10 ms·

I was scared To say this to NASA (But I said it anyway) – Smarter Every Day

109 points by Meleagris 3y ago

Meleagris 3y ago
Report discussed in the talk: "What made Apollo A Success?" https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720005243/downloads/19720005243.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720005243/downloads/19...
nabla9 3y ago
Good talk, worth watch. 15 rockets!
- ziffusion 3y ago
  Hey - you put in the time. Can you please help the rest of us out and post a TLDR?
  - postalrat 3y ago
    tldr; don't simply listen to others and go with the flow, do your own research and be brave
  - nabla9 3y ago
    TL;DR: - Apollo simple, Apollo success. - Artemis very complex, many unknowns. - Stated reasons for doing things are clearly not the real reasons. - Providing honest negative feedback seems to be the the key to success. - Artemis engineers might fear talking honestly. --- Personal comment: The timeline was fubar from the beginning. Remember when VP Mike Pence made a surprise announcement that NASA goes to the Moon 2024 surprising NASA director. Then NASA committed to it and scrambled to adjust everything.
    - protastus 3y ago
      Also: - Apollo simple with many redundancies, design for failure, culture of risk management (after Apollo 1) - Artemis very complex, many unknowns, unanswered questions, poor communication
    - credit_guy 3y ago
      I wonder if he mentioned the reason for Apollo: a muscle-flexing exercise to show the Soviet Union (and the rest of the world) who the boss is. Once the point was made, there was no need for further Moon or outer space exploration, and predictably the program ended. We don't have that rationale now. Various presidents come with different ideas for space exploration, but the fundamental need is just not there, and without that, the budget and the focus is not there. The only way for us to get back to the Moon is if we can do it on the cheap. So cheap that it doesn't cost a lot of political capital to do it. And for for that SpaceX seems like the best bet. Maybe not in 2 years, but at some point.
  - darksim905 3y ago
    In the time that it took you to ask several people for the TL;DR, you could've watched the video. I guess I summarize things different than others, but at the 32:00 minute mark, he talks about what he was actually scared about: NASA is essentially, a business (my addition) -- that does not know how to communicate. The left hand very much does not know what the right hand is doing. He brings up a fantastic example of how many rockets are required for a particular phase of a mission and showed how multiple people gave different answers without even realizing their launch date is set in stone. In essence, issues abound.
    - avmich 3y ago
      > He brings up a fantastic example of how many rockets are required for a particular phase of a mission and showed how multiple people gave different answers without even realizing their launch date is set in stone. Careful here - multiple Starship refueling launches shown in the video (I've counted 24 tanker launches) are not set in stone and might be not that important for the mission itself, it's just an example of a valid question with added concern that we've yet to have this uncertainty resolved. It may look like an Exhibit A of mismanagement, but could be a very different thing. I think the most important think he's saying is that NASA is not enough focused on the success of moving forward.
  - SushiHippie 3y ago
    Relatively good AI summary: https://www.summarize.tech/youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU https://www.summarize.tech/youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU Click on see more, to see 5 minute wise summaries.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  I think his phrasing in that section was at best misleading. It's not 15 rockets, it's 1.5 rockets (one booster, one HLS second stage, one refueling second stage) used 15 times.
pcdoodle 3y ago
Yep, good stuff.
unsupp0rted 3y ago
He seems really worried about offending people and hurting his relationships with NASA execs. I wonder if NASA people are more prickly, less, or the same in terms of taking negative feedback as compared to programmers and hackers. I suspect since we spend all day with compilers telling us we made silly errors, we're a bit more inured to criticism than the general public.
- junofan 3y ago
  I don’t know about NASA, but in my few encounters with stuff at the federal level the people involved seemed way more concerned with interagency battles than anything related to the mission. To the point where it the top priority was to fuck over Bob from the Department of Whatever by scuttling his project before the next Big Meeting. I guess fighting the same battles for forty+ years could lead to a form of org debt.
- jtokoph 3y ago
  People are way more willing to accept negative feedback and direction from a computer than a human. It’s one of the major benefits of code linters and CI. It’s not embarrassing to be told by a computer that you messed up.
- kelipso 3y ago
  Really doubt coders are much better at taking negative criticism than the general population haha.
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    They definitely aren't. If anything I'd say worse. There are a couple of people I've had to work with who took any suggestion for changing anything as a personal attack.
ziffusion 3y ago
