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Artemis II is not safe to fly
- johng 7mo agoGreat 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 7mo agoWas there ever a risk-free spaceflight? Pretty sure even with this finding this flight would be safer than any Apollo.
- everyone 7mo agoSaturn 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 7mo agoOrion is a Lockheed (CM) and Airbus (ESM) project.
- everyone 7mo agoYeah, 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 7mo agoSaturn 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 7mo agoYou 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 7mo agoNever risk free , but Soyuz hardly lost any crew over its 50+ years
- wiseowise 7mo agoYeah, and where is it now?
- idlewords 7mo agoThe next two Soyuz launches are this Wednesday and Saturday.
- IndrekR 7mo ago2/156 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 7mo agoThe 2 were early, and fewer lives were lost. The shuttle was unnecessarily risky , and NASA was aware from its inception
- cr125rider 7mo agoBut that’s exactly what happened with Challenger
- jaggederest 7mo agoAnd Columbia, too, when they made the decision to reenter without inspection, and reenter instead of waiting for rescue.
- fishgoesblub 7mo agoA rescue was impractical and potentially riskier no?
- paleotrope 7mo agoRiskier? 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 7mo agoIt 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 7mo agoAnd 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 7mo ago
- steve-atx-7600 7mo agoAstronauts are smart folks. They can vote with their feet.
- tonymet 7mo agoThey’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 7mo agoIt’s the American roulette
- shrubble 7mo ago*Freedom Roulette
- wat10000 7mo ago135 missions, 2 fatal accidents, that’s not 1/10.
- tonymet 7mo ago[flagged]
- kelnos 7mo agoThat... doesn't make any sense.
- tonymet 7mo agoIf 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 7mo agoBy 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.
- anitil 7mo agoThis 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 7mo agoI 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.
- wiseowise 7mo ago[flagged]
- radu_floricica 7mo agoIt's 100b just to begin - the full bill would be multiples of that. And there are options now.
- EA-3167 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoThis comment in dripping with elitism. We trusted the rocket scientists and what did that get us? The Challenger disaster. /s
- kristianp 7mo agoIf I recall correctly the Author worked at NASA.
- themafia 7mo ago> 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-shield-for-next-crew-mission-due-to-manufacturing-defect/ https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/05/24/spacex-swapping-heat-s...
- wat10000 7mo agoYour link says it failed in testing, not in flight.
- themafia 7mo agoDid 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 7mo agoNone 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.
- CoastalCoder 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agohttps://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2026/03/30/nasas-artemis-ii-launch-mission-countdown-begins/ 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 7mo agoThere’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-1-moon-mission-had-a-heat-shield-issue-heres-why-nasa-doesnt-think-it-will-happen-again-on-artemis-2 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 7mo agoTheir testing procedures failed to predict the char loss before the flight, so they don't seem very reliable.
- akamaka 7mo agoYes, 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 7mo agoI’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.
- bsilvereagle 7mo ago> “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/20160001258.pdf 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/ https://www.nasa.gov/ames/arcjet-complex/
- idlewords 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoHow does SpaceX test it? Have they needed to solve this problem?
- margalabargala 7mo agoSpaceX tests these in prod. Kinda like Artemis I did.
- eru 7mo agoAnd this is actually a decent strategy, but you can only really do this when you have lots of unmanned flights.
- randomNumber7 7mo agoNothing 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).
- kristianp 7mo ago> 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 7mo agoThe point of the blog post is that those concerns have not been adequately addressed.
- delichon 7mo agoI 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 7mo ago> I am very not brave but I'd volunteer. >> Artemis II could fly just as easily without astronauts on board
- healthworker 7mo agoI think they were saying they would sign up just for the experience, even if it's unnecessary to the program.
- dataflow 7mo agoBut 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 7mo agoespecially 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 7mo agoThis is an interesting comment -- your life is precious brother, you might have something in store down the road :)
- gedy 7mo agoDepending on one's age, maybe not honestly? (Not the OP)
- wmf 7mo agoRelated: NASA's Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage by Casey Handmer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794242 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-orion-heat-shield-expresses-full-confidence-in-it-for-artemis-ii/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/nasa-chief-reviews-ori...
