly related note, I always found the games
| played in Pretoria in South Africa fascinating. It's 1350
| m above sea level, so kicks all go 10% to 15% further (my
| estimate) which makes quite a difference when there are
| players kicking penalties from over halfway even at sea
| level.
| kitd wrote:
| I've often thought world leaders, upon election/selection,
| should get a free few orbits of the earth, to give them some
| perspective on the job they're about to undertake. Maybe
| offer the first one on Artemis II, a deferred one for the
| current US administration?
| kakacik wrote:
| Do you think sociopaths like current 'leader' would change
| significantly upon such experience? I unfortunately don't
| share such optimism.
| bayindirh wrote:
| You don't have to be an optimist. You have to _try_.
|
| Trying and seeing what happens is also science, after
| all.
| discreteevent wrote:
| Scientists don't try everything. First they run it
| through expert critical review. This candidate wouldn't
| make it past the theory stage.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| I mean, we can probably predict what will happen based on
| existing data.
|
| "I've seen things up there that are huge, absolutely
| huge. And let me tell you, astronauts, they came up to
| me, they were crying, big men crying. Earth, it's a good
| name, but it's not big enough, not grand enough. So, I'm
| thinking we rename it. How about 'The Trump Sphere'? It's
| got a nice ring to it, doesn't it? And let me tell you,
| nobody would argue with that name!"
| sheiyei wrote:
| The point with the last bit was that they should be put
| in an unsafe craft.
| bregma wrote:
| "Houston, this is Golden One. I'm looking down on the
| big, beautiful, blue world. They love me down there. They
| all love me. I'm the greatest astronaut ever in the
| history of mankind. No one has ever orbited like this
| before."
|
| Yeah, you may be right.
| drfloyd51 wrote:
| Maybe he should ride on the Artemis II mission?
| allenrb wrote:
| Strapped to one of the boosters?
| GTP wrote:
| Made me chuckle :D
| shiroiuma wrote:
| >I've often thought world leaders, upon election/selection,
| should get a free few orbits of the earth, to give them
| some perspective on the job they're about to undertake.
|
| Perhaps, but they should also get a few free orbits of the
| Earth *after* their term ends, on a launch system built by
| whichever contractor has given the most "campaign
| donations" to politicians. Surely they'll trust it to be
| safe, right?
| eru wrote:
| That would only work for countries with a space
| programme.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I would also say give them a year of free vacations in
| various places. Say a maximum security prison in general
| population, any type of dark camps, hospitals, mental
| institutions and care homes.
|
| Give them the rest and recreation they need in these
| wonderful places.
| bayindirh wrote:
| James May of Top Gear has flown with a U2 spy plane once
| [0][1]. When they reached to the edge of space, May said
| "If everybody could do that once, it would completely
| change the face of global politics, religion, education,
| everything".
|
| I can't agree more.
|
| Another thing I believe needs to be watched periodically is
| Pale Blue Dot [2].
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-COlil4tos
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtsZaDbxCgM
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g
| antonvs wrote:
| I think you overestimate the effect that would have on
| the kind of people that most need that sort of humility.
|
| Look at what happened with William Shatner and Jeff Bezos
| when they came back from space. Shatner started to say
| something about what an impactful experience it was, but
| Bezos cut him off and was like "Woo! Partay!" and
| switched his attention to a magnum of champagne.
| Terr_ wrote:
| There's probably a strong self-selection factor going on,
| in terms of the kind of person that typically seeks out
| that kind of experience.
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| Exactly what I thought of as well
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Extra tactless considering Shatner is a recovering
| alcoholic.
| notahacker wrote:
| And if the actual U2 pilots (air force pilots and CIA
| operatives) had come back profoundly changed, someone
| might have cancelled the programme...
|
| Astronauts are regular smart people capable of making
| good and bad life decisions too.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| Jeff went up two flights earlier, in July 2021 on NS-16.
| Shatner was on NS-18 in October.
|
| I don't know if it's a thing that wears off, if Bezos was
| just in business-mode the entire time, or just didn't
| want someone monologuing right after getting back.
| mlrtime wrote:
| "If everybody could do that once, it would completely
| change the face of global politics, religion, education,
| everything".
|
| You could have the same effect with LSD/Psilocybin for
| quite a bit less $$$$.
| kitd wrote:
| Yeah, that (and Carl Sagan) was what made me think of the
| idea.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| 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
| eru wrote:
| 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.
| necovek wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| Well, getting your toes cut off is better than losing
| your whole foot, yes.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I have a hunch that space race is not for "peaceful
| technological progress of human race at large", or "let's
| see how this behaves in 0G, it might be useful for some
| global problems" anymore.
| adrianN wrote:
| It is my understanding that it always was about ,,rockets
| are good for dropping bombs on people".
| GTP wrote:
| Well, I highly doubt that the kind of rockets they are
| developing for Lunar and Mars missions will be mich
| better, if any better at all, than current ballistic
| missiles armies around the world already have. Those
| space rockets are huge and meant to more or less safely
| carry people over a long distance in space. Warheads are
| meant to carry explosives while also being hard to detect
| or stop. I'm no rocket scientist, but I believe that huge
| space rockets would defeat the purpose, as they would
| consume a lot of fuel for nothing, while also being much
| easier to spot and stopped by shooting something at them.
|
| So I think the opposite: we are way past the point of
| space exploration being directly useful for weapons.
| fastball wrote:
| What opportunity is being lost out on because of space
| exploration?
| eru wrote:
| Whatever you can imagine they could spend the money on,
| including leaving it with the tax payer or taking on less
| debt.
|
| (And, if you don't like the monetary framing: just look
| at the real resources spend instead.)
|
| However I'm not nearly as harsh on unmanned space
| exploration.
| fastball wrote:
| That's not how resources work. Resources that are used
| for space exploration aren't magically available for
| anything else when you don't do space exploration. The
| economy is not a zero sum game and human capital is not
| fungible.
|
| A rocket scientist/engineer/technician/etc at NASA is not
| going to work on the thing we "should" spend money on
| instead if tomorrow you shut down NASA's manned
| spaceflight programs. They'll probably go work on ads at
| Meta instead.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Firstly how is this related to opportunity costs.
| Secondly, no one said that to create digital computer you
| should start a war. It's just that war is already
| present, regardless of you invent digital computers or
| space travel.
| gmerc wrote:
| Now do the opportunity cost of AI model virtue signalling
| to investors for several years
| eru wrote:
| As long as they mostly spend VC money, who am I to judge?
| It's no worse than rich people buying yachts.
|
| Just don't spend tax payer money.
| creaturemachine wrote:
| But they dodge taxes, so they're effectively spending it
| anyway.
| eru wrote:
| Are you talking about legal tax optimisation, or
| illegally not paying your taxes?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's unlikely computing would have developed as quickly
| as it did without the Cold War. IBM's Sage and MIT's TX0
| were both Cold War projects - one for a national early
| warning system, the other as an R&D platform for flight
| simulators.
|
| Most US investment in associated tech - including the
| Internet - came through DARPA.
|
| Not pointing this out because I support war, but to
| underline that _the US doesn 't have a culture of
| aggressive government investment in non-military R&D_.
|
| NASA and the NSF both get pocket money in budget terms.
| And at its height Apollo was a Cold War PR battle with
| the USSR that happened to funnel a lot of of money to
| defence contractors.
|
| The original moon landings were not primarily motivated
| by science.
| eru wrote:
| Why does it have to be government R&D?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It doesn't, but it was, because it was tied to
| administration and nuclear physics and then rocketry.
|
| Private sector doesn't do much without obvious short-term
| gain, and it especially doesn't do basic research. It may
| be good at fitting more pixels in ever thinner phones,
| but it wouldn't get to that point if not the government
| that needed number-crunching machines for better
| modelling of nuclear fission some 80 years earlier.
| eru wrote:
| As I said, IBM and Konrad Zuse were already on the cusp
| of general computing.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You are serious? Up until this point I thought you're
| writing in jest, because all the things you mention are
| actually good ideas - including especially funding manned
| space flight from entertainment budget, because:
|
| 1) It's better aligned with mission profile
| (inspirational, emotional, but not strictly necessary;
|
| 2) _There 's much more of it to go_ than NASA gets;
|
| 3) It would be a better use of that money than what it's
| currently used for.
| eru wrote:
| I'm saying manned spaceflight is a waste of money and
| resources.
|
| We'd get more and better science by spending it on
| unmanned space stuff. Or you could even just leave the
| money with the taxpayer.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Broken window fallacy much? The amount of money spent on
| space race could have been spent somewhere else and you
| have no idea how to evaluate of this was a valid set of
| outcomes.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Space spinoffs are grossly exaggerated.
| tikhonj wrote:
| Based on some rough numbers, NASA's budget (around $24B)
| would be <4% of the US's total spending on entertainment,
| with a pretty great return in research, engineering and
| education to boot.
|
| I also looked up the NSF's 2024 budget, which, at $9B, was
| much lower than I expected.
| eru wrote:
| NASA does both manned and unmanned stuff. Don't conflate
| those when you are looking at returns.
|
| Look at this joke of a list
| https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/20-breakthroughs-
| from-... for an illustration. And those were the 20 best
| things they could come up with.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| There are actually a lot of really interesting
| discoveries on that list. I haven't thought deeply about
| whether it represents value for money, but I would say
| that that is anything but "a joke of a list."
| eru wrote:
| And 'Stimulating the low-Earth orbit economy' is a joke.
| Spending money not as a means to an end, but as the end
| in itself?
|
| Apart from the research into the effects of microgravity
| on humans, pretty much everything else could have been
| done cheaper and better without humans.
|
| Or take this example:
|
| > Deployment of CubeSats from station: CubeSats are one
| of the smallest types of satellites and provide a cheaper
| way to perform science and technology demonstrations in
| space. More than 250 CubeSats have now been deployed from
| the space station, jumpstarting research and satellite
| companies.
|
| Cubesats are great! But you don't exactly need a manned
| space station to deploy them. Similar with many other
| 'achievements' like the 'Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer'.
|
| See also how they don't mention any actual impact. Only
| stuff like "This achievement may provide insight into
| fundamental laws of quantum mechanics."
|
| And this is supposed to be the list of highlights. The
| best they have to offer.
| randallsquared wrote:
| > Spending money not as a means to an end, but as the end
| in itself?
|
| Welcome to the macroeconomics practical, where we'll dig
| a ditch, refill it, and count it as a productive addition
| to the economy both times!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| If doing it lowers the cost of earth movers and gets 20
| other groups to each dig their own ditch, that's actually
| money well spent.
| eru wrote:
| No, it depends on what else you could have spent the
| money on. Perhaps that would have been even better?
| randallsquared wrote:
| This is a typical argument for state intervention in the
| marketplace, but it is weaker if one makes different
| assumptions about the state of the market absent the
| intervention. In order to show that it was money well
| spent, you'd have to show that it's better to have more
| groups digging, _and_ that there wouldn 't have been
| enough diggers without GovDitch.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| Also, it's NASA, so they can't come out and say "stopped
| soviet rocket technology and expertise from
| proliferating" which was a large motivator for the ISS.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > with a pretty great return in research, engineering and
| education to boot.
|
| If a company could spend 24B in research they would
| probably produce a lot more things than NASA
| allenrb wrote:
| Absolutely! Think of the many new ways to display
| advertising that are being neglected while we foolishly
| launch people and things into space.
| eru wrote:
| Well, NASA itself is a good counterexample here:
|
| NASA could do a lot more good science, if they didn't
| (have to) launch primates into space.
| tikhonj wrote:
| Google's R&D budget is like $60B. Make of that what you
| will.
| anon291 wrote:
| No no no. Space will be colonized. At least our local solar
| system will see sustained human exploration and inhabitation.
| This requires physical presence. This is one of those black
| swans which seem silly when looking forward, but obvious in
| retrospective. The future belongs to those who do seemingly
| silly things today. The first industrialists often faced
| ridicule because they spent time designing machines instead
| of doing the task and making the immediate money. Set aside
| your need for immediate gratification. Hard things lead to
| good outcomes.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| Yes and the reversal of safety calculations really surprised
| me. "The orbiter has a total fail rate of one in 1000 so this
| individual part is higher than 1 in 10000", something like
| that. Where neither premise was actually tested or verified.
| Just specified on paper as a requirement and then used for
| actual safety calculations.
|
| I don't know how a big organisation can think like that. But I
| guess these calculations were ones out of millions of ones made
| for the project.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| The bigger an organization gets, the more internal overhead
| it has. At some point, it would take divine intervention for
| important things not to get overlooked or lost at some
| junctions in the org chart.
| bambax wrote:
| I really don't understand the point of manned space exploration
| though?
|
| Landing on the moon in 1969 was an extraordinary achievement,
| perhaps the most beautiful thing ever done by mankind. But now?
| What's the point exactly?
|
| We know we can't go much further than the moon anyway (as this
| very same blog has demonstrated many times); what do we expect
| to achieve with astronauts that robots can't do?
| lopis wrote:
| I think it's still very important for adaptability. yes, a
| land rover can run for years and run thousands of
| experiments, but it's limited to whatever scientific probes
| it was equipped with. Humans are right now more flexible and
| could adapt experiments to findings, which would then inform
| the next rovers. And when the time comes that we start mining
| and building on the moon, a few humans will probably need to
| live there. So any data on human survival outside the Earth
| is useful data. https://humanresearchroadmap.nasa.gov/
| Filligree wrote:
| At the rate robots are improving, will that still be the
| case in ten years?
| Mikhail_K wrote:
| > 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/1
| ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...> by heat shield expert and Shuttle
| astronaut Charles Camarda, the former Director of Engineering
| at Johnson Space Center, asserts that it was *not* the O-rings:
|
| _" The Challenger accident was not caused by O-rings or
| temperature on the day of launch; it was caused by a deviant
| joint design which opened instead of closed when loaded. It was
| caused by mistaking analytical adequacy of a simplified test
| for physical understanding of the system. The solution, post
| Challenger, was the structural redesign of the SRB field joint
| and the use of the exact same O-rings."_
|
| I find that highly surprising, because "it was the O-rings"
| explanation seems universally believed and sanctified by no
| lesser authority than the Nobel prize laureate Richard Feynman.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Using the same o-rings afterwards is surprising, I've heard
| that the manufacturer was surprised that they were being used
| for that purpose because they weren't rated for that.
|
| Also I'm not sure the assertion is correct. If the sealant
| and O-Rings were adequate, the joint would not have failed.
| It was suboptimal, and increased risk, sure, but it in itself
| wasn't the reason for the accident. It was the joint and the
| o-rings in combination. The holes in the swiss cheese model
| lined up that day, and a lot of small problems combined into
| one big problem
| Mikhail_K wrote:
| > If the sealant and O-Rings were adequate, the joint would
| not have failed.
|
| That assertion requires some reasoning and evidence to back
| it.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| The sealant and O-rings were meant to keep the hot gasses
| inside. Simply making a joint slightly wiggly will not
| keep hot gasses inside. The hot gasses did not stay
| inside. The sealant and O-rings did not succeed in
| keeping the hot gasses inside (evidence: Challenger).