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE someone post a TLDR. The dude is pleasant to listen to, but he goes ON and ON and ON about his life story and what not. Please just give us the bullet points.
- jackfoxy 3y ago
  I'm only about half-way through, but if you skip to 30:50 he makes a big point. And frankly the lead up to that point was necessary, which necessity is also part of the message he is delivering.
- haunter 3y ago
  Q: 'How many Starship launches are needed to execute the Artemis III lunar landing?' NASA: 'We don't know but at least 15' Video: 'Oh well that's a huge problem to have a complex project like this and we don't even have an exact answer'
  - marcusverus 3y ago
    Isn’t this disingenuous? As far as I can tell, Starship can make it to the lunar surface with a significant payload without refueling. The refueling launches are only required if you want to maximize the payload per lunar trip.
    - ianburrell 3y ago
      The Artemis mission involves landing astronauts on the Moon and bringing them back to Earth. Not landing an empty Starship on the Moon. Maximizing the payload is really important when need to carry humans, and launch a whole large spacecraft off the Moon.
    - lrseimas 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - avmich 3y ago
      BOTE calculations, approximate numbers: - delta-V for LEO-to-the-Moon flight - 3100 m/s - delta-V to get to low Moon orbit (a-la Apollo) - 1000 m/s - delta-V to land on the Moon from low orbit - 1700 m/s - extra delta-V during landing like with Apollo LEM for emergencies - 700 m/s - delta-V to get back to the Moon orbit - 1700 m/s - extra delta-V during lift-off like with Apollo - 500 m/s Total - 3100 + 1000 + 1700 + 700 + 1700 + 500 = 8700 m/s, that's a pretty large delta-V, almost like an Earth SSTO. Raptor Isp - 3500 m/s, fueled mass - 1320 tons, empty mass - 120 tons, mass ratio - 1320 / 120 = 11. Tsiolkovsky formula: exp(8700 / 3500) = m_fueled / m_empty = 12 that is, we need Starship HLS to be somewhat lighter to get to the Moon surface and back to low Moon orbit from LEO than the current numbers for Starship, and that is without any payload. It's definitely not the final numbers, so the results will change, but > Starship can make it to the lunar surface with a significant payload without refueling is questionable at the moment. If you mean cargo flights with no return to the Moon orbit - rather than crewed flights as agreed with NASA today for Starship HLS - then of course the numbers are better.
dmillar 3y ago
My TLDW: He's (not so) indirectly critical of Space X's Starship program and tribal groupthink. He may be "scared" of NASA because he's calling out one of their giant Artemis contracts. Some longer takeaways: - Simplify. We went to the moon 50+ years ago, but we are reinventing the wheel in some significant ways in Artemis. Why? We are supposedly going to the moon in two years, but we have never attempted a cryogenic refuel in orbit (this seems like a biggie). - Communicate a lot. Why aren't people talking about the seemingly giant increase in complexity to accomplish the same mission we had in the 60s (land on the moon)? People need to have safe/comfortable way to raise questions and concerns. - Have many layers of redundancy. Apollo had 6-7 backup procedures for what to do if they couldn't launch the lander off the moon. - Test. small tests, big tests, real tests, skin-in-the-game tests. Some tests can be eliminated by simplifying or, in the case of big systems/tests, doing small tests on the riskiest components. - Humans have ingrained biases. Will be situations astronauts haven't experienced where their instincts may be wrong.
- grecy 3y ago
  > We went to the moon 50+ years ago, but we are reinventing the wheel in some significant ways in Artemis. Why? Because if we do it the same way we did 50+ years ago, we learn absolutely nothing and the whole thing is a pointless waste of money. In order to progress and learn and improve you must do things you've never done before. You must be ambitious and you must attempt things that are difficult and will probably take many attempts to master. This logic is exactly the same as saying "we've been burning toxic liquids for generations to get around. Why are we making things complicated with all these batteries and electric motors". The whole point is improvement.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - shahar2k 3y ago
    This strikes me as a moment where you should watch the video there's a moment specifically at 41:40 where he basically says what you're saying and it's an integral part of his point I find that a lot of people myself included like to argue against an imagined version of something they hear second hand often not going to the source material to realize they're standing on the same side
avmich 3y ago