- arppacket 7mo agoLooks 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoAbout 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 7mo agocould the government rent out monopoly grants for televised football on the moon in exchange for sponsoring manned space exploration?
- eru 7mo agoWhich 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?
- dataflow 7mo agoWhat 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 7mo agoThere aren't many people left who've been that close to the moon. Lots of people would love to be on that list.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- FpUser 7mo agoSome 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 7mo agoThis 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 7mo ago> 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 7mo agoThat’s not my purpose so dying that way doesn’t seem that appealing.
- vsgherzi 7mo agoDefinitely 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 7mo agoNASA’s track record says otherwise, no? Challenger and Columbia come to mind.
- shiroiuma 7mo ago>They don’t joke around with lives on the line. They don't? They sure seemed to back when they ignored the engineers and launched Challenger, and again with Columbia. And those were times when the country had competent political leadership instead of a complete clown-show. I have very, very little faith in NASA at this point after seeing how much the administration has wrecked other federal agencies like the CDC and NHS. There's no way I'd fly on that thing.
- throw-23 7mo agoAs 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 7mo agoThe more things change, the more they stay the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon
- cromwellian 7mo agoNASA'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.
- isoprophlex 7mo agoCan'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 7mo agoAerobraking 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 7mo agointeresting; obviously kerbal space logic does not apply to the real world... thanks for the explainer as to why
- sephamorr 7mo agoThis 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 7mo agoI’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 7mo agoSomeone 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 7mo agoThe 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 7mo ago> NASA tried the honeycomb approach for Orion, but it was too labor-intensive So cost cutting, as always.
- lanternfish 7mo agoEngineering 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 7mo agoApollo was ridiculously expensive. it was a proof of concept, but not sustainable for long term exploration
- GMoromisato 7mo agoThis is a more balanced take, in my opinion: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/nasa-chief-reviews-orion-heat-shield-expresses-full-confidence-in-it-for-artemis-ii/ 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 7mo ago"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 7mo agofor 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 7mo ago1/100 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 7mo agoIt's not terrible for space flight. Flying a rocket to the moon and commercial aviation are obviously very different things.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Findecanor 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoBut this mission does not have O.J. Simpson. Does it ?
- Findecanor 7mo agoI 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.
- euroderf 6mo agoI was thinking: Capricorn One !
- decimalenough 7mo ago[flagged]
- gramie 7mo agoLots 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.
- waterTanuki 7mo ago> 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 7mo agoI'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.
- tuananh 7mo ago> 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.
- dmazin 7mo agoMaciej now has a Mars newsletter, which I obviously subscribed to immediately: https://mceglowski.substack.com/ 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoIt's subscribers only and costs $5/month.
- cubefox 7mo agoYeah, 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo ago> 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/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZzIksrs0jy/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
- dvh 7mo agoIf 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 7mo agoHave 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 7mo agoIt'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 7mo agoIt 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 7mo agoIf you want to be precise, sure. But most people don't make a distinction between AVCOAT 5026-39/HC-G and just AVCOAT 5026-39/HC and then AVCOAT 5026-39. The key is that there's no honeycomb providing key structural support to the "honey."
- quasistasis 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoSorry, I had to google it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_Flight_Test-1 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 7mo agoNASA 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 7mo agoIt'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 7mo agoOne thing I'm missing here, did the heat shield actually burn through on the earlier test or not?
- rustyhancock 7mo agoTo 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 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoIf 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 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoSo 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 7mo agoRight 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo ago“…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 7mo agoFor 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_ 7mo agoThat 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 7mo agoI'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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_entry#Ablative
- pennomi 7mo agoThis one is an ablative heat shield, but it’s supposed to flake off gracefully, not break off in large chunks.