| They were not adequate
| Mikhail_K wrote:
| > The sealant and O-rings did not succeed in keeping the
| hot gasses inside (evidence: Challenger). They were not
| adequate
|
| No. The whole assembly --joint, sealant and O-rings, --
| failed.
|
| "They were not adequate" - yet, after the redesign, they
| kept those same O-rings and declared that boosters are
| safe to fly, in manifest contradiction to your assertion.
| So your reasoning is clearly flawed.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _" They were not adequate" - yet, after the redesign,
| they kept those same O-rings_
|
| presumably "redesign" means some stuff changed. why is it
| not possible that the O-rings were inadequate for the old
| design, but adequate for the new design?
| buildsjets wrote:
| Exactly. They re-designed the tang and clevis joint so
| that the metal parts of the joint did not spread under
| gas pressure and the o-ring did not lose compression.
| They added a heater to ensure that the o-ring remained in
| it's usable temperature range. And added a superfluous
| third O-ring.
|
| Speaking of which, has anyone ever adequately explained
| why Challenger's Right SRB joint temperature was measured
| as -13 deg C using infrared pyrometers, when the lowest
| ambient temperature that night was -5.5C, and the Left
| SRB was measured -4 C? What subcooled the right SRB?
|
| Allan McDonald's "Truth, Lies, and O-Rings" is mandatory
| reading for anyone who wants to discuss the details of
| this particular bit of corporate and government
| malfeasance. It's 600 pages of technical detail and
| political intrigue. He suggests that a plume from a cryo
| vent could have impinged on the field joint and cooled
| the o-ring to lower than ambient temperatures. No proof
| though.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >why is it not possible that the O-rings were inadequate
| for the old design, but adequate for the new design?
|
| Boneheads getting lucky, happens to the worst of them
| more often than lots of people want to admit :\
|
| I came from Florida and am not a fan of cold weather.
|
| That morning of course nobody knew about defective
| engineering at NASA contractors when it comes to o-rings.
| I got in to work, and the office people had turned on the
| seldom-used little black & white TV in the office
| manager's room so they could watch the Challenger launch.
| That was about the only time anybody watched TV at work,
| except for baseball playoffs when they occasionally occur
| in the afternoon.
|
| It was 19 Fahrenheit at the launch site so I never
| thought for a minute that they would go through with it.
| It was simple common sense. You don't even try anything
| "normal" during the one day per decade when it gets that
| cold, and that would be in _north_ Florida. You wait
| years for it to get below freezing at 32 F, especially on
| the central Florida Atlantic coast. And no matter what,
| you never have to wait long for it to get above freezing.
| I just naturally couldn 't imagine anyone not fully on
| board with living to wear shorts another day. I was
| thinking about the rubber seals that must be there to
| keep the crew hatches airtight, for one thing, but aware
| there were countless other variables which I didn't have
| a clue about that could also be cold sensitive, like
| electronics.
|
| I went into the back where my lab office was, thinking
| they were surely going to delay the launch, at least to
| later in the day. I didn't get back to the front office
| until a little after liftoff time, where I expected to
| find out how much of a delay or reschedule there was. It
| was very quiet. I asked what happened and they said "it
| blew up!" I actually thought they were kidding me because
| I missed the liftoff. Then I saw the tragic replay that
| was enough to make anybody sick.
|
| Eventually, the o-rings were pointed to, and publicly
| disclosed and it was stupidly worse than I imagined.
|
| A few years earlier I had experienced a dramatic o-ring
| blowout on some high-pressure apparatus that one of our
| engineers had designed at a previous employer. That was
| an engineering lab, and I'm no engineer but it turned out
| they needed more help than just chemistry lessons for
| experiment design. Since I was the one who had taken a
| reading within the blast zone minutes before I went back
| to my desk, I took over the redesign of the heavy-walled
| high-pressure custom cylinders, going over every little
| thing from alloy properties, dimensional characteristics,
| reinforced thread strength, etc. It was helpful that I
| had worked in a machine shop before, but I was the only
| one there who had any full time experience at metal
| fabrication. Well constant overtime really. When I got to
| the critical o-ring design parameters, that alone
| required more engineering effort than the rest of the
| project. Each standard o-ring has its own precision
| design parameters, highly dependent on the durometer
| hardness of the rubber among many other things.
|
| Without considering durometer, here's a very simplified
| chart of some key parameters (primarily US inch units):
|
| https://d2t1xqejof9utc.cloudfront.net/pictures/files/1865
| 32/...
|
| There's way more data than this and most of it was
| gathered over decades of serious destructive testing &
| analysis.
|
| And here's a pretty good article about the Challenger
| fiasco:
|
| https://clearthinking.co/the-teleconference-before-the-
| chall...
|
| Plus a color diagram that may be a little clearer:
|
| https://onlineethics.org/sites/onlineethics/files/Challen
| ger...
|
| Never did look into the Challenger o-rings this much
| until now, all I knew was that defective o-ring design is
| more likely than not, and you would be a fool to use any
| o-ring that was not standard size without the equivalent
| of decades of destructive testing yourself.
|
| All I needed to know was these o-rings circled the entire
| booster, so that alone was a no-no since it was nowhere
| near standard. Now in the clearthinking article I see the
| nominal measurements, 38 feet in circumference but only
| 1/4 inch thick. Yikes, what were they thinking? No wonder
| they used two o-rings, it was plain to see that one would
| never be enough :\
|
| Look back at the d2t1xqejof9utc.cloudfront chart. Notice
| that a 1/4 inch thick o-ring is _not expected to have
| nominal reliability_ outside the tolerances listed.
|
| Notice the Groove depth and the gland depth are two
| different things but actually need to be as close as you
| can get in practice, _within 3 thousandths of an inch_
| altogether across the entire (38 foot!) diameter, or
| _half of that_ when measured at any one point on the arc.
| This requires some precision machining and quite rigid
| metal substrates or it will never come true. This is
| precise enough that _large temperature swings would
| always be a factor_ , but more so the greater the
| diameter of the substrate. And the maximum eccentricity
| of the groove relative to its substrate must be within
| 0.005 inch. The widest tolerance on this little chart is
| the "squeeze" of the rubber to be between 0.040 and 0.055
| which is not for the machine shop but depends on the
| o-ring thickness being within its own design
| specifications. Not surprised to find out they were Viton
| rubber which is widely known to be some of the most
| chemically resistant for a non-teflon compound. Probably
| would have been better if Thiokol also was aware how
| "good" Viton is for its intended purpose, strong
| resilience at temperatures 200 F and above, below which
| it doesn't seal as well as ordinary rubber. Viton is just
| too hard and non-tacky at room temperature by comparison.
|
| After all these decades, now I'm even more convinced it
| was always an accident waiting to happen :(
| inaros wrote:
| >> Using the same o-rings afterwards is surprising, I've
| heard that the manufacturer was surprised that they were
| being used for that purpose because they weren't rated for
| that.
|
| Not surprising if you understand what the real cause was:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47585889
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Surprised? One of the engineers was literally on the phone
| with NASA the morning of the disaster begging them not to
| launch. He was overruled by management.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Surprising for the management. If you are a spoiled brat
| who always got what it wanted if you just asked/cried you
| don't expect reality to come and hit you.
| rob74 wrote:
| Without being too familiar with the subject - another
| commenter referred to the "swiss cheese model": the O-ring
| design, the temperature etc. weren't the single cause, they
| were _contributing factors_ , and the more contributing
| factors you eliminate, the more certain you can be that you
| won't have a repeat accident. AFAIK there weren't any more
| Shuttle launches at such low temperatures after that anymore
| either?
| pfdietz wrote:
| That's right, the accident launch was by far the coldest.
| They also added joint heaters.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| It's the same explaination. When the SRB joints flexxed the
| o-rings were meant to stay in place, but the joints were
| defective and NASA knew the o-rings were moving. However NASA
| also believed the o-rings could still take the abuse, because
| although they were moving they were getting shoved deeper
| into the joint, in a way that wasn't intended but was
| nonetheless at least marginally effective at stopping exhaust
| blow-by shortly after it began. But when the o-rings were
| cold and stiff... they didn't move the same way, exhaust blew
| by them longer and cut right through. At that point the SRB
| turns into a cutting torch (the SRBs didn't actually explode
| until after the shuttle broke up and range safety sent the
| signal to kill the boosters.
| Mikhail_K wrote:
| > However NASA also believed the o-rings could still take
| the abuse, because
|
| > although they were moving they were getting shoved deeper
| into the joint,
|
| Why would they be "shoved deeper," when the problem is that
| the joint _opens wider_ under load?
| anonymars wrote:
| See here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Scott-
| Post/publication/...
|
| What would happen "normally" (i.e. the normalization of
| deviance) was that the rotation (from the SRB joints
| bowing--essentially "ballooning") would create a gap, and
| the O-rings would get blown into that gap and ultimately
| seal in there
|
| With Challenger, it was too cold, so the O-ring rubber
| was not malleable enough to seal into that space (like
| the O-ring towards the right of the diagram), so the hot
| gases were allowed to blow by and erode the O-ring. If
| they had sealed in (like the one on the left) it would
| have just taken the pressure but not worn away
| inaros wrote:
| >>I find that highly surprising, because "it was the O-rings"
| explanation seems universally believed and sanctified by no
| lesser authority than the Nobel prize laureate Richard
| Feynman.
|
| Essentially you are mischaracterizing what Feynman did or
| say, although this is also Feynman fault :-), by doing the
| famous public demonstration, with the ice water in a glass
| [2], although even there he only said it has "significance to
| the problem...". In other words, we should not simplify, even
| for the general public, what are complex subtle engineering
| issues. This is also the reason why current AI, will fail
| spectacularly, but I digress...
|
| Feynman documented the joint rotation problem in his written
| Appendix F, but his televised demonstration became the
| explanation...[3]
|
| Camarda is correct here. There was a fundamentally flawed
| field joint design, meaning the tang-and-clevis joint opened
| under combustion pressure instead of closing. This meant the
| O-rings were being asked to chase a widening gap something
| the O-ring manufacturer explicitly told Thiokol O-rings were
| never designed to do. Joint rotation was known as early as
| 1977, a full nine years before the disaster.
|
| The cold temperature made things worse by stiffening the
| rubber so it could not chase the gap as quickly, but O-ring
| erosion and blow-by were occurring on flights in warm weather
| too and nearly every flight in 1985 showed damage.
|
| The proof is how they fixed. NASA redesigned the joint metal
| structure with a capture feature to prevent rotation, added a
| third O-ring for redundancy, and installed heaters but kept
| the exact same Viton rubber. If the O-rings were the real
| problem, you would change the O-rings. They did not need to.
|
| The report [1] is public for everybody to read...but not from
| the NASA page... who funnily enough has a block on the link
| from their own page, so I had to find an alternative link...
|
| [1] - https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-
| CRPT-99hrpt1016/pdf/...
|
| [2] - https://youtu.be/6TInWPDJhjU
|
| [3] -
| https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf
| Mikhail_K wrote:
| That's valuable, detailed explanation, thanks.
| oritron wrote:
| My recollection is that a rocket design was scaled up from
| one that worked, by people who didn't consider how an o-ring
| should be loaded in order to function properly. They
| inadvertently changed the design rather than simply scale it.
| I don't think Feynman got this wrong either. His demo was
| because the justifications for flight were based on the fact
| that failure had a temperature correlation, and they had a
| model representing how damaged the o-rings would be.
|
| The o-ring failure was a measurable consequence of the joint
| design failure. The data behind the model didn't go down to
| temperatures as low as that at Challenger's launch date.
|
| For more inappropriate extrapolation to justify a decision:
| the data for the heat shield tile loss model was based on
| much less damage than sustained by Columbia (3 orders of
| magnitude IIRC).
|
| Now they are looking at the same style of fallacy and don't
| even have a model based on damage sustained in flights.
|
| Another parallel I haven't seen discussed here yet, though I
| haven't read all comments: I recall Feynman feeling like he
| was on the investigation panel as a prop, that the intention
| of the investigation was to clear NASA of any wrongdoing.
| They used a model, considered risks, etc. Feynman recognized
| the need for a clear and powerful visual to cut through an
| information dump and pull it to front page news. The
| invitation of Camarda to a presentation with a pre-determined
| conclusion has the same feeling. I don't know what Camarda
| can do to put it on a (non-HN) front page today.
| nritchie wrote:
| Both things can be true. A better O-ring with the same joint
| might have prevented the disaster. A better designed joint
| with the same O-ring might also. Feynman knew that a little
| theater would go a long way. The O-ring explanation, albeit a
| partial explanation, made for good theater.
| acranox wrote:
| There's a pretty good explanation here:
| https://exrocketman.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-seal-failure-
| in...
| HPsquared wrote:
| Normalization of deviance
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
| brador wrote:
| This is when you hire someone with autism and give them a
| direct report.
|
| Their inability at social cues will cut right through.
|
| Works every time.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm sorry this got dinged.
|
| It's pithy, but correct.
|
| Source: I'm "on the spectrum." This often resulted in me
| being the skunk at the rationalization picnic, because I
| didn't realize the boss wanted me to rubberstamp a bad
| design.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > 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 slightly north of 20 tons. An Orion mass
| simulator with enough attitude control mated with a FH second
| stage would leave a lot of delta-v to accelerate the capsule
| back into the atmosphere.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I'd prefer if we just wrote off space-x and pretend they
| don't exist.
| randallsquared wrote:
| SpaceX is the only major operator of spaceflights in the
| US: more than 95% of all satellites launched are launched
| by SpaceX, not just in the US, but _worldwide_.
| oritron wrote:
| That's an eye catching stat. What is the impact of
| starlink satellites on the number, ie what if you drop
| them from both numerator and denominator?