Good video, many good points. "Focus on the mission" What's the mission? We're "returning to the Moon" - what does it mean? Boots on the regolith? I somehow doubt that. USA did that half a century ago, we're supposed to go farther. What's the mission this time? We're going to the Moon for a more serious, longer exploration this time, right? That's the mission, right? So, we want more people at the same time on the Moon, we want more payloads, we want longer duration stays on the surface - in fact, we state that we want to establish a permanent "outpost", to use it for exploration and future uses and as a basis of something - some Moon-based station even bigger and better. Right? What options do we have now? Especially - do we have good options to do that now given that we plan to land in about 2 years? It's kind of a hard technical question, and many would be tempted - with pretty good arguments - to answer negatively to that. Apollo program didn't have this as a good option - it actually turned out to have a tragedy of Apollo-1 and "successful failure" of Apollo-13 to have man on the Moon within 1960-s, with 6 landings. Should we say today "no, we don't have that kind of the urgency today, and we do have much more elevated safety requirements, so we should do things differently than what we can accomplish in 2 years"? Maybe it's a good idea to still try to work as if we have some urgency. That is, we don't know when to land - we choose the time ourselves - and, frankly, this time the mission isn't just land and come back, as it was before - so we could justify a schedule slip. But how big? How long we can shift our plans to the right? Maybe we should do a waterfall-ish style rethinking and replanning and have a good, rather realistic plan for a modest sub-goal - say, analog of Apollo-10, or even Apollo-11, with "just" landing - but in such a way that it would lead us not to Apollo-17 and "bye", but towards the desired Moon outpost? I don't quite agree with Destin's skepticism regarding multiple launches to refuel on LEO. We didn't do that before, but we didn't do a lot of things before Apollo which are practically taken for granted today, like successful launches from Earth and successful dockings. It's an interesting technical problem to solve for SpaceX, and I do believe they'll have a working solution (I'd probably start thinking with expandable flexible displacement device, inflatable with some gases, in the tanks), but I don't think it will be a show-stopper for orbital refueling plans. However what Starship HLS brings us - and what other proposed solutions for lunar landers seems not to - is that transition from "boot on the regolith" missions to "permanent outpost" state. Yes it's harder to get to in the first place, and it's likely we won't have Starship HLS on the Moon in ~2 years, but it's still a pretty good component of what we need to have missions which go beyond Apollo achievements. So it might make sense to keep developing Starship, and LEO refueling, and if other Moon lander options will come first - good, if not, we'll have a landing system which is capable to scale for a bigger missions worthy of our century.
ulrashida 3y ago
I would have greatly preferred a non-clickbait title for this.
- vikramkr 3y ago
  I don't actually know if it's clickbait. A huge portion of the video is actually just laying the groundwork for the importance of feedback and being afraid to speak up because of political and management concerns is actually a central point of the talk. Thematically the title is a great fit and if it gets clicks, good for him
ATMLOTTOBEER 3y ago
I sincerely hope this doesn’t destroy his career.
- dralley 3y ago
  His career is on YouTube these days, he'll be fine. Yes he's done a lot with NASA in the past but even if they blackballed him completely (unlikely) it's not the end of the world.
- namlem 3y ago
  Few of his videos are done with NASA and his day job is developing anti-missile systems for the DoD. His career will not be meaningfully impacted lol
protastus 3y ago
Does NASA and their contractors have any true believers in leadership positions? The complexity and safety concerns have been pointed out multiple times. I stopped paying attention because this program appears to be on bureaucratic autopilot. Government contractors deliver parts, without control or accountability about the performance of the entire system. The complexity indicates that Artemis will get cancelled once it fails to achieve goals. I hope nobody dies. The top engineering talent of the U.S. is not in this program. Poor engineering leadership is inevitable. Artemis looks like a jobs program.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  There are some misunderstanding here. Artemis isn't really a program. SLS, Orion, HLS (Starship) and a few other things are all their own program. Each has their own political logic and its cancellation depends on many things. Cancling all isn't really possible, no matter what the marketing term 'Artemis' means. Artemis is literally just a marking term a clever NASA Administrator made up in order to get money for a lander. SLS and Orion have survived many changes in program, their survival is independent. The HLS program is fixed-price, and once award can't really be changed canceled. They can only not renew the contract for more missions. If NASA engineering talent is so shit, why has Commercial Crew and Cargo program been some of the most successful NASA programs since Apollo? The same people selected the HLS program. HLS (Starship) is anything but a Jobs program for NASA or SpaceX. Its literally the future SpaceX (pretty good engineering company) is banking on. Artemis is a complex program with a complex history of sub-parts and lots of political constraints. The programs most like it have been successful. This is a larger version of those ideas, but those ideas were clearly more successful then what NASA has been doing for the last 40 years. (Look at the countless failed projects) > Government contractors deliver parts, without control or accountability about the performance of the entire system. Contractors didn't have this during Apollo.