- antryu 7mo agomechanical 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoEasier to manufacture usually means easier to reproduce. With something like this, you don't want variance.
- ibejoeb 7mo agoYeah 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 7mo agoJust 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 7mo agoWelcome back, Maciej!
- roelschroeven 7mo agoLet'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-flight-as-type-a-mishap-says-agency-made-mistakes/ 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 7mo agoA 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 7mo agoI understand the point you’re making, but if this is a programme doomed to achieve nothing, that makes the risk even less acceptable.
- shadowofneptune 7mo agoThat 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 7mo agoThe 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 7mo ago>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.
- chadd 7mo agoI'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.html 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 https://www.nasa.gov/columbia/caib/html/start.html
- actimod 7mo agoIt is bound to happen again and again considering humans are so oblivious to safety.
- danesparza 7mo agoThen explain the Apollo program, and the actual printed literature that came out of the program that summarized how they were successful.
- mathgeek 7mo agoIf 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 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.
- randomNumber7 7mo agoI 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 7mo ago> 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 7mo ago>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 7mo agoWhere 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 7mo agoHypothetical 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 7mo agoYou’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.
- Waterluvian 7mo ago[dead]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- fatcullen 7mo agoIt 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 7mo agoYour 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_system_delta_v_map.svg 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 7mo ago> 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoSean 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-agency-will-beat-china-back-moon-rcna229447 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/interim-nasa-head-tells...
- dataflow 7mo agoIsn'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 7mo agooh come on. NASA would never ignore or cover up critical flight safety issues! /s
- elif 7mo agoFortunately, the most likely outcome is another indefinite delay at the last minute.
- impish9208 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoThank you! Like NASA, I hope to up my operational tempo.
- rglover 7mo ago> 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 7mo agoWhy 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 7mo agoStarship explodes
- mrguyorama 7mo agoStarship 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 7mo agoDoes it count as inclusion if we blow up the most gender and race diverse crew in history?
- budman1 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoData 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 7mo agoHow much of this is Trump trying to look good by rushing the program asap?
- throw7 7mo agoEach 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 7mo agoI think if that were the rule, all the program managers would just quit and there would be no manned spaceflight anymore.
- StevenWaterman 7mo ago"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 7mo agoIsn’t any flight into space risky? I doubt that the first flights were safer than this one.
- justinator 7mo ago> 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 7mo agoUm, yeah. Welcome to the 21'st century, did you enjoy your long nap?
- justinator 7mo agoWell 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 7mo agoThey do not, except for some of the avionics.
- justinator 7mo agoThat makes me feel better. This whole project seems pretty lame.
- Melatonic 7mo agoNever thought I would randomly run into Idle Words again but here we are ! And this is definitely concerning stuff
- purpleredrose 7mo agotufte
- gbgarbeb 7mo ago[dead]
- beanjuiceII 7mo agoit doesnt matter, they have to produce some kind of result at this point lets go get em up there
- xnx 7mo agoI guess I'm glad that Kalshi and Polymarket don't seem to have betting pools on launch/return success.
- Vecr 7mo agoRobin Hanson thinks they should. He makes a comparison to the (public company) Morton-Thiokol trading minutes after the shuttle explosion. Insider trading (allowed on future markets) would have let that price move before the explosion.
- dminik 7mo agoThere are a lot of comments here saying something to the effect of "spaceflight is inherently unsafe" or "you can't always guarantee safety." I find this rather concerning. Surely there is a difference between "our engineers did the best they could and the mission has a X% chance of failure" and "management overrode the engineers so they can get a launch in before the program is shuttered."
- cubefox 7mo agoThere is no evidence that "management overrode the engineers".
- wpferrell 6mo agoToo many new things and too fast out the door.
- exabrial 6mo agoThis has aged well.
- OSHAman 6mo agoThe mission has been compromisedfrom the beginning. The entire mission is political, therefore it's management's goal to get it done, and hope it all works out.
- mzqk 6mo agoMore like, Artemis II is not safe to land XD
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]