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| It looks like 70% of all satellites deployed in 2025 were
| starlink. Seems they make up over half (~65%) of all
| satellites currently in orbit.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > 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.
| hersko wrote:
| Lets just ban lightbulbs so we don't have light
| pollution.
| rbanffy wrote:
| We have regions where we deliberately minimize light
| pollution, but those regions aren't immune to Elon's
| swarm of photobombing satellites.
|
| 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.
| TheBlight wrote:
| Because of your personal politics?
| monkeywork wrote:
| why because "elon bad" ??
|
| cut your nose off to spite your face if you want but the
| rest of us will recognize the importance of space-x and be
| grateful it is here.
| withinboredom wrote:
| This is about going to the moon. Space-x is over budget
| and extremely late. It has nothing to do with the
| management there, only that it is better to come up with
| a solution without them.
| monkeywork wrote:
| If that was the truth I have a strong feeling your
| wording would be different.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Please read the
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| I literally can't even continue this thread.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I only suggested a Falcon Heavy because the rocket
| exists, is flight proven, and has enough capacity to
| shoot an Orion to any trajectory it is expected to
| encounter.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Imagine if NASA had the resources and the freedom to pursue
| a high-risk high-return strategy the same way SpaceX did.
| NASA can't afford high-profile failures because it needs
| political support to function from a Congress that doesn't
| understand engineering.
|
| 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.
| aboardRat4 wrote:
| >both cases some models were used to justify the decision, with
| wild extrapolations
|
| Happens often. Just look at the climate change discussion.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| I don't know any astronauts that push for manned space
| exploration. Just a few billionaires and dementia patients.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| >In both cases some models were used to justify the decision,
| with wild extrapolations and fundamentally, a design that
| wasn't expected to fail in that mode /at all/.
|
| Because, and it speaks volumes that nobody ever circles back
| around to this, that is absolutely f-ing normal. If everyone
| ran around like the sky was falling every time some widget made
| it into service and some unexpected thing was noticed nothing
| would get done.
|
| "hey we disassembled this gearbox and there's a little rust
| from condensation + chemistry = cyclic usage, we better take a
| look at it"
|
| "we've taken a look at it and the corrosion is forming because
| X, this is fine because the surfaces that can't rust see
| lubricant flow and the per our calculations the maximum amount
| of rust into the lube is Y and since the service interval is Z
| this is fine, tests confirm this."
|
| ^ the above happened for a multimillion dollar per hour of
| downtime gearbox. That was 40yr ago. It was in fact fine. I
| know it was fine because they added venting suggestions to the
| docs and the client balked because they bought another one in
| the 2010s and a bunch of "we went over this when it was
| installed and it was fine then and the building is even more
| tightly humidity controlled than it was in the 1980s" back and
| fourth whining ensued.
|
| You don't know how many other things they noticed when they put
| the shuttles into service that did in fact turn out to be
| perfectly fine. It's real easy to be smug in hindsight but good
| luck trying to pick the needle out of the haystack in advance.
|
| Now obviously the shuttle people flubbed it and much has been
| writtenn about it, but the point still sands.
| dataflow wrote:
| What I don't get is why the heck are the _astronauts_ willing to
| risk their lives on something they must know by now is so
| dangerous? Is it really better to risk death than to risk getting
| fired?
| shawn_w wrote:
| There aren't many people left who've been that close to the
| moon. Lots of people would love to be on that list.
| FpUser wrote:
| Some people go to war for the thrill of it, others do base
| jumping, free solo climbing and whole lot of other activities
| that eventually kill many of them. It is in their genes.
| renewiltord wrote:
| This degree of lifespan-maximization is something you might
| have but others don't necessarily share. E.g. old people went
| to Fukushima to sort it out. "Was it really better to risk
| death than to risk getting fired?"
|
| Neither of these are major risks compared to never being what
| you want to be.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Neither of these are major risks compared to never being
| what you want to be.
|
| I want you to repeat those words as you melt away re-entering
| the atmosphere.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That's not my purpose so dying that way doesn't seem that
| appealing.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Replace it with whatever you consider "worth dying for".
| renewiltord wrote:
| In that case it seems all right. Certainly if I died in
| Apollo 1 and I cared about spaceflight and making it to
| the Moon before the Russians I wouldn't see it as
| unworthy.
|
| The Shuttle deaths no problem.
| spike021 wrote:
| To be honest I don't know how close to non-fiction "The Right
| Stuff" (book or film) was but if you watch it you'd maybe gain
| an understanding for why astronauts do these things. At least
| that part is believable.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > why are the astronauts willing to risk their lives
|
| There are a lot of funerals in chapter 1 of Tom Wolfe's book,
| "The Right Stuff".
|
| I suggest that some choice of profession come with a higher
| life-risk tolerance than others. "Accountants willing to risk
| their lives for the job" would be news. Firefighters, less so.
| Test pilots or astronauts, not much at all.
| voxic11 wrote:
| Because even in the worst case what we are really talking about
| is just much higher risk than the government is claiming, but
| its still far more likely to succeed than fail. Plenty of
| people would take a 1 in 10 or 1 in 100 chance of dying if it
| meant they could walk on the moon.
| vsgherzi wrote:
| Definitely concerned to hear but I'm hopeful that the core of
| nasa is intact. They're some of the kindest and smartest people
| I've had the pleasure of meeting. They don't joke around with
| lives on the line. I hope the best for everyone involved. I'll be
| watching the launch of Artemis 2 and 3 with excitement and hope.
| nickvec wrote:
| NASA's track record says otherwise, no? Challenger and Columbia
| come to mind.
| throw-23 wrote:
| 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, and without
| much benefit for society in general.
|
| Humans in space are currently still a waste of time/money,
| largely just a big surrender to PR, space-selfies, the attention
| economy, and the general emphasis on "seem not be" you see
| elsewhere. Please just send robots, build a base, and let us know
| when we can put more than ~10 freaking people up there at one
| time. If that _fails_ , then at least we'll have results in
| robotics research that can be applicable elsewhere on Earth
| _right now_ as well as help us achieve the more grand ambitions
| later.
|
| House is on fire, has been for a while, fuck business as usual. I
| honestly think all those smart people ought to be charged with
| things like using their operations research to improve government
| generally, or with larger-scale high tech job programs. If you
| don't want to let NASA big-brains try to fix healthcare, we could
| at least let them fix the DMV. Hell, let them _keep_ their spin-
| offs too, so they actually want success, and have some part of
| their budget that won 't disappear. Basic research and
| fundamental science is (still) something we need, but we need to
| be far more strategic about it.
|
| Food for thought: The way things are going, we can definitely
| look forward to a NASA that's completely transformed into an
| informal, but publicly funded, research/telemetry arm for
| billionaire asteroid-mining operations, and thus more of the
| "public risk, private-profits" thing while we pad margins for
| people who are doing fine without the help. OTOH, if NASA is
| _running_ asteroid mining businesses at huge profits, then they
| can do whatever they want with squishy volunteers as a sideshow,
| and maybe we 'll have enough cash left over to fund basic income.
| wmf wrote:
| The more things change, the more they stay the same.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon
| cromwellian wrote:
| 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.
| kakacik wrote:
| > it provides a beacon for humanity to dream
|
| Not only that, for truly long term perspective its about
| mankind survival. Even that POS musk realizes that (at least
| he did, not sure where his psychosis got him now and don't
| care much TBH).
|
| If we stay around just Earth, we will be eventually wiped
| out. Maybe not in next million years (or maybe yes), but but
| given enough time one of many ways that would happen will
| happen, from the sky or from processes happening purely down
| here, manmade or not.
|
| Its not rocket science, its not some magical theoretical
| what-if, just hard facts when digging around a bit and
| looking at history. Anybody who has power to change things
| and decides not to should be treated accordingly.
| generic92034 wrote:
| Even if mankind is lucky with everything else, in 500-800
| million years the sun's increased luminosity will render
| Earth uninhabitable for higher life forms (as we know them)
| [0].
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
| throw-23 wrote:
| It might not seem like it, but I really am on your team. What
| you're missing and Sabine understands is that there is no
| such thing as spending that's insignificant, and whether
| we're talking cash or mission bandwidth, _everything_ has
| opportunity costs. Exactly how many possible missions are
| thrown out every time we decide to send squishy humans
| instead of robots?
|
| As for defense spending, to be clear I'm all for swapping the
| pentagon/nasa budgets, but afterwards I'd still call bullshit
| if I think there's gross mismanagement at NASA. Pandering to
| the public with space-selfies is mismanagement, even if it's
| brought on by desperation and shrinking budgets. I think
| there's a strong argument Webb was also is bad strategy /
| mismanagement, but it's too long to get into here.
|
| Unfortunately, like everyone else, NASA, NSF et al _do_ need
| to worry about public trust, ROI, and the dreaded question:
| What have you done for me lately? There 's this idea that
| basic research _must_ be incompatible with that sort of
| thing, but I disagree.
| cromwellian wrote:
| Sabine got her wish. DOGE cut NSF by 40%. Tons of
| scientists out of work including physicists. But she'll be
| ok, she only needs to pimp another ad for Brilliant.com
| throw-23 wrote:
| > Sabine got her wish. DOGE cut NSF by 40%.
|
| You think that was her wish? Typical situation is "We
| only get X, too much of it goes to Y, which is bad for
| Z". Of course X is not negotiable in an upwards
| direction, Y is some entrenched status-quo that's
| difficult to change, and Z is _lots and lots of stuff_.
| Everyone who cares about Z attacks Y because they can 't
| increase X and don't _expect_ they can decrease it
| (although sometimes just calling attention to the zone
| does that anyway).
|
| DOGE is/was stupid and awful, not for their mission, but
| because of their methods, missing skill sets, sheer
| repugnant criminality, etc. As a general rule in any push
| for efficiency you'll be way better off exercising a
| little creative intelligence rather than doing straight
| austerity anyway. And while I don't think the entire
| government should be run like a business, why _isn 't_
| more of it self-funding? So maybe let serious people with
| good intentions at NASA or NSF do DOGE-style work,
| creating tech or process that cuts costs for other less
| intellectually-gifted sections of the government, and
| then let them keep half of what they save the tax payers.
| Half of what they save could triple their budget! It's
| not ideal to use our best and brightest this way
| honestly, but house on fire, you work with what you have
| at hand.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| While we are throwing shade towards Sabine, just want to
| remind readers that she's in the Epstein files and her
| discussions around AI are full on grifter territory.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| And? What significant development in the last decades
| came out of science and not out of industry labs?
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Can't they do a few loops around the planet and skim only the
| upper atmosphere? always worked well for me on kerbal space
| program, haha
| uoaei wrote:
| Aerobraking causes heat _cycles_. Expanding and contracting a
| material that already has "not large, large chunks missing"
| doesn't seem very prudent. Even before the evidence of
| deterioration, I'm not sure the safety culture at NASA would
| reach for that any time soon when a single high-temp event
| would work.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| interesting; obviously kerbal space logic does not apply to
| the real world... thanks for the explainer as to why
| sephamorr wrote:
| This is actually what is thought to partially have caused the
| damage seen previously. The new trajectory is supposed to just
| have a single heating pulse instead of two.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| I'd love to see a new law requiring the NASA Administrator (a
| political appointee) to be a member of the first crewed flight of
| a new program.
| turtletontine wrote:
| Someone please answer my obvious question. We sent successful
| missions to the moon sixty years ago. What heat shield material
| was used for the Apollo capsules, and why would we need something
| different now? Are the Artemis mission parameters totally
| different in a way that requires a new design? Or was Apollo
| incredibly dangerous and we got lucky they didn't all fail
| catastrophically? The article mentions Orion is much heavier than
| the Apollo capsules, does that really require a totally novel
| heat shield that takes $billions to develop?
| idlewords wrote:
| 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 consensus is that Apollo may have been at
| the upper size limit for using Avcoat.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > NASA tried the honeycomb approach for Orion, but it was too
| labor-intensive
|
| So cost cutting, as always.
| lanternfish wrote:
| Engineering is done in the context of constraints, cost is
| one constraint - and its a relatively conserved constraint.
| Saving labor in one area allows for more care in other
| areas. Especially given that labor is often not cost
| constrained, but skill constrained, which is less elastic.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| Apollo was ridiculously expensive. it was a proof of
| concept, but not sustainable for long term exploration
| ponector wrote:
| How expensive in comparison to the nuclear submarines or
| nuclear carriers?
| XorNot wrote:
| At its peak the Apollo program was about 6% of US GDP.
| azernik wrote:
| About 4% of the federal budget and 6% of _discretionary
| spending_ at its peak, not of GDP.
|
| Still a very high number, but nowhere near the military-
| budget-levels you're talking about.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _How expensive in comparison to the nuclear submarines
| or nuclear carriers?_
|
| SLS already costs about as much as a nuclear submarine.
| Per launch.
| ghc wrote:
| The Apollo program cost about as much as 22 Gerald Ford
| class nuclear carriers.
|
| Amortized over the whole program, each launch cost the
| same as building 2 Gerald Ford class nuclear carriers, or
| $26 billion USD.
| idlewords wrote:
| You would be the first person to ever accuse the Orion
| program of cutting costs.
| shiroiuma wrote:
| There's different kinds of costs: cost to the government,
| and cost to actually build the thing.
|
| The contractor has no trouble inflating the first one
| whenever they can, but they want to strip the second one
| to the bone to maximize profits.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| More precise would be:
|
| NASA is an organization that is dysfunctional and way too
| expensive for what it does. It then decided to use
| agressive cost cutting to cover up these problems.
| namibj wrote:
| The fix for not doing that by hand is to get a robot to do
| it, given the applicator is human-held, a human-strength
| Kuka with enough reach to cover the area it can handle
| before the applicator needs refurbishment of some sort
| which would give a good opportunity to move the robot to a
| new section of the heat shield.
| XorNot wrote:
| Labor intensive methods aren't automatically better: you
| have more manual steps which must be done perfectly and
| validated etc.
| sokols wrote:
| For the Apollo spacecrafts:
|
| > The paste-like material was gunned into each of the
| 330,000 cells of the fiberglass honeycomb individually, a
| process taking about six months. [1]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVCOAT#Apollo_Command_Module
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Thats what engineering is. If you dont have to consider
| cost or labor, a lot of engineering becomes much easier.
| plaguuuuuu wrote:
| too labor intensive - each launch already costs like $1bn,
| how bad can it be
| stingraycharles wrote:
| As explained in the article, it's typical margin cutting.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| 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 spending 6% of GDP to develop and run a
| crewed lunar program 60 years ago and then immediately
| destroying the evidence, r&d artifacts, and materials fab
| capabilities was a good idea.
| nikanj wrote:
| The very first Apollo attempt killed three astronauts. We would
| need something different now because the cold-war-crazy days
| are behind us, and we don't push ahead with missions that might
| end up in casualties.
| pruetj wrote:
| We _do_ push ahead with missions that might end up in
| casualties. It 's just a matter of risk tolerance.
|
| It's impossible to say a space flight mission has 0% chance
| of casualty. It might be impossible to say that for virtually
| any activity involving humans.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| Or Apollo development was a massive boondoggle that would never
| work and a small subset of those involved faked it to avoid
| being fired or going to prison. I know that directors of
| multibillion dollar projects lying to save their own skin is
| unheard of, but hear me out.
|
| Artemis, launching on April Fools Day, seems like a joke
| waiting to happen.
| testing22321 wrote:
| Related - what does SpaceX Dragon use for heat shield material
| and can it be used on Orion?
| mbo wrote:
| PICA-3, per
| https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-
| sp...
|
| > All this would be inexplicable enough if, indeed, AVCOAT
| was the only known material from which heat shields could be
| built. But while Lockheed continues to soak the US taxpayer
| and play chicken with the lives of NASA's astronauts with
| this "flight proven" (but completely different) design,
| Lockheed happily built a PICA heat shield for JPL's large
| Mars rovers Curiosity and Perseverance, and SpaceX's Dragon
| capsule also uses PICA-3.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| In this document (thats also linked in the main article) you
| find a great explanation to your question.
|
| The original design used a honeycomb structure, because
| problems with cracking and gas permeability had been known (in
| the 1960s).
|
| On the other hand it would be more labor intensive to build it
| in that way.