109 points by Meleagris 3y ago

Report discussed in the talk: "What made Apollo A Success?" https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720005243/downloads/19720005243.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720005243/downloads/19...

nabla9 3y ago

Good talk, worth watch. 15 rockets!

ziffusion 3y ago
Hey - you put in the time. Can you please help the rest of us out and post a TLDR?
- postalrat 3y ago
  tldr; don't simply listen to others and go with the flow, do your own research and be brave
- nabla9 3y ago
  TL;DR: - Apollo simple, Apollo success. - Artemis very complex, many unknowns. - Stated reasons for doing things are clearly not the real reasons. - Providing honest negative feedback seems to be the the key to success. - Artemis engineers might fear talking honestly. --- Personal comment: The timeline was fubar from the beginning. Remember when VP Mike Pence made a surprise announcement that NASA goes to the Moon 2024 surprising NASA director. Then NASA committed to it and scrambled to adjust everything.
  - protastus 3y ago
    Also: - Apollo simple with many redundancies, design for failure, culture of risk management (after Apollo 1) - Artemis very complex, many unknowns, unanswered questions, poor communication
  - credit_guy 3y ago
    I wonder if he mentioned the reason for Apollo: a muscle-flexing exercise to show the Soviet Union (and the rest of the world) who the boss is. Once the point was made, there was no need for further Moon or outer space exploration, and predictably the program ended. We don't have that rationale now. Various presidents come with different ideas for space exploration, but the fundamental need is just not there, and without that, the budget and the focus is not there. The only way for us to get back to the Moon is if we can do it on the cheap. So cheap that it doesn't cost a lot of political capital to do it. And for for that SpaceX seems like the best bet. Maybe not in 2 years, but at some point.
- darksim905 3y ago
  In the time that it took you to ask several people for the TL;DR, you could've watched the video. I guess I summarize things different than others, but at the 32:00 minute mark, he talks about what he was actually scared about: NASA is essentially, a business (my addition) -- that does not know how to communicate. The left hand very much does not know what the right hand is doing. He brings up a fantastic example of how many rockets are required for a particular phase of a mission and showed how multiple people gave different answers without even realizing their launch date is set in stone. In essence, issues abound.
  - avmich 3y ago
    > He brings up a fantastic example of how many rockets are required for a particular phase of a mission and showed how multiple people gave different answers without even realizing their launch date is set in stone. Careful here - multiple Starship refueling launches shown in the video (I've counted 24 tanker launches) are not set in stone and might be not that important for the mission itself, it's just an example of a valid question with added concern that we've yet to have this uncertainty resolved. It may look like an Exhibit A of mismanagement, but could be a very different thing. I think the most important think he's saying is that NASA is not enough focused on the success of moving forward.
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  Relatively good AI summary: https://www.summarize.tech/youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU https://www.summarize.tech/youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU Click on see more, to see 5 minute wise summaries.
sebzim4500 3y ago
I think his phrasing in that section was at best misleading. It's not 15 rockets, it's 1.5 rockets (one booster, one HLS second stage, one refueling second stage) used 15 times.

pcdoodle 3y ago

Yep, good stuff.

unsupp0rted 3y ago

He seems really worried about offending people and hurting his relationships with NASA execs. I wonder if NASA people are more prickly, less, or the same in terms of taking negative feedback as compared to programmers and hackers. I suspect since we spend all day with compilers telling us we made silly errors, we're a bit more inured to criticism than the general public.

junofan 3y ago
I don’t know about NASA, but in my few encounters with stuff at the federal level the people involved seemed way more concerned with interagency battles than anything related to the mission. To the point where it the top priority was to fuck over Bob from the Department of Whatever by scuttling his project before the next Big Meeting. I guess fighting the same battles for forty+ years could lead to a form of org debt.
jtokoph 3y ago
People are way more willing to accept negative feedback and direction from a computer than a human. It’s one of the major benefits of code linters and CI. It’s not embarrassing to be told by a computer that you messed up.
kelipso 3y ago
Really doubt coders are much better at taking negative criticism than the general population haha.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  They definitely aren't. If anything I'd say worse. There are a couple of people I've had to work with who took any suggestion for changing anything as a personal attack.

ziffusion 3y ago

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE someone post a TLDR. The dude is pleasant to listen to, but he goes ON and ON and ON about his life story and what not. Please just give us the bullet points.