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Arguably, the goal isnt to go to the moon. Thats the mission,
| but the goal is to improve our capabilities of space travel.
| Improving our understanding and engineering of heat shields is
| one such case
| GMoromisato wrote:
| 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
| reconcile "It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" with
| "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly", unless maybe getting clicks is
| involved.
|
| Regardless, this is not a Challenger or Columbia situation. In
| both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the
| problem because they didn't think there was a problem. That's the
| difference, in my opinion. NASA is taking this seriously and has
| analyzed the problem deeply.
|
| They are not YOLO'ing this mission, and it's somewhat insulting
| that people think they are.
| cwillu wrote:
| "It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" and "Artemis II
| is Not Safe to Fly" are both compatible with the probability of
| a disaster on reentry being 10%.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| 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)
| irjustin wrote:
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's not terrible for space flight. Flying a rocket to the
| moon and commercial aviation are obviously very different
| things.
| mr_toad wrote:
| 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.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| 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.
| Someone wrote:
| > I could argue that Apollo had a 1 in 20 chance of killing
| a crew.
|
| NASA computed the chance of "landing a man on the Moon and
| returning him safely to Earth" as less than 1 in 20. I
| would think a lot more than 1 in 20 of those failures would
| result in killing crew members.
|
| https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190002249/downloads/2
| 0...:
|
| _"Appreciating and deemphasizing risk in Apollo
|
| Joseph Shea, the Apollo program manager, chaired the
| initial Apollo systems architecting team. The "calculation
| was made by its architecting team, assuming all elements
| from propulsion to rendezvous and life support were done as
| well or better than ever before, that 30 astronauts would
| be lost before 3 were returned safely to the Earth. Even to
| do that well, launch vehicle failure rates would have to be
| half those ever achieved and with untried propulsion
| systems."
|
| The high risk of the moon landing was understood by the
| astronauts. Apollo 11's Command Module pilot Mike Collins
| described it as a "fragile daisy chain of events." Collins
| and Neil Armstrong, the first man to step on the moon,
| rated their chances of survival at 50-50.
|
| The awareness of risk let to intense focus on reducing
| risk. "The only possible explanation for the astonishing
| success - no losses in space and on time - was that every
| participant at every level in every area far exceeded the
| norm of human capabilities."
|
| However, this appreciation of the risk was not considered
| appropriate for the public. During Apollo, NASA conducted a
| full Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) to assess the
| likelihood of success in "landing a man on the Moon and
| returning him safely to Earth." The PRA indicated the
| chance of success was "less than 5 percent." The NASA
| Administrator felt that if the results were made public,
| "the numbers could do irreparable harm." The PRA effort was
| cancelled and NASA stayed away from numerical risk
| assessment as a result._
| kelnos wrote:
| > _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._
|
| That's not how risk analysis works.
|
| Let's say every Apollo mission had gone flawlessly, and no
| one even came close to dying. Would you then say that the
| risk of death for future missions would be zero? No, of
| course not.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| If you only look at this data it would be the most
| reasonable guess.
|
| Of course one should also analyze the technical sytems
| involved and then it is clear that 0% failure is not
| reasonable.
| ballooney wrote:
| Bayes rule has existed for nearly 300 years, there is no
| excuse for 'only look[ing] at this data' and that is
| NEVER a reasonable thing to do.
| rjmunro wrote:
| I thought I'd look this up. If you've had 9 successful
| attempts, assuming nothing has changed between them and
| no other prior knowledge about success probability, then
| Laplace's Rule of Succession says the probability of the
| next mission being a success is about 83.3%, i.e. there
| is a 1 in 6 chance of failing next time.
| jonahx wrote:
| > and no other prior knowledge about success probability
|
| This phrase is misleading, as Laplace's Rule of
| Succession is equivalent to _assuming_ a uniform Bayesian
| prior over all values of p. That is, before any
| experiments, a 50% chance of success. Depending on the
| situation, this may be roughly accurate or wildly wrong.
| You cannot appeal to this rule to resolve the situation.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Well, obviously if we have a better prior, then that's
| better. But assuming no other knowledge, and especially
| if we think that other people's priors could be
| intentionally misleading, this rule seems to offer the
| best estimate.
| jonahx wrote:
| Generally speaking, you never truly have "no prior
| knowledge". Some relevant past experience, or "common
| sense", or _something_ tips you away from "all
| probabilities are equally likely". I think this rule is
| rarely a best estimate.
| irjustin wrote:
| > In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze
| the problem because they didn't think there was a problem.
|
| Being pedantic, NASA management "ignored" engineers - because
| money.
|
| That said, I 100% agree with you assuming:
|
| > "We have full confidence in the Orion spacecraft and its heat
| shield, grounded in rigorous analysis and the work of
| exceptional engineers who followed the data throughout the
| process," Isaacman said Thursday.
|
| I only say assuming not that I don't believe Isaacman, but
| historically NASA managers have said publicly everything's fine
| when it wasn't and tried to throw the blame onto engineers.
|
| With Challenger, engineers said no-go.
|
| With Columbia, engineers had to explicitly state/sign "this is
| unsafe", which pushes the incentivisation the wrong direction.
|
| So, I want to believe him, but historically it hasn't been so
| great to do so.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| There were a lot of mistakes with Challenger and Columbia--I
| totally agree. But I don't think it was money. It's not like
| the NASA administrator gets a bonus when a rocket launches
| (unlike some CEOs, maybe).
|
| I think the problem with both Challenger and Columbia was
| that there were so many possible problems (turbine blade
| cracks, tiles falling off, etc.) that managers and even
| engineers got used to off-nominal conditions. This is the
| "normalization of deviance" that Diane Vaughan talked about.
|
| Is that what's going on with the Orion heat shield? I don't
| think so. I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks
| and have done the math to convince themselves that this is
| safe.
| irjustin wrote:
| > It's not like the NASA administrator gets a bonus when a
| rocket launches
|
| It's related to funding. I mean it's always money, right?
|
| But in Challenger's case, there was very heavy pressure to
| launch because of delays and the rising costs. I remember
| in a documentary they explicitly mentioned there was a
| backlog of missions and STS-51 had been delayed multiple
| times. To rollout/fuel, costs a LOT and challenger had been
| out on the pad for a while. Rollback was a material
| risk+cost.
|
| For columbia, yea less about money. They ignored the
| requests to repoint spy sats and normalized foam strikes.
|
| > I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks and
| have done the math to convince themselves that this is
| safe.
|
| And that's the way it should be. Everything has a risk
| value regardless if we calculate it or not. It's never 0...
| (maybe accidentally going faster than light is though?) We
| just need to agree what it is and is acceptable.
|
| Story time - I was a young engineer at National Instruments
| and I remember sitting in on a meeting where they were
| discussing sig figs for their new high precision DMMs. Can
| we guarantee 6... 7 digits? 7? and they argued that back
| and forth. No decisions but it really stuck with me. When
| you're doing bleeding edge work the lines tend to get
| blurry.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It 's related to funding. I mean it's always money,
| right?_
|
| This sounds more like there is money in the room than
| it's about the money. None of the decision makers
| personally profited from saying go. It was much more of a
| prestige thing.
| budman1 wrote:
| man, if you need 7 digits, call HP.
| idlewords wrote:
| 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 around" for the good of the
| program in the past. Calling Camarda an outlier is just a
| different way of stating this problem.
| arppacket wrote:
| 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._
| palata wrote:
| 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.
| Grimburger wrote:
| Have you bothered to ask the astronauts on board if they want
| to risk it?
|
| You're getting clicks, they're going to the moon and there's
| a lot of people on Earth who would happily take any tradeoff
| for that.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| _> there 's a lot of people on Earth who would happily take
| any tradeoff for that_
|
| That's not reassuring, though. And it isn't just about
| them.
| quasistasis wrote:
| The astronauts are cool with it. They are basically
| brainwashed to rationalize exceptional trust in all of the
| people and components so that they are able to focus on the
| task at hand.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I wouldn't say brainwashed, but they're definitely aware
| of the political angles related to succeeding with a
| career at NASA and almost always agree to play ball
| without causing trouble for the org.
| tclancy wrote:
| 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?
| ethmarks wrote:
| 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
| potentially-dangerous spacecraft.
| trothamel wrote:
| This is a perfect way to put it.
|
| 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.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Taking a related quote from Dollhouse: "That is their
| business, but that is not their purpose."
| palata wrote:
| 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.
| dminik wrote:
| Have you bothered to ask the gambler if they want to risk
| it?
|
| No offense to the astronauts of course, but asking people
| that have dreamed of this opportunity their whole life
| doesn't actually tell you all that much about the actual
| safety of the mission as a whole.
| IshKebab wrote:
| But then no spacecraft is safe to fly. We're obviously
| willing to accept a _much_ higher level of risk sending
| humans to the moon than in other situations. I think I read
| somewhere at a 1 in 30 chance of them all dying was
| acceptable. Not too far off from Russian roulette!
| tclancy wrote:
| Pro tip: you're supposed to use a revolver.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Juggle five guns after loading one.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Who says I'm not?
|
| https://www.rockislandauction.com/detail/62/1323/rare-
| and-un...
| trhway wrote:
| >The engineers at NASA believe it is safe.
|
| it doesn't matter.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_II
|
| "It will be the second flight of the Space Launch System (SLS),
| the first crewed mission of the Orion spacecraft, and the first
| crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972."
|
| such "second/first" were ok 60 years ago. Today the only reason
| for that is that the SLS isn't reusable while the cost is
| hyper-astronomical.
|
| Today's tech complexity, engineering culture and overall
| managerial processes don't allow the first/second to succeed as
| a rule. Even the best - Space X - has got several failed
| launches back then for Falcon and now for Starship.
|
| Of course we wish success, and it will probably succeed - just
| like the Russian roulette so aptly mentioned in the sibling
| comment.
| mpweiher wrote:
| It is easy to reconcile these two statements.
|
| The "likely" in "likely ...to land safely" and "likely to work
| fine" is not nearly good enough.
| waterTanuki wrote:
| > The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts
| believe it is safe.
|
| This take completely ignores Camarda's observations that there
| is a culture of fear spreading at NASA which punishes
| whistleblowers. I'm not saying he's 100% correct, but how can
| you claim such a take is truly balanced if there's a
| possibility one of the parties is engaging in a cover-up?
|
| The engineers at NASA & astronauts aboard Columbia & Challenger
| also believed the programs were safe.
| cubefox wrote:
| > It's hard for me to reconcile "It is likely that Artemis II
| will land safely" with "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly", unless
| maybe getting clicks is involved.
|
| Look up the term "expected value". If pressing a button has a
| 10% chance of destroying Earth, it is both 1) likely that
| pressing it will do nothing AND 2) the case that pressing it is
| extremely unsafe.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| In the space shuttle disasters the hardware had at least been
| used more than once. A huge lot of this one is only tried and
| tested on paper.
|
| And the idea that 'if we throw this much money at it, it really
| must be fine' I don't buy either. Look at how that worked out
| for Boeing.
|
| For all my feelings about Musk I would much rather step into a
| rocket that has exploded in all kinds of imaginable situations
| before so they know how the materials and design actually
| behave in real world scenarios. I do really think that is the
| way to go.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| > For all my feelings about Musk I would much rather step
| into a rocket
|
| Definitely, but we still have to figure out if Musk is such a
| genious or NASA is full of retards.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| 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.
| chasd00 wrote:
| 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.
| AIorNot wrote:
| As a former NASA guy I would trust Eric Bergers measured and
| detailed reporting here over that blog post that says they are
| all going to die
|
| As he shows that Olivas changed his mind:
|
| " Olivas told me he had changed his mind, expressing
| appreciation and admiration for the in-depth engineering work
| done by the NASA team. He would now fly on Orion"
|
| Anyway we live in an age of armchair experts in youtube (who
| are often very smart but quick to rush to judgment without
| enough context)
|
| The article explains the situation in a more balanced and fair
| light
| pie_flavor wrote:
| How about former NASA engineer Charles Camarda? Linked from
| the article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXc
| BwF8qpDUxmZz...
| joak wrote:
| I agree, this report from astronaut Camarda should really
| alarm NASA.
| sgt wrote:
| >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.
|
| Indeed, this is a much more balanced take. And it turns out
| that the OP armchair expert is assuming NASA doesn't know what
| they are doing or is negligent.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| The OP links a document from former astronaut Charles
| Camarda, who NASA explicitly invited in to check their work,
| and who observed the press conference the Ars article comes
| from. He addresses every point in it, including that one.
| Just because an article is contrary to a strident opinion
| doesn't make it 'balanced'. It matters whether the actual
| facts are true or not.
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz.
| ..
| joak wrote:
| This report from astronaut Camarda is indeed a bomb.
| Scaring.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I mean, it isn't like there are not multiple precedents for
| NASA to find a surprise safety issue, talk it down, and then
| see it literally blow up in their faces.
|
| NASA is an institution and the incentives align with
| launching despite risk in cases where the risk was completely
| unanticipated. The project has its own momentum that it has
| gathered over time as it rolls down collecting opportunity
| costs and people tie themselves to it. If you think an
| astronaut would pull out of a launch because of a 5% risk of
| catastrophe... well you are talking about a group of people
| which originated from test pilot programs post-WWII where
| chances of blowing up with the gear was much much higher, so
| even though modern astronauts don't have the same direct
| experience, it isn't beyond reason to assume they inherent at
| least a bit of that bravado.
| quasistasis wrote:
| Camarda isnt an outlier. Lots of people left that project after
| the Experimental Flight Test, which was done with the honeycomb
| (making Avcoat truly Avcoat) in 2014. Without Avcoat, spalling
| was inevitable and breakoff, oh yeah.
|
| The design change by LM, not commentedkn by Textron is like. a
| beehive with no honeycomb-a crystallized block of honey.
|
| i'll take the structural support of honeycomb any day.
|
| It's a normalization of deviance. That is what Charlie is
| bringing voice to. Many of us fear reprisals and even when
| talking to heads of, like with Columbia, we are ignored.
|
| So, Charlie is a voice of many people, not an outlier.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| > _In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze
| the problem because they didn 't think there was a problem._
|
| False on both counts. Both the SRB joint design issue and the
| foam shedding were known, researched and dismissed very early
| in the shuttle program. They suspected it after STS-1 and
| confirmed it within a few flights.
| eqvinox wrote:
| 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 failure, TFA (and
| its references) will be forgotten.
|
| And if it does blow up due to heat shield failure, TFA (and its
| references) can suddenly claim prescience, all the while this
| is one of thousands of factors that went into the risk
| assessment. If one _really_ wanted to claim prescience, it 'd
| need to be a ranking of a sufficient number of failure modes.
|
| To illustrate the problem: I hereby claim they will have a
| "toilet failure". Now if they actually have one, I'll claim
| `m4d ch0pz` in rocket engineering.
|
| (P.S.: it's a joke but toilet failures on spacecraft are
| actually a serious problem, if it really happens... shit needs
| to go somewhere...)