jackfoxy 3y ago
I'm only about half-way through, but if you skip to 30:50 he makes a big point. And frankly the lead up to that point was necessary, which necessity is also part of the message he is delivering.
haunter 3y ago
Q: 'How many Starship launches are needed to execute the Artemis III lunar landing?' NASA: 'We don't know but at least 15' Video: 'Oh well that's a huge problem to have a complex project like this and we don't even have an exact answer'
- marcusverus 3y ago
  Isn’t this disingenuous? As far as I can tell, Starship can make it to the lunar surface with a significant payload without refueling. The refueling launches are only required if you want to maximize the payload per lunar trip.
  - ianburrell 3y ago
    The Artemis mission involves landing astronauts on the Moon and bringing them back to Earth. Not landing an empty Starship on the Moon. Maximizing the payload is really important when need to carry humans, and launch a whole large spacecraft off the Moon.
  - lrseimas 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - avmich 3y ago
    BOTE calculations, approximate numbers: - delta-V for LEO-to-the-Moon flight - 3100 m/s - delta-V to get to low Moon orbit (a-la Apollo) - 1000 m/s - delta-V to land on the Moon from low orbit - 1700 m/s - extra delta-V during landing like with Apollo LEM for emergencies - 700 m/s - delta-V to get back to the Moon orbit - 1700 m/s - extra delta-V during lift-off like with Apollo - 500 m/s Total - 3100 + 1000 + 1700 + 700 + 1700 + 500 = 8700 m/s, that's a pretty large delta-V, almost like an Earth SSTO. Raptor Isp - 3500 m/s, fueled mass - 1320 tons, empty mass - 120 tons, mass ratio - 1320 / 120 = 11. Tsiolkovsky formula: exp(8700 / 3500) = m_fueled / m_empty = 12 that is, we need Starship HLS to be somewhat lighter to get to the Moon surface and back to low Moon orbit from LEO than the current numbers for Starship, and that is without any payload. It's definitely not the final numbers, so the results will change, but > Starship can make it to the lunar surface with a significant payload without refueling is questionable at the moment. If you mean cargo flights with no return to the Moon orbit - rather than crewed flights as agreed with NASA today for Starship HLS - then of course the numbers are better.

dmillar 3y ago

My TLDW: He's (not so) indirectly critical of Space X's Starship program and tribal groupthink. He may be "scared" of NASA because he's calling out one of their giant Artemis contracts. Some longer takeaways: - Simplify. We went to the moon 50+ years ago, but we are reinventing the wheel in some significant ways in Artemis. Why? We are supposedly going to the moon in two years, but we have never attempted a cryogenic refuel in orbit (this seems like a biggie). - Communicate a lot. Why aren't people talking about the seemingly giant increase in complexity to accomplish the same mission we had in the 60s (land on the moon)? People need to have safe/comfortable way to raise questions and concerns. - Have many layers of redundancy. Apollo had 6-7 backup procedures for what to do if they couldn't launch the lander off the moon. - Test. small tests, big tests, real tests, skin-in-the-game tests. Some tests can be eliminated by simplifying or, in the case of big systems/tests, doing small tests on the riskiest components. - Humans have ingrained biases. Will be situations astronauts haven't experienced where their instincts may be wrong.

grecy 3y ago
> We went to the moon 50+ years ago, but we are reinventing the wheel in some significant ways in Artemis. Why? Because if we do it the same way we did 50+ years ago, we learn absolutely nothing and the whole thing is a pointless waste of money. In order to progress and learn and improve you must do things you've never done before. You must be ambitious and you must attempt things that are difficult and will probably take many attempts to master. This logic is exactly the same as saying "we've been burning toxic liquids for generations to get around. Why are we making things complicated with all these batteries and electric motors". The whole point is improvement.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- shahar2k 3y ago
  This strikes me as a moment where you should watch the video there's a moment specifically at 41:40 where he basically says what you're saying and it's an integral part of his point I find that a lot of people myself included like to argue against an imagined version of something they hear second hand often not going to the source material to realize they're standing on the same side