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _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
| may even write another article after the fly.
|
| For comparison, I remember the Feynman appendix. One
| important detail was that Nasa said the the probability of
| accidents was 1/100000, but he concluded that it was closer
| to 1/100. Nobody expect to fly a hundred Artemis missions to
| get a good statistic. Even if the current version explosion
| rate is super high like 1/10, then you can probably fry a few
| missions without problems if you cross your fingers hard
| enough.
| eqvinox wrote:
| 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 bodyparts against various parts of the
| spaceship. That's technically an accident.
|
| And in this concrete example -- the heat shield isn't
| boolean either. I don't know how steep the gradient between
| pass and fail is, but it certainly exists, and it's
| possible they come back successfully but with it singed
| significantly outside expected parameters. (Even "less than
| expected" would indicate a problem here IMHO.) That does
| mean it's not necessarily a question of having enough
| boolean datapoints.
| gus_massa wrote:
| A high enough threshold for "accident" is a death. In the
| space shuttle the "accident" rate was 2/135 that is
| somewhat close to 1/100, but it shows that 1/100000 is
| too optimistic.
|
| You can pick a more strict safety criteria, but the
| result would be (something)/135 >= 2/135 > 1/100 >>
| 1/1000000
| cmsefton wrote:
| Minor nitpick: OP didn't say "maybe very likely". He said
| "hopefully very likely". They are, in my mind, different
| things.
| oefrha wrote:
| That "balanced take" severely mischaracterizes dissenting
| expert Camarda's attitude, so it's not balanced at all. Its
| answer to "Could the NASA engineers convince Olivas and
| Camarda?" is a "maybe" for Camarda, which couldn't be further
| from what Camarda had to say himself, which is he was more
| concerned after the meeting than before.
|
| From Camarda's own account after the meeting:
|
| > Hold a "transparent" meeting with invited press to "vet" the
| Artemis II decision with one of the most public technical
| dissenters, me, in attendance (Jan 8th, 2026).
|
| > Control the one-sided narrative and bombard the attendees
| with the Artemis Program view
|
| > Do not allow dissenting voices to present at the meeting
|
| > Do not even allow the IRT or the NESC to present their
| findings
|
| > Rely on the attending journalists to regurgitate the party
| line and witness the overwhelming consensus of knowledgeable
| people
|
| The whole thing is a good read
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
|
| Characterizing someone being (slightly?) more diplomatic as
| "maybe convinced" is shameful.
| vannevar wrote:
| All of the controversy over the heat shield is obscuring the
| much bigger safety issue: Artemis has had only a single
| unmanned test flight. By contrast, the Saturn launch system had
| seven successful unmanned tests before being trusted with a
| crew, including two unmanned flights of the complete Saturn V
| stack. And even then, three astronauts were lost during ground
| testing of the crew capsule due to a critical design flaw.
| Artemis's closest modern counterpart, the SpaceX Starship, has
| had 11 test flights, several of which resulted in loss of the
| vehicle. There is no reason to believe that Artemis has a
| significantly higher reliability rate than Starship or Saturn
| V. Even without the heat shield controversy, this is the most
| dangerous mission NASA has launched since the first flight of
| the Space Shuttle.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > Artemis's closest modern counterpart, the SpaceX Starship,
| has had 11 test flights, several of which resulted in loss of
| the vehicle.
|
| I don't think you can compare the two. Starship's risks are
| so high failure is almost the expected outcome, it's a trial
| and error based process. Starship and Artemis is an
| apples/oranges comparison with respect to how the programs
| approach risk tolerance.
| vannevar wrote:
| Until Artemis actually flies a comparable number of
| missions, any advantage in reliability is pure speculation.
| Which is not a good way to approach crewed spaceflight. I
| don't think the two programs are as different as you think,
| prospectively: both take great care to ensure that their
| vehicles don't fail. Starships may be cheaper than the SLS,
| but they're still very expensive. SpaceX doesn't go into a
| flight expecting to lose a vehicle. The difference in
| culture is more in the _reaction_ to failure. As a private
| company, SpaceX moves very quickly in the wake of failure,
| whereas NASA has in recent decades become much more
| cautious once a failure has occurred. And while you say
| SpaceX is more tolerant of risk, I would note that they 've
| never flown a crew on a launch vehicle that had only one
| previous unmanned launch. Falcon 9 had 85 unmanned launches
| before there was a crew aboard. And they expect to launch
| 100 unmanned Starships before they fly one with a crew.
|
| Now which program seems the more risk tolerant?
| cryptonector wrote:
| Absolutely not. I will not even consider the word of an
| organization that has repeatedly failed to learn from its past
| mistakes. They need to demonstrate an ability to learn first,
| and to do so they need to take these concerns seriously. That
| means no astronauts on Artemis II.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| > In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze
| the problem because they didn't think there was a problem.
|
| Problems with the O-Rings had been known and on the morning
| before the challenger launched the engineers begged management
| to delay the launch.
| gbgarbeb wrote:
| They have analyzed the problem with 1D non-coupled models that
| are so poorly matched to reality they would receive an F in a
| high school science class.
|
| They are YOLOing it. It is insulting that clowns like yourself
| continue to cover for them.
|
| NASA lowers its standards every time an accident happens. When
| they designed Shuttle, they intended for a failure rate of 1 in
| 10,000 or thereabouts.
|
| Remember, it was meant to fly dozens of times per year. At the
| real failure rate, we would have lost dozens of Shuttles by
| now. The public would have shut NASA down in protest for
| massacring astronauts.
|
| Good job moving the goalposts.
|
| > They just slink away, and then when the next event happens,
| they cry wolf again. When they happen to be right 2 of ~130
| times, they get to say "see I told you so!" and go on speaking
| tours about how they figured it out but NASA wouldn't listen,
| say they should be considered for a leadership position in NASA
| etc.
|
| NASA does not have a single model that accurately predicts the
| heatshield damage. They are lying about this fact and crossing
| their fingers that all is okay. That might work in SWE's little
| AWS and GCP world, it doesn't work during hypersonic reentry.
| IOW they are gambling.
|
| If you have a college degree, especially one that taught
| statistics, put it in a shredder and remove it from your CV.
| This is embarrassing.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| The issue with arguments like this is that people who make
| the claim "it's not safe!" never feel the negative
| consequences when everything goes to plan. They just slink
| away, and then when the next event happens, they cry wolf
| again. When they happen to be right 2 of ~130 times, they get
| to say "see I _told_ you so! " and go on speaking tours about
| how they figured it out but NASA wouldn't listen, say they
| should be considered for a leadership position in NASA etc.
| To the people who think they are YOLO'ing it and that
| disaster is inevitable, they should be willing to actually
| put something on the line (promising never to talk about the
| topic again, money, etc.) and have some skin in the game.
| Otherwise, such claims are worthless.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| You seem to have ignored an important statement in your
| reply. Will you be willing to put $20,000 on a bet whether or
| not the Artemis will have a catastrophic failure? Or willing
| to record a statement and release it on all of your social
| media if the Artemis does not have a catastrophic failure? It
| is extremely easy to sit on the sidelines at home and say to
| delay everything because something may go wrong, and you will
| actually be right, because eventually something always goes
| wrong occasionally. But the people who actually get work done
| have to make decisions.
| aeternum wrote:
| 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 counts
| the lives lost due to slowing scientific progress but we
| should. How much further behind would we be scientifically if
| Darwin hadn't ventured out on the Beagle due to endless safety
| reviews. Would the US be what it is today if Lewis and Clark
| had to prove to congress that the trip was safe?
|
| Given the opportunity, many of us would choose to die as part
| of a grand adventure in service to humanity vs. wither away of
| old age.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I wish I could downvote this comment more than once. It's
| incredibly ghoulish to use the perfectly-sensible argument
| that modern culture is too risk-averse to handwave away
| _known critical safety problems_. Those two things are
| completely orthogonal. Yes, astronauts should be willing to
| accept that there are "unknown unknowns" and that they will
| be facing some amount of unquantifiable risk, and they should
| be celebrated for this. That does not, not at all, mean that
| when a mission comes back with heat shield failures we _know_
| should not have happened, and multiple Inspector-General
| reports say the ship is not safe, those concerns should be
| blown off with rambling about Charles Darwin. That 's pure
| insanity.
|
| 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.
| aeternum wrote:
| >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 would have run the
| o-ring experiment as soon as it was brought up as a
| concern. Put the fuel pumps in a freezer, test if they
| leak. Feynman famously demonstrated it with a glass of
| icewater. Experiment is what separates made up risks from
| real risks, I would have definitely told the engineers to
| take a hike and would have hit launch if they couldn't
| provide experimental evidence of o-ring failure in cold
| temps. (Spoiler alert: in that case they easily could have)
| Analemma_ wrote:
| > 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 saying it's not happening again,
| especially when the OIG's report directly contradicted
| what NASA had been saying about the heat shield up to
| that point (indicating they were lying and had to hastily
| retcon their story).
| aeternum wrote:
| >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.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| 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)
| waterTanuki wrote:
| > 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.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| I'm pretty much with you. The fraud and waste is infuriating.
| But, frankly, what is the point of this program? At the risk of
| not being skeptical, can't we say that we conquered lunar orbit
| in the 1960s? I don't understand why this is some enormous
| scratch R&D project.
| Findecanor wrote:
| I have a bad feeling about this project.
|
| It reminds me of both the movies Capricorn 1 and Iron Sky ... and
| not in any good way.
| euroderf wrote:
| But this mission does not have O.J. Simpson. Does it ?
| Findecanor wrote:
| I was thinking of the risk of the crew capsule burning up on
| reentry, due to a possibly faulty heat shield -- and people
| in charge knowing about the risk beforehand but going on with
| it anyway.
|
| I had forgotten that O.J Simpson had been in the movie, to be
| honest.
| gramie wrote:
| Lots of people have bad feelings about things. If it all turns
| out okay, they generally forget about the premonitions. If it
| goes bad, then they believe that their gut instinct is reliably
| correct.
|
| When I was small, I used to have bad feelings about my parents
| getting in a car accident every time they went out. It never
| happened, and they lived into their 90s.
| tuananh wrote:
| > Notice: Only variables should be passed by reference in
| /Users/maciej/Code/iw/site/month.php on line 8
|
| if author is reading this, you should fix this maybe.
| idlewords wrote:
| I'm sorry it bugs you!
| dmazin wrote:
| Maciej now has a Mars newsletter, which I obviously subscribed to
| immediately: https://mceglowski.substack.com/
|
| I didn't even have a strong interest in space before the dude
| started writing about it. Maciej could write about literal rocks
| and make it worthwhile to read.
| cubefox wrote:
| I just read one blog post ("Musk on Mars") and it was indeed
| excellent. He seems to have quite a small readership though,
| judging from the Substack reactions.
| decimalenough wrote:
| It's subscribers only and costs $5/month.
| cubefox wrote:
| Yeah, though some posts a free. I think real problem is
| that he decided to start a Mars blog two weeks before
| SpaceX announced they are now focusing on the moon instead,
| and prior to that merging with xAI, effectively cancelling
| any Mars plans.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I wonder what the heat shield engineers actually think of this.
| It's my understanding that in the Challenger disaster, the
| engineers were aware of the problem and tried to do something
| about it, but management weren't having it
| orbital-decay wrote:
| _> The most energetic voice of public dissent has been heat
| shield expert and Shuttle astronaut Charles Camarda, the former
| Director of Engineering at Johnson Space Center. [...] he ended
| up publishing a cri de coeur that I encourage everyone to read
| in full._
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
| dvh wrote:
| If you are serious about moon, there should be dozen of unmanned
| landers setting up the infrastructure before first human landers.
| There should be plenty of time to test human rated stuff multiple
| times. This is only problem because it's second mission and right
| with humans. If it was 24th and first human mission all these
| unknowns would be solved.
|
| Ergo the mission design is wrong, not the heat shield design.
| tmvphil wrote:
| Have you considered that would do nothing to solve Donald
| Trump's political problem that he promised to make boomers feel
| like they were reliving their halcyon days one last time?
| quasistasis wrote:
| It's not actually Avcoat. It was changed by LM. Thw honeycomb was
| removed. Imagine a beehive with no honeycomb and a slop of honey
| is what you have. Crystallized/solid honey, but honey never the
| less.
| fatcullen wrote:
| It is still Avcoat, that's just the name for the epoxy+silica
| 'honey.' But yeah they got rid of the honeycomb structure due
| to labour to manually fill the cells costing too much. Seems
| like kind of a dumb place to draw a line with the budget
| considering all the overruns it already has, means that now the
| Avcoat is being used in a design it wasn't originally meant for
| quasistasis wrote:
| The heatshield is not quite Avcoat. It is missing the crucial
| honeycomb that gives it structural integrity. I worked on EFT-1.
| It's test flight was gorgeous (2014). LM decided to remove the
| honeycomb. It is like a beehive with no honeycomb.
|
| I changed projects bc it was obvious to that the risk was
| substantial, long befor Artemis was called Artemis, people said
| this.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Sorry, I had to google it
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_Flight_Test-1
|
| > [...] _previously known as Orion Flight Test 1_ [...]
| _Without a crew, it was launched on December 5, 2014_ [...]
| user2722 wrote:
| NASA operates as a terminal, bloated monopoly that has completely
| severed its feedback loops with physical reality in favor of
| preserving a 25-year-old architectural fantasy. The Orion heat
| shield is essentially a buggy hardware release being pushed into
| a mission-critical production environment despite the fact that
| its own internal telemetry is screaming about a catastrophic
| failure. By choosing to ignore the spalling and the melted
| structural bolts, the agency is deliberately discarding the
| engineering equivalent of core dump data to maintain a schedule
| that satisfies political optics rather than Newtonian physics.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| It's really hard to parse that out over the backdrop of a
| fascist regime that thinks time ended in the 60s, and we should
| turn back the clock.
| rwmj wrote:
| One thing I'm missing here, did the heat shield actually burn
| through on the earlier test or not?
| rustyhancock wrote:
| To some extent I think since the challenger disaster trying to
| blow the whistle on safety issues at NASA has been romantacized.
|
| For me, so long as the information is transparently discussed
| with the astronauts they can agree or disagree. But the task is
| intrinsically extremely risky.
|
| It makes it very challenging for anyone to really know how to
| balance those risks.
|
| The peak outcome (modal, mean at least) is a good outcome. But
| the tail is very very long with all the little ways a catastrophe
| can occur. I think the median outcome is also deeply in the
| "good" category.
|
| And we sample this curve a few times a decade!
| pavlov wrote:
| The Artemis program has cost over $100 billion so far.
|
| It doesn't make any sense to spend that much money on something
| that's still Russian roulette for the astronauts.
|
| If the purpose of the human risk is to let the agency
| accomplish more, then it needs to be reflected in the cost as a
| drastic reduction (so you can actually spend the money on doing
| more). Now Artemis is the worst of both worlds.
| rustyhancock wrote:
| If you need expect perfection then we will never have a space
| mission.
|
| Let the astronauts give informed consent. If they mission is
| to dangerous for NASA then we can only hope, ISRO, CNSA or
| ROSCOSMOS will go.
| pavlov wrote:
| The point is that a $100B mission that's still dangerous
| and only replicates 1960s achievements is completely
| pointless.
|
| If they had set out to replicate the Moon landing at much
| lower cost and a controlled risk, that could have been
| different. Now they ended up with a very expensive, unsafe,
| and uninteresting mission - the worst possible combination.
| rustyhancock wrote:
| So what's your point? Spend more on a project that is
| complete but not up to your standard?
|
| Or Extend the mission to something novel? Some how
| without ballooning the project?
|
| Neither is possible in the slightest.
|
| For what it's worth the Apollo program adjusted for
| inflation is pushing 200bn USD compared to Artemis 100bn.
|
| The Artemis programme is far safer than the Apollo
| program in terms of risk, Apollo sampled a much flatter
| high risk curve just 7 times.
|
| Bottom line let the Astronauts decide what they consider
| safe enough they're very smart people and deserve to be
| allowed to give informed consent.
| djeastm wrote:
| Right or wrong about this, none of us can do much about it at
| this point. The die is cast. I guess we'll just wait and see.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I wouldn't be nearly so concerned if not for the blatant coverup
| and downplaying from NASA. This makes the whole situation easily
| pattern match to Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia, where
| political pressure to ignore problems and drive forward anyway
| got people needlessly killed.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| "...in early 2026, NASA decided to add an additional Artemis
| mission to the manifest. The new Artemis III would fly in 2027 as
| a near-Earth mission to test docking with whatever lunar lander
| (Blue Origin or SpaceX) was available. The first moon landing
| would be pushed back to the mission after that, Artemis IV. This
| change removed any rationale for flying astronauts on Artemis
| II."
|
| Is there truly no engineering or science merit to flying
| astronauts by the Moon?
| gus_massa wrote:
| For today technology, it's as hard as flying an empty crew
| module with all the live keeping equipment turned on. Add
| Buster from Mythbuster to get more accurate data about the
| forces on a human.
|
| I think SpaceX used a piece of cheese in one of their test
| fliying arround Earth, just to show that the temperature was
| never outside a confortable range. They could have user the
| sensor they already had, but using the cheese too is good for
| PR.
| panick21_ wrote:
| That we are still using Avcoat is just silly. Pica is so much
| better. It really shows this design is literally from the 90s.
| Orian is one of those continual dumbster fire programs that
| literally only exists to make congress happy. It survived
| literally years without any reasonable mission at all. NASA had
| to make up missions for it to do.
|
| Orian is everything erong with US technology development and
| procurment.
| matja wrote:
| I'm nowhere near qualified to say if the design is not safe, but
| I'm suprised the article doesn't mention that some heat shields
| are designed to indeed, blow chunks:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_entry#Ablative
| pennomi wrote:
| This one is an ablative heat shield, but it's supposed to flake
| off gracefully, not break off in large chunks.
| antryu wrote:
| mechanical engineering background here. the heat shield honeycomb
| - block change sounds like a classic cost/complexity tradeoff
| where you lose structural integrity for easier manufacturing.
|
| reminds me of automotive safety recalls that trace back to
| "simplified" component designs. sometimes the old complex way was
| complex for a reason.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| I don't know anything about this program, so here's a basic
| question: why does manufacturing need to be easier? Are they
| intending to mass produce these craft?
| chuckadams wrote:
| Easier to manufacture usually means easier to reproduce. With
| something like this, you don't want variance.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Yeah that's the second part. So do they intend manufacture
| these en masse? If not, why not bite the bullet and
| manufacture it to spec, since it seems like the honeycomb
| is integral to the performance? Even if they do, what are
| we going to do with some number of deeply flawed craft?
| chuckadams wrote:
| Just manufacturing enough to cover a single craft is
| something you want keep as consistent as possible. Either
| way, I don't think the second real-world test ever should
| be with a crew, given the results of the first.
| throwanem wrote:
| Welcome back, Maciej!
| roelschroeven wrote:
| Let's not forget that, much more recently than Challenger and
| Columbia, NASA showed signs of launch fever in the Starliner
| program.
|
| Starliner was not safe to fly either, thrusters couldn't be
| trusted, but Boeing and NASA managed pushed on and decided to fly
| anyway. The flight demonstrated that the problems were bad
| indeed. NASA communications pretended things were not good but
| not disastrous.
|
| Turns out things were much worse than NASA and Boeing wanted to
| admit: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/02/nasa-chief-
| classifies-...
|
| "Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be
| corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this
| investigation is not hardware," Isaacman wrote in his letter to
| the NASA workforce. "It is decision-making and leadership that,
| if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human
| spaceflight."
|
| Still, after astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams
| eventually docked at the station, Boeing officials declared it a
| success. "We accomplished a lot, and really more than expected,"
| said Mark Nappi, vice president and manager of Boeing's
| Commercial Crew Program, during a post-docking news conference.
| "We just had an outstanding day."
|
| The true danger the astronauts faced on board Starliner was not
| publicly revealed until after they landed and flew back to
| Houston. In an interview with Ars, Wilmore described the tense
| minutes when he had to take control of Starliner as its thrusters
| began to fail, one after the other.
|
| One thing that has surprised outside observers since publication
| of Wilmore's harrowing experience is how NASA, knowing all of
| this, could have seriously entertained bringing the crew home on
| Starliner.
|
| Isaacman clearly had questions as well. He began reviewing the
| internal report on Starliner, published last November, almost
| immediately after becoming the space agency administrator in
| December. He wanted to understand why NASA insisted publicly for
| so long that it would bring astronauts back on Starliner, even
| though there was a safe backup option with Crew Dragon.
|
| "Pretending that that did not exist, and focusing exclusively on
| a single pathway, created a cultural issue that leadership should
| have been able to step in and course correct," Isaacman said
| during the teleconference. "What levels of the organization
| inside of NASA did that exist at? Multiple levels, including, I
| would say, right up to the administrator of NASA."
|
| Some of NASA's biggest lapses in judgment occurred before the
| crew flight test, the report found. In particular, these revolved
| around the second orbital flight test of Starliner, which took
| place two years earlier, in May 2022.
|
| During this flight, which was declared to be successful, three of
| the thrusters on the Starliner Service Module failed. In
| hindsight, this should have raised huge red flags for what was to
| come during the mission of Wilmore and Williams two years later.
|
| However, in his letter to NASA employees, Isaacman said the NASA
| and Boeing investigations into these failures did not push hard
| enough to find the root cause of the thruster failures.
|
| And so on. Lots of parallels with the Artemis program, though in
| Artemis Isaacman doesn't seem to be following his own conclusions
| from the Starliner failure.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| A lot of the discussion overlooks or wishes to avoid an
| uncomfortable problem with the Artemis program: Artemis III's
| hardware will not be ready for the forseeable future. The program
| has had multiple shakeups so far. This is a program heading for
| cancellation.
|
| The flight risk is surely acceptable if this is not the first
| flight of many but the last.
| tonyonodi wrote:
| I understand the point you're making, but if this is a
| programme doomed to achieve nothing, that makes the risk even
| less acceptable.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| That is equally fair. My position I suppose is that my
| enthusiasm has been spent on so many half-finished ambitious
| programs like this that it has all run out by 2026.
| Constellation, Asteroid Redirect, Artemis. If I was older
| that would include SEI.
|
| At least this one had real missions fly if it suffers the
| same fate. The crew of Artemis is among the ones most aware
| that most space missions never happen. The anxiety of being
| in these astronaut classes must be unbearable, especially as
| the ISS ages. I don't know if this mission can maintain
| public confidence in the program as the world grows more
| chaotic and people's attentions are not focused on the sky
| but the ground.
| wongarsu wrote:
| The threat of a Chinese moon landing keeps the Artemis program
| alive. As long as Artemis is slowly working towards the goal of
| eventually landing Americans on the surface of the moon and
| eventually building a habitat they can be injected with money
| and manpower whenever geopolitical or ideological demands
| arise. If it was canceled outright it would be much harder to
| react to any Chinese success
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| >The threat of a Chinese moon landing keeps the Artemis
| program alive.
|
| I don't disagree but I also don't really get it. The US
| performed the feat almost 60 years ago when the technology to
| do it didn't exist at the beginning of the program, and
| people didn't even know if it would be possible.
|
| Today it's pretty well understood as a funding challenge more
| than anything. And sending people with the level of
| automation we have available today is essentially just a
| political move.
| wongarsu wrote:
| There's the obvious meme of "the US used to be able to do
| it, but can they still do it?". That wouldn't stand in
| question if the US had say a Mars mission, but if all the
| US can show are some low earth orbit activities while China
| has astronauts walking the moon that makes for a great
| propaganda point for the Chinese. Something to the tune of
| "As the American empire declines, the Chinese empire rises"
|
| But the more impactful point is that the Chinese don't want
| to stop at what the Apollo program accomplished. They want
| to build a moon base, turn it into a lunar research station
| and invite other countries to cooperate. If the Chinese are
| wildly successful on that front, cooperating with them to
| get access to their moon base might be very enticing. Both
| for research about the moon and about low gravity. If the
| US doesn't answer with their own moon base that might end
| up in a reversal of the ISS situation (where everyone
| except China was invited to cooperate on the ISS).
|
| Of course we don't know whether the Chinese will be
| successful in those points. But so far their space program
| has a great track record. They did manage to build their
| own space stations and lunar rovers, everything after that
| is, as you say, mostly a funding challenge
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| > Today it's pretty well understood as a funding challenge
| more than anything.
|
| I'm not sure this is true. We had very good scientists and
| engineers at that time.
| trogdor wrote:
| > The threat of a Chinese moon landing
|
| Maybe I'm naive, but what is the threat here?
|
| > If it was canceled outright it would be much harder to
| react to any Chinese success
|
| I feel like the appropriate reaction would be to congratulate
| China.
| wongarsu wrote:
| We need more people like you in government
| ACCount37 wrote:
| You're saying that as if Artemis III is going to be the first
| time Artemis eats delays.
|
| What I'm seeing from Artemis recently is "good signs of life"
| rather than the opposite.
|
| They acknowledged that Artemis III is "system tests" rather
| than "a full landing", which gives it far better chances of
| happening before 2030. They're trimming the fat deposits from
| the program by removing things like Gateway or NRHO. They're
| pushing for a more aggressive launch cadence. They're actually
| seriously bringing up "a persistent Moon base" and "manned
| flights every 6 months" as Artemis program goals.
|
| This is more focus and ambition than what NASA had in actual
| literal decades.
| idlewords wrote:
| I think you mean Artemis IV (the moon landing)? Artemis III is
| now a near Earth orbit mission to dock with whatever mockup
| lander SpaceX or Blue Origin can throw up in time.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| Right, I forgot about that development. A very late change in
| program structure, and having your main lander option have an
| indefinite schedule is quite bad!
| chadd wrote:
| 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 Monthly [1], warning that NASA's "success-oriented
| planning" and political pressure were creating the conditions for
| catastrophe. He essentially predicted Columbia's heat shield
| failures in the article 1 year before the first flight.
|
| Challenger in 1986, and the Rogers Commission identified
| hierarchy, communication failures, and management overriding
| engineering judgment.
|
| Then Columbia happened in 2003. The CAIB found NASA had not
| implemented the 1986 recommendations [2].
|
| Now Charles Camarda (who flew the first shuttle mission after
| Columbia and is literally a heat shield expert!) is saying it's
| happening again.
|
| [1] https://www.iasa-
| intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.ht...
|
| [2] Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, Chapter 8:
| https://www.nasa.gov/columbia/caib/html/start.html
| actimod wrote:
| It is bound to happen again and again considering humans are so
| oblivious to safety.
| danesparza wrote:
| Then explain the Apollo program, and the actual printed
| literature that came out of the program that summarized how
| they were successful.
| mathgeek wrote:
| If you're looking for programs where mistakes were not
| made, Apollo is not the program to choose. I highly
| recommend visiting Kennedy Space Center some time where
| they go in-depth on how close it came to never happening
| after Apollo I. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
|
| That being said, I'm a big proponent of "you can't make
| ICBM's carrying humans 100% safe", but you sure can try
| your best.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Apollo killed three astronauts. NASA learned some lessons
| from that and the rest of the program was safer, although
| still extremely risky.
| hluska wrote:
| I wouldn't say humans are oblivious to safety. The Apollo
| program was very successful as long as you're not related to
| Gus Grissom, Ed White or Roger Chaffee. But those three
| (preventable) deaths aside, Apollo was quite successful and
| figured out some huge problems.
|
| If you're interested in a heck of a good read, the Columbia
| Accident Investigation Report is a good place to start:
|
| https://ehss.energy.gov/deprep/archive/documents/0308_caib_r.
| ..
|
| It looks at the safety culture in NASA and at how that safety
| culture ran into budget issues, time pressure and a culture
| that 'it's always been okay'. But people were aware of the
| problems.
|
| There's a really frustrating example from Columbia where
| engineers on the ground badly wanted to inspect the shuttle's
| left wing from the ground using ground based telescopes or
| even observations from telescopes or any other assets.
| There's footage available was an email circulated where an
| engineer all but begged anyone to take a look with anything.
| That request was not approved - they never looked.
|
| Realistically there's a point to be made that NASA wasn't
| capable of saving those astronauts at that point. But they
| had a shuttle almost ready to to, they could have jettisoned
| its science load and possibly had a rescue of some sort
| available. They never looked though but alarm bells were
| ringing.
|
| It's more accurate to say people are highly aware of safety
| but when you get a bunch of us together, add in cognitive
| biases and promotion bands we can get stuck in unsafe ruts.
| sfn42 wrote:
| I'd say it's more accurate to say the people who are
| actually smart work as engineers. Leadership is generally
| engineers who were better at office politics than
| engineering, or just business majors etc.
|
| So you have a group of really talented people using their
| talents to do awesome things, and then you have some
| useless idiots who are good at kissing the right asses,
| running the show and taking most of the credit. And that's
| how you end up killing astronauts, because the useless
| assholes in charge aren't even competent enough to
| recognize when they should listen to the brains of their
| operation. All they care about is looking good to their
| superiors and hitting some arbitrary deadline they've
| decided to set for no damn reason etc.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| _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 just one life...".
|
| The optimal amount of tragedy is not zero. It's correct that
| we should accept some risk. We just need to be up-front and
| recognize what the safety margins really are.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| > 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.
| adamsb6 wrote:
| My kids are going to be legally mandated to be in car
| seats until they're about 12 years old.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| 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
| enoch_r wrote:
| 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 pain.
|
| Furthermore, the evidence that car seats actually benefit
| safety is significantly less robust than you might think.
| The "mountains of evidence" that do exist for things like
| 70% reductions in fatalities, bizarrely enough, generally
| compare the rate of fatalities for car seats vs
| _completely unrestrained_ kids. When you compare the rate
| of fatalities in car seats to kids wearing adult seat
| belts, the bulk of the evidence suggests essentially no
| difference. Fatalities happen when the forces involved
| are catastrophic and sadly a car seat doesn 't help much
| for kids over 2.
|
| Even a back of the envelope comparison makes this
| extremely plausible: car crash fatalities for kids 9-12
| have declined by 72% from 1978-2017. If car seats and car
| seat laws save significant numbers of lives, you'd expect
| that the fatality rate for kids 0-8, who _are_ generally
| in car seats, to have decreased much _more_. But it hasn
| 't, it declined by 73% over the same period.