avmich 3y ago

Good video, many good points. "Focus on the mission" What's the mission? We're "returning to the Moon" - what does it mean? Boots on the regolith? I somehow doubt that. USA did that half a century ago, we're supposed to go farther. What's the mission this time? We're going to the Moon for a more serious, longer exploration this time, right? That's the mission, right? So, we want more people at the same time on the Moon, we want more payloads, we want longer duration stays on the surface - in fact, we state that we want to establish a permanent "outpost", to use it for exploration and future uses and as a basis of something - some Moon-based station even bigger and better. Right? What options do we have now? Especially - do we have good options to do that now given that we plan to land in about 2 years? It's kind of a hard technical question, and many would be tempted - with pretty good arguments - to answer negatively to that. Apollo program didn't have this as a good option - it actually turned out to have a tragedy of Apollo-1 and "successful failure" of Apollo-13 to have man on the Moon within 1960-s, with 6 landings. Should we say today "no, we don't have that kind of the urgency today, and we do have much more elevated safety requirements, so we should do things differently than what we can accomplish in 2 years"? Maybe it's a good idea to still try to work as if we have some urgency. That is, we don't know when to land - we choose the time ourselves - and, frankly, this time the mission isn't just land and come back, as it was before - so we could justify a schedule slip. But how big? How long we can shift our plans to the right? Maybe we should do a waterfall-ish style rethinking and replanning and have a good, rather realistic plan for a modest sub-goal - say, analog of Apollo-10, or even Apollo-11, with "just" landing - but in such a way that it would lead us not to Apollo-17 and "bye", but towards the desired Moon outpost? I don't quite agree with Destin's skepticism regarding multiple launches to refuel on LEO. We didn't do that before, but we didn't do a lot of things before Apollo which are practically taken for granted today, like successful launches from Earth and successful dockings. It's an interesting technical problem to solve for SpaceX, and I do believe they'll have a working solution (I'd probably start thinking with expandable flexible displacement device, inflatable with some gases, in the tanks), but I don't think it will be a show-stopper for orbital refueling plans. However what Starship HLS brings us - and what other proposed solutions for lunar landers seems not to - is that transition from "boot on the regolith" missions to "permanent outpost" state. Yes it's harder to get to in the first place, and it's likely we won't have Starship HLS on the Moon in ~2 years, but it's still a pretty good component of what we need to have missions which go beyond Apollo achievements. So it might make sense to keep developing Starship, and LEO refueling, and if other Moon lander options will come first - good, if not, we'll have a landing system which is capable to scale for a bigger missions worthy of our century.

ulrashida 3y ago

I would have greatly preferred a non-clickbait title for this.

vikramkr 3y ago
I don't actually know if it's clickbait. A huge portion of the video is actually just laying the groundwork for the importance of feedback and being afraid to speak up because of political and management concerns is actually a central point of the talk. Thematically the title is a great fit and if it gets clicks, good for him

ATMLOTTOBEER 3y ago

I sincerely hope this doesn’t destroy his career.

dralley 3y ago
His career is on YouTube these days, he'll be fine. Yes he's done a lot with NASA in the past but even if they blackballed him completely (unlikely) it's not the end of the world.
namlem 3y ago
Few of his videos are done with NASA and his day job is developing anti-missile systems for the DoD. His career will not be meaningfully impacted lol

protastus 3y ago

Does NASA and their contractors have any true believers in leadership positions? The complexity and safety concerns have been pointed out multiple times. I stopped paying attention because this program appears to be on bureaucratic autopilot. Government contractors deliver parts, without control or accountability about the performance of the entire system. The complexity indicates that Artemis will get cancelled once it fails to achieve goals. I hope nobody dies. The top engineering talent of the U.S. is not in this program. Poor engineering leadership is inevitable. Artemis looks like a jobs program.

panick21_ 3y ago
There are some misunderstanding here. Artemis isn't really a program. SLS, Orion, HLS (Starship) and a few other things are all their own program. Each has their own political logic and its cancellation depends on many things. Cancling all isn't really possible, no matter what the marketing term 'Artemis' means. Artemis is literally just a marking term a clever NASA Administrator made up in order to get money for a lander. SLS and Orion have survived many changes in program, their survival is independent. The HLS program is fixed-price, and once award can't really be changed canceled. They can only not renew the contract for more missions. If NASA engineering talent is so shit, why has Commercial Crew and Cargo program been some of the most successful NASA programs since Apollo? The same people selected the HLS program. HLS (Starship) is anything but a Jobs program for NASA or SpaceX. Its literally the future SpaceX (pretty good engineering company) is banking on. Artemis is a complex program with a complex history of sub-parts and lots of political constraints. The programs most like it have been successful. This is a larger version of those ideas, but those ideas were clearly more successful then what NASA has been doing for the last 40 years. (Look at the countless failed projects) > Government contractors deliver parts, without control or accountability about the performance of the entire system. Contractors didn't have this during Apollo.