|
| Now, car seats and boosters do seem to moderately reduce
| _non-fatal_ injuries - huge spread of estimates here,
| most clustering around 10-25%. It 's reasonable for most
| people to use car seats or boosters most of the time
| based on this alone, IMO, especially for young kids. But
| do they justify a mandate? IMO: no. Absolutely not.
|
| Worth mentioning that mandates probably do succeed in one
| thing: they reduce the number of children _born at all_
| by _at least_ 57x more than they prevent child
| fatalities. Roughly 8,000 kids per year, 145,000 kids
| since 1980. That 's with the (unlikely, as discussed
| above) assumption that car seats do in fact save
| significant numbers of lives. But it's also entirely
| possible that they've prevented hundreds of thousands of
| kids from being born, somewhat reduced the nonfatal
| injury rate, and saved essentially no lives.
|
| Citations below:
|
| Fatality reduction with car seats or boosters:
|
| - https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/seatbelt
| s.pdf (found that seat belts as effective as car seats
| for children 2-6)
|
| - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jae.2449
| (independent replication of above with different data
| set)
|
| - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19959729/ (no
| statistically significant difference between booster
| seats and seat belt alone for fatalities)
|
| - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16754824/ (the main
| counter-estimate to the above, with the 28% fatality
| reduction)
|
| Non-fatal injury reductions:
|
| - https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ecinqu/v48y2010i3p521-536
| .html (no difference in serious injuries, ~25% reduction
| in least serious injury category)
|
| - https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublica
| tion/... (14% reduction in likelihood of injury for
| boosters)
|
| - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19841126/ (45%
| estimate)
|
| - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12783914/ (59%
| estimate)
|
| Reduction in birth rate from car seat mandates:
|
| - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=366
| 5046 (car seat mandates "led to a permanent reduction of
| approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000
| fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being
| since 2000")
|
| Note that both the 45% and 59% estimate for injury
| reduction and the 28% estimate for fatality reduction all
| come from one research group using a proprietary data
| set. Everything that's independently reproducible points
| towards small or zero effect on fatalities and modest
| effects on injuries.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| I don't think your analysis is fair, but pointing out
| details I disagree with misses the forest for the trees.
|
| Look at what lengths you went to in order to justify and
| defend what is, by your own arguments, the demonstrably
| less safe option.
| enoch_r wrote:
| Do you think that car seat _mandates_ (up to age 12 in my
| state) are good policy if the net effect is:
|
| - a small reduction in minor injuries,
|
| - worse childhoods and parenting experiences (difficult
| to quantify, but real),
|
| - and a few hundred thousand fewer children being born in
| the first place,
|
| - very few, if any, lives saved?
|
| If yes, then cool - but I strongly disagree.
|
| If no - then I think the evidence and details very much
| matter, and that's why I was happy to invest my time in
| them.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| In the hypothetical scenario where car seats have only
| downsides, then of course I'm against a mandate.
|
| There is a difference between cherry picking studies that
| back up your view point and how medical experts set
| policy though.
|
| Experts review all of the data, and ignore outliers like
| a paper published in a law journal that suggests car
| seats are the primary reason families have shrunk from
| having three to two kids since the 80's
| sfn42 wrote:
| 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.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >allowed to decide how to keep their own kids safe.
|
| This was not the major factor, but when things were still
| like that, it was not only NASA that made more forward
| progress than later times.
| enoch_r wrote:
| The evidence that car seats save lives is _significantly_
| weaker that you probably believe, as I detailed in
| another comment in this thread. But look: even if car
| seats make sense for a typical 5 year old on a typical
| drive in their typical car (which is a higher evidentiary
| burden than you might think), a mandate imposes a huge
| logistical tax that makes many normal things completely
| infeasible or impractical:
|
| - travel with many kids (nope, physically can't carry 4
| car seats plus luggage)
|
| - using a taxi, e.g. to go see a movie (nope, can't carry
| a car seat into the theater)
|
| - carpooling with other families (I'll drive them, you
| pick up? Nope, we'd have to shuffle car seats around.)
|
| - rides with grandparents or other family members (sorry,
| we'd have to deliver the car seat to them first)
|
| - splitting kids between two vehicles for errands (let's
| spend 10m wrestling car seats from one car to the other
| first)
|
| The whole texture of independent childhood is altered by
| car seat mandates! Everything gets filtered through "is
| there a car seat available?". If you haven't experienced
| this, it's hard to describe - and I think it's absolutely
| a case where tradeoffs like "how will this affect quality
| of life?" are completely overridden because "well, if it
| just saves one life..."
| sfn42 wrote:
| Here's what I found doing a basic Google search:
|
| > Car seats and booster seats significantly reduce the
| risk of fatal injury in crashes by 71% for infants and
| 54% for toddlers (1-4 years old), saving over 11,000
| lives in the US since 1975
|
| > Booster seats reduce the risk of serious injury for
| children aged 4-8 by 45% compared to seatbelts alone.
|
| It's from the AI summary because it was the most quotable
| but the articles I found say pretty much the same thing.
| Seems pretty solid to me.
|
| > If you haven't experienced this, it's hard to describe
| - and I think it's absolutely a case where tradeoffs like
| "how will this affect quality of life?" are completely
| overridden because "well, if it just saves one life..."
|
| If you haven't experienced your children dying
| unnecessarily because it was inconvenient to make them
| safe it's hard to describe..
| enoch_r wrote:
| See my comment summarizing the evidence as I understand
| it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47590700
|
| What articles did you find, exactly? What primary
| evidence are they basing their claims on? Many of the
| numbers you'll find with a google search are unclear
| about what they're comparing _to_ - I believe both of the
| fatality numbers above (71% and 54%) are relative to
| _completely unrestrained_ kids, which is not the relevant
| comparison.
|
| The 45% number I specifically discuss in the other
| comment, but every independently reproducible study using
| publicly available data has found much smaller effects,
| around 10-25% for minor injuries and no statistically
| significant difference in severe injuries.
|
| To be clear, I'm not saying "don't use car seats," I'm
| saying that the evidence doesn't support _mandating them_
| through age 8 (or 12!).
|
| Our kids would be much safer if we drove everywhere at
| 15mph - less convenient, but it would prevent many
| unnecessary deaths. Unfortunately, it is impossible to do
| anything in the world without risk. So we're forced to
| balance convenience against safety every day, whether we
| want to admit it to ourselves or not.
| sfn42 wrote:
| I think this was one of the ones I looked at:
| https://www.trafficsafetymarketing.gov/safety-
| topics/child-s...
|
| It notes this, which might be pertinent to your comment
| regarding how the overall statistics don't show the
| trends you expect:
|
| > A NHTSA study found that while most parents and
| caregivers believe they know how to correctly install
| their car seats, about half (46%) have installed their
| child's car seat incorrectly.
|
| Here's a more quotable one that directly addresses your
| claim that it's compared with unrestrained:
| https://www.cdc.gov/child-passenger-
| safety/prevention/index....
|
| > Car seat use reduces the risk for injury in a crash by
| 71-82% for children, when *compared with seat belt use
| alone*.
|
| Here's another one specifically concerning booster seats:
| https://www.childrenshospitals.org/news/childrens-
| hospitals-...
|
| > Children in booster seats in the back seat are 45% less
| likely to be injured in a crash than children *using a
| seat belt alone*.
|
| That's about as much effort as I'm willing to put into
| this conversation. I'll finish off by saying I'm not
| American and these rules exist outside the US as well - I
| have a hard time believing so many countries would
| separately implement this (or similar) mandate if it was
| as unfounded as you claim.
| anon291 wrote:
| 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.
| sfn42 wrote:
| Seems strong to me, can you support this claim?
| doubled112 wrote:
| If I'm simplifying, your argument is that car seats are
| useless if we'd just stop crashing?
|
| 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.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| _But sure everything would be better if any moron was
| allowed to decide how to keep their own kids safe._
|
| Yes, I think that we'd all be better off if every person
| was allowed to have their own personal values, deciding
| what's more important to themSELVES, rather than piling
| on and trying to force every one into a one-size-fits-all
| solution.
|
| For my part, I'd much rather have people wishing me "have
| a rich and fulfilling life" rather than "be timid and
| careful to maximize your time even if it's boring and
| unrewarding".
|
| Sure, you can disagree with my priorities, but that's the
| whole point. We should each be able to have our own
| priorities.
| array_key_first wrote:
| Considering cars are one of the top causes of death for
| kids (the top?), this just feels obvious.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| >Relaxed worker safety standards, weakened environmental
| protections, and generally moving as fast as possible.
|
| These sorts of collective values (or lack thereof) make
| it more important that individuals focus on _their own_
| safety in day-to-day life, no?
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| Yes, why don't individuals who live near industrial
| facilities simply find their own clean air to breathe.
|
| And workers should refuse to do unsafe work, and simply
| take one of the many safe jobs instead.
|
| We don't need a childhood vaccine schedule. We just need
| parents to keep their kids from getting sick.
|
| Kind of silly that we as a society even bothered with all
| of the dangerous safety standards to start with.
| greedo wrote:
| Considering that driving (at least in the US) is a
| relatively unsafe means of travel compared to the
| alternatives, I can understand imploring someone to drive
| safe.
| nickserv wrote:
| Not just the US.
|
| Rather strangely when choosing transportation options,
| people generally don't say "I'll take the subway it's
| _safer_ ", when it very much is.
|
| On the other hand people accept things like "I have a
| fear of flying" much more easily than "I have a fear of
| cars".
| rdiddly wrote:
| America has been craving safety since 9/11, and it has made
| cowards of everybody, so in some sense I would agree.
|
| But taking a risk regarding an unknown or to expand
| knowledge or _actually accomplish something_ is one thing.
| Ignoring known and mitigable risks just to save money, save
| face, meet a deadline or please a bureaucrat is another.
|
| Anyway these clowns even fail your criterion, because by
| covering up the results of the first launch/experiment,
| they are not being up front about a risk.
|
| In my opinion this is a top-down, human hierarchy thing.
| CEOs and agency administrators create and set an
| organization's culture and expectations.
|
| The irony is that a faulty heat shield is an engineering
| challenge that real engineers would love to tackle; all you
| have to do is turn them loose on the problem, let them fix
| it. They live for that. I find it actually aesthetically
| offensive that the organization and its culture has instead
| taught them venal, circumspect careerism, which is
| cowardice of a different kind.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Our internal emotional thinking doesn't work very well with
| probabilities so it is a very common fallacy trying to
| reduce a probability to zero when it is completely
| irrational.
| losvedir wrote:
| I feel like all the responses to your comment sort of prove
| its point.
|
| As I was reading the post I was wondering along the same
| lines, if this is different from before. Going to space is
| an inherently risky activity. It's always going to be easy
| to write the "this is not safe" think piece, where you can
| either say "I told you so" or "Whew, thankfully we made it
| this time!" afterwards. Things like this only happen when
| you accept some risk and people say "yes" press forward.
|
| All that said, not all risk is equal, and I'm trying to
| understand if NASA is uniquely dysfunctional now and taking
| needless, incidental risks.
| irchans wrote:
| Us humans do have difficulty with safety. Sometimes we are
| able to overcome that problem to an extent. Here are some the
| few examples where humans have done well with safety: FAA
| commercial airlines, Soyuz, ISS, Shinkansen trains, US
| Nuclear power post 3 mile island, Vaccines, and the Falcon 9.
| nritchie wrote:
| Maybe not so much "oblivious to safety" as "oblivious to
| probable risk." We worry to much about low risk events (like
| airline flights) and don't worry enough about higher risk
| events (like trips-and-falls, driving a car, poor diet...)
| hluska wrote:
| 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
| different platform decades in the future feels like sitting
| through a bad movie for the third time.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| ``It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when
| his salary depends on his not understanding it.''
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Isn't NASA run by the government? Why not pay people to do
| their job correctly?
| gojomo wrote:
| The word "government" doesn't magically erase all the same
| individual & institutional incentives, ambitions, biases, &
| flaws that exist elsewhere.
|
| And sometimes, the extant magical belief that "government"
| is different & immune lets those same human factors be
| ignored until they feed bigger, slower disasters that
| everyone is afraid to admit, because (ostensibly) "we all
| did this together".
| jabl wrote:
| Because the grifters are running the show. The point is not
| to fly to orbit/moon/mars/whatever, but shovel taxpayer
| money to politically well connected large aerospace
| contractors.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Just because you pay people doesn't mean they do their job
| correctly.
|
| It just gives you the option of not paying them if they
| don't do their job correctly.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Is "Why not pay people to do their jobs correctly?" a way
| of voicing frustration with massive gov't incompetence? Or
| a way of saying that organizational incompetence is top-
| down?
| anon291 wrote:
| The role of for-profit companies and 'shareholder' value in
| explaining corporate bad behavior is highly overstated. The
| only profit that matters is the one at the individual level
| (i.e., compensation, which is a form of profit, for the
| individual).
|
| A government employee or a private corporation doesn't
| matter. To the actual humans, they are the same, in that
| each provides a particular compensation, tied to their
| decisions.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Because the correct answer is politically unacceptable.
| jessewmc wrote:
| As an aside, do you have any suggestions for "state of the art"
| reading on safety culture?
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| 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.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Most people are just resistant to learning (without pain).
| trey-jones wrote:
| 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 seen the consequences
| before.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I'm not saying it is right, or correct.
|
| Just that it happens.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Learn about failures.
|
| _Inviting Disaster: Lessons From the Edge of Technology_ was
| one of the texts for an aerospace class I didn 't take but
| friends did, but honestly you can just read the book.
|
| There are lots of frameworks for teaching safety and programs
| for compliance and such but they are far too easy to cargo
| cult if you don't appreciate safety and the need for safety
| culture and UNDERSTAND what failures look like.
|
| And when you really understand the need and how significant
| failures happened... "state of the art" tools and practices
| take a back seat, they can be useful but they're just tools.
| What you need is people developing the appropriate vision,
| and with that the right things tend to follow.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| 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
| njovin wrote:
| It can't be solved 100%, but it can be _mostly_ solved with
| systemic buy-in to the safety culture. Commercial aviation is
| a great example IMO.
|
| We've spent the last several decades making sure that every
| single person trained to participate in commercial aviation
| (maintenance, pilots, attendants, ATC, ground crew) knows
| their role in the safety culture, and that each of them not
| only has the power but the _responsibility_ to act to prevent
| possible accidents.
|
| The Swiss Cheese Model [1] does a great job of illustrating
| this principle and imparting the importance of each person's
| role in safety culture.
|
| A big missing piece with manned space flight IMO is the lack
| of decision-making authority granted to lower staff. A junior
| pilot acting as first officer on their very first commercial
| flight with real passengers has the authority to call a go-
| around even if a seasoned Captain is flying the plane. AFAIK
| no such 'anyone can call a no-go' exists within NASA.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| No, CRM is a disaster you clearly are not in aviation. The
| reliability in aviation came from incredibly strict
| regulation and engineering improvements, NOT from
| structural alignment of parties. They were forced to get
| safer by the government if you can believe there was a time
| where the government did anything useful at all.
|
| I could go off for literally hours on this topic but
| suffice to say I've done an unbelievable amount of CRM as
| an officer in the United States Air Force who flew on and
| executed 100s of combat missions in Iraq
|
| My friends from Shell 77 are all dead because of CRM
| failures
|
| Sounds like you need to watch the Rehearsal
| poopmonster wrote:
| I am suddenly reminded of a clip I saw recently of Ronald
| Reagan on Johnny Carson in 1975.
| (https://youtu.be/CNmnmdtcdcg?si=UMpkHwOVA74Nv5P7)
|
| Reagan speaks with grandfatherly warmth about the
| importance of finding a middle ground between reasonable
| safety regulations and progress. In the same clip, he
| mentioned not knowing of any group with as little
| influence on politics as business.
|
| Dog convinces owner to let it off leash. The rhetoric
| that charmed Americans into letting down their guard, in
| miniature.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Yes and... NASA space programs (doing rare, unknown things)
| are different than commercial aviation (doing a frequent,
| known thing with high safety). Best be careful applying
| solutions from the latter to the former.
|
| Layering additional safety layers on top of a fundamentally
| misaligned organization process also generally balloons
| costs and delivery timelines (see: NASA).
|
| The smarter play is to better align all stakeholders'
| incentives, from the top (including the president and
| Congress) to the bottom, to the desired outcome.
|
| Right now most parties are working towards very different
| goals.
| pas wrote:
| Safety culture requires the ability to learn from mistakes,
| the capability to ground planes (without that turning into
| a political problem), and someone to foot the bill. (Which
| did not always happen, Boeing MCAS with a SPoF AoA sensor
| _without_ retraining. A chain of cost-cutting decisions.
| And of course there were usual problems with market
| distorting subsidies to both Boeing and Airbus.)
|
| NASA's missions are way too big, because the science
| payloads are unique, so they "can't do" launch early,
| launch often. And then things sit in storage for years,
| waiting for budget. (And manned flights are in an even
| worse situation of course, because they are two-way.)
|
| And there's too much sequential dependency in the marquee
| projects (without enough slack to be able to absorb
| problems if some earlier dependent outcome is unfavorable),
| or in other words because of time and cost constraints the
| projects did not include enough proper development,
| testing, verification.
|
| NASA is doing too many things, and too much of it is
| politics. It should be more like a grant organization,
| rewarding cost-efficient scientific (and engineering)
| progress, in a specific broad area ("spaaace!"), like the
| NIH (but hopefully not like the NIH).
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _without enough slack to be able to absorb problems if
| some earlier dependent outcome is unfavorable_
|
| It's strange because unmanned mission are heavy in the "
| _under promise and over deliver_ " territory. They may
| say something like " _we are sending a car to Mars for a
| month_ ", but everything is over engineered to last for a
| year. Then it miraculously work for eleven month and it's
| a huge success.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Are you just now learning about propaganda?
| gus_massa wrote:
| No, it's just strange that different parts of the same
| organization make oposite decisions for the propaganda.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Did you miss the Boeing 737max?
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| 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.
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| 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.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > 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 a shotgun toting sheriff overseeing a
| chain gang working in the summer heat in the deep south.
|
| I've worked with managers who would argue with you even if they
| knew they were wrong because they were incapable of accepting
| humiliation. I worked with managers who were wall flowers so
| afraid of confrontation or negative emotions that they covered
| up every issue they could in order to avoid any potential
| negative interaction with their superiors. That manager was
| also bullied by other managers and even some employees.
|
| A lot of it is ego along with a heavy dose of machismo
| depending. I've seen managers let safety go right down the
| tubes because "don't be a such a pussy." It's a bad culture
| that has to go away.
| mmooss wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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'm not saying people
| can't do those things and that we shouldn't work hard and
| aspire to them, but it's not going to happen reliably with
| any but a few people.) That expectation itself is a culture,
| organizational and managerial failure. If you see a system in
| which so many fail, then the problem is the system.
|
| And when I say 'managerial' failure, I include leadership by
| everyone and also 'managing up'. We're all responsible for
| and agents of the team's results, and whatever our role we
| need to prevent those situations. One important tactic is to
| anticipate that problem and get ahead of it, putting the team
| in a position where the risk is proactively addressed and/or
| they have the flexibility to change course without
| 'humiliation'. We're all responsible for the team's culture.
|
| I think many blaming others underestimate their own human
| nature, the effect of power on them and their willingness to
| endure things like humiliation. Rather than criticising
| others, I keep my attention on the one in the mirror and on
| strategies to avoid situations equally dangerous to my own
| character; otherwise I'll end up doing the same very human
| things.
|
| EDIT: While I still agree with everything I wrote above,
| there is an exceptional cultural problem here, one which
| you'll recognize and which is common to many SV leaders, the
| Trump administration, and others you're familiar with (and
| which needs a name ...). From the document referenced in the
| OP by "heat shield expert and Shuttle astronaut Charles
| Camarda, the former Director of Engineering at Johnson Space
| Center."
|
| _" Instead, the meeting started with his [Jared Isaacman,
| the new NASA Administrator's] declaration that the decision
| was final. We would launch Artemis II with a crew, even
| though the uncrewed Artemis I mission around the Moon
| returned with a seriously damaged heat shield, a failure in
| my opinion. I was not going to be allowed to present my
| position on why the decision was flawed. Instead, the public
| would hear, through the two reporters allowed to attend, the
| Artemis Program narrative, only one side of the story. They
| would be bombarded with technical information which they
| would have very little time to understand ..._
|
| _Jared could claim transparency because the only thermal
| protection expert and public dissenter, me, was present. ..._
|
| _I was allowed only one-day to review some of the technical
| documents which were not open to the public and which were
| classified Controlled Unclassified Information /International
| Traffic and Arms Regulations (CUI/ITAR) prior to the Jan.8th
| meeting. ..."_
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz.
| ..
| palata wrote:
| > 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.
| pstuart wrote:
| A simplistic answer would be to ensure that incentives are
| aligned with safety and success. Then that leads to the
| evergreen problem of Goodhart's Law (when a measure becomes a
| target, it ceases to be a good measure).
|
| Even if it can't ever be truly fixed, at least recognizing
| the issues and shining daylight on decisions for some form of
| accountability should be a base-level approach.
| Cpoll wrote:
| > Goodhart's Law
|
| Useful to be sure, but it's easier to game something like
| LOC than it is to game "product made money" and "nobody
| died."
| gtowey wrote:
| Easy, put the manager on the actual mission.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| What strikes is not the systemic failures. But the intense
| culture of secrecy.
|
| Reports are heavily redacted. They aren't shared. Failures
| aren't acknowledged. Engineering models aren't released. That
| secrecy eventually causes what we see today.
| torginus wrote:
| But in the 80s I guess there was the pressure to one-up the
| Soviets, so everything had to be done yesterday, but Artemis
| has existed most of my adult life at various levels of maturity
| (Orion and its predecessors certainly did), and considering its
| been more time spent between that famous Kennedy speech and the
| actual Moon landing (where there was apparently no issue with
| safety culture).
|
| 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.
| pragma_x wrote:
| May as well link the full report too. IMO, this is a bit easier
| to read.
|
| https://ehss.energy.gov/deprep/archive/documents/0308_caib_r...
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| I would like to understand why it happens so often to
| organizations that a currupted and dyfunctional behaviour takes
| over. And it seems to happen more often to institutions run by
| governments.
|
| Examples could be the Challenger disaster where managers
| overruled the engineers (who said in a meeting a launch was too
| dangerous) or the Boing 737max. Also a lot of companies in
| germany that I experienced (as employee and as consultant) seem
| similiar.
|
| One reason could be (and I saw that myself) is that there can be
| a situation where the best employees start leaving. It's likely
| natural since they can find something else easier than the
| others.
| mordae wrote:
| > And it seems to happen more often to institutions run by
| governments.
|
| I've snorted my coffee. I happens to any organization that's
| run by people who are only in it for power, not outcomes.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >I would like to understand why it happens so often to
| organizations that a currupted and dyfunctional behaviour takes
| over. And it seems to happen more often to institutions run by
| governments.
|
| Most people want nothing more than to complete a job to the
| satisfaction of their supervisor and go home for the day. When
| you get large groups of people together, this will always be
| the majority. Mission driven folks will always be crowded out
| of a large organization, replaced by careerists who play the
| meta game.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Where are the mission driven people and what are they doing?
| (just asking for a friend ;)
|
| So would you say that every large organization is doomed?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Hypothetical to wrap my head around scope: Say we had a
| spacecraft that was 100% capable of launching from Earth,
| orbiting the moon, and landing back on Earth, but it _also_ had
| the docking equipment to be compatible with ISS. Could I decide,
| while orbiting the moon, that I 'd rather dock with the ISS
| instead? Is that at all feasible or is it one of those, "we're
| not lined up for any of this. It's basically impossible." things?
| ballooney wrote:
| You'd need a load of additional propellant to insert yourself
| into the same orbit as the ISS on your return, which would have
| an exponential effect on the amount of propellant needed in the
| first place to get all this lot out to the moon. It would be a
| different vehicle.
| fatcullen wrote:
| It is one of those, "we're not lined up for any of this. It's
| basically impossible." things Completely different orbits,
| would need a ton of extra fuel, not at all possible for Artemis
| (or any other mission for that matter)
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Your comment is dead for some reason but let me help.
|
| Orbital mechanics are not something you can just intuit, but
| are pretty simple.
|
| Learn about Delta V. Play some Kerbal space program. View this
| diagram:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Solar_sy...
|
| The ISS isn't listed but the math doesn't change much for it VS
| the listed 250km earth orbit.
|
| TL;DR
|
| In space you can think of yourself as _captured_ in an orbit.
| It takes a lot of energy (fuel) to _boost_ yourself out of that
| orbit and flying towards some other body. But after that, you
| have to also expend more fuel to actually be _captured_ by that
| orbit. The returning craft would have to expend energy to be
| captured by the earth 's orbit to rendezvous with the ISS,
| rather than just hit earth and land.
| timcobb wrote:
| > But do we really have to wait for astronauts to die to re-learn
| the same lessons a third time?
|
| Humans don't seem to learn in the way we think or what them to
| rjmunro wrote:
| I read something about the Challenger disaster being predicted by
| an engineer and they wrote a memo about the risk because they
| were worried about it, but it didn't get through. I wondered if
| this was the only memo ever about risks to the space shuttle, or
| if it was one of hundreds and it just got the actual cause by
| luck.
|
| Does anyone know any more about this?
| ck2 wrote:
| Sean Duffy:
|
| _" do not let safety be the enemy of progress"_
|
| aka _some of you may die but I 'm okay with that and will sleep
| fine_
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/interim-nasa-head-tells...
| dataflow wrote:
| Isn't this the exact kind of scenario where you'd hope someone
| from above (like, idk, the president) would block the launch?
|
| Not that I expect that to happen, but worth keeping in mind in
| case something horrible happens. NASA wouldn't be the only one
| responsible for lost lives.
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| oh come on. NASA would never ignore or cover up critical flight
| safety issues!
|
| /s
| elif wrote:
| Fortunately, the most likely outcome is another indefinite delay
| at the last minute.
| impish9208 wrote:
| I have no takes on Artemis, but just wanted to say how happy I am
| for another post from idlewords. Some of my most favorite
| articles on the internet are on that site.
| idlewords wrote:
| Thank you! Like NASA, I hope to up my operational tempo.
| rglover wrote:
| > 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.
|
| So, rushing, to fulfill an arbitrary PR schedule dictated by
| _further_ chasing of the yesteryears of America instead of calmly
| evaluating "what did we screw up, what needs to be fixed, and
| what can we do about it in order to bring this into reality,
| safely?"
|
| "Things of quality have no fear of time" should be carved into
| the walls at NASA.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| Why don't they use Starship, seems like Musk's company has a
| great record overall for designing and operating spacecraft. I
| asked Gemini, of course Boeing is in the picture: "NASA has
| contracts with multiple partners (Boeing, Lockheed Martin) for
| the SLS and Orion, and shifting entirely to Starship would
| require canceling these expensive, legally binding contracts.".
| dannyfreeman wrote:
| Starship explodes
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Starship has also never launched a payload as heavy as the
| Orion stack. It's about 60k pounds. Starship has also never
| even reached orbit yet. I believe it's capable but, like, it
| would be nice to be demoed first.
|
| Starship has only ever lifted 44k pounds, and most of it's
| more successful tests operate only with 35k pounds.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Does it count as inclusion if we blow up the most gender and race
| diverse crew in history?
| budman1 wrote:
| I expect there are a dozen equally possible to occur catastrophic
| failures that the team at NASA knows about, has analyzed, and the
| decision has been made to take the risk and launch.
|
| Spaceflight is complicated. We don't know everything. There is a
| lot of unknowns that happen everytime you light off a rocket.
|
| It is a lot easier for Elon, as the loss is only a pile of money.
|
| Without ever working at NASA, I expect there is a week long "risk
| management prior to launch" meeting where many, many issues are
| brought up, discussed, and decided.
| jedc wrote:
| Data points that worry me:
|
| 02/1967 - Apollo 1 fire
|
| 01/1986 - Challenger disaster (19 yrs later)
|
| 02/2003 - Columbia disaster (17 yrs later)
|
| It's been 23 years since Columbia, and there seems to be a 20-ish
| year rhythm to NASA disasters where the organization learns
| lessons, becomes more careful... and then standards potentially
| slip.
| d--b wrote:
| How much of this is Trump trying to look good by rushing the
| program asap?
| throw7 wrote:
| Each of the program managers responsible for go/no-go are to take
| an oath of death. If there is a loss of crew and it can be
| attributed to the foreknown 3 different issues (heat shield
| spalling, heat shield fragment impacts, bolt erosion), then you
| die.
| MichaelDickens wrote:
| I think if that were the rule, all the program managers would
| just quit and there would be no manned spaceflight anymore.
| StevenWaterman wrote:
| "If the heat shield breaks then I will die" is the exact
| situation for the astronauts, and yet we still have
| astronauts.
|
| In fact it's worse for the astronauts, because in this
| hypothetical _only_ the heat shield failing will condemn the
| POs to death, whereas any critical part failing kills the
| astronauts
|
| Yes, it's a much sexier job than project manager, but clearly
| there are some people, in some circumstances, that would
| accept it.
| yshamrei wrote:
| Isn't any flight into space risky? I doubt that the first flights
| were safer than this one.
| justinator wrote:
| _> 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?!
| buildsjets wrote:
| Um, yeah. Welcome to the 21'st century, did you enjoy your long
| nap?
| justinator wrote:
| Well genius are there other 20 year old reusable space craft
| that haven't turned to plasma while trying to re-enter the
| earth's atmosphere that I'm not aware of?
|
| This seems like the only one, and according TFA, it _sucks_.
| idlewords wrote:
| They do not, except for some of the avionics.
| justinator wrote:
| That makes me feel _better_.
|
| This whole project seems pretty lame.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Never thought I would randomly run into Idle Words again but here
| we are !
|
| And this is definitely concerning stuff
| purpleredrose wrote:
| tufte
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| it doesnt matter, they have to produce some kind of result at
| this point lets go get em up there
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