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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-M

• eru 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    could the government rent out monopoly grants for televised football on the moon in exchange for sponsoring manned space exploration?
    • eru 6mo ago
      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 6mo ago
      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 6mo ago
      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 6mo ago
      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 6mo ago
        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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
      Do you think sociopaths like current 'leader' would change significantly upon such experience? I unfortunately don't share such optimism.
      • bayindirh 6mo ago
        You don't have to be an optimist. You have to try. Trying and seeing what happens is also science, after all.
        • discreteevent 6mo ago
          Scientists don't try everything. First they run it through expert critical review. This candidate wouldn't make it past the theory stage.
        • InsideOutSanta 6mo ago
          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 6mo ago
        The point with the last bit was that they should be put in an unsafe craft.
      • bregma 6mo ago
        "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.
  • cultofmetatron 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
      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 6mo ago
        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 6mo ago
          Well, getting your toes cut off is better than losing your whole foot, yes.
        • bayindirh 6mo ago
          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 6mo ago
            It is my understanding that it always was about „rockets are good for dropping bombs on people“.
            • GTP 6mo ago
  • tikhonj 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
      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-20-years-of-science-aboard-the-international-space-station/ 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 6mo ago
        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 6mo ago
          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.
  • anon291 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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/ https://humanresearchroadmap.nasa.gov/
    • Filligree 6mo ago
      At the rate robots are improving, will that still be the case in ten years?
• aaron695 6mo ago
  [dead]
• Mikhail_K 6mo ago
  > 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/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZzIksrs0jy/edit?pli=1 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...> 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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
      > 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 6mo ago
        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
• HPsquared 6mo ago
  Normalization of deviance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
  • brador 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
      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 6mo ago
  > 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 6mo ago
    I'd prefer if we just wrote off space-x and pretend they don't exist.
    • TheBlight 6mo ago
      Because of your personal politics?
    • randallsquared 6mo ago
      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 6mo ago
        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 6mo ago
          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 6mo ago
• aboardRat4 6mo ago
  >both cases some models were used to justify the decision, with wild extrapolations Happens often. Just look at the climate change discussion.
• cyanydeez 6mo ago
  I don't know any astronauts that push for manned space exploration. Just a few billionaires and dementia patients.
• cucumber3732842 6mo ago
  >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.
  • LorenPechtel 6mo ago
    The shuttle people never looked. That there was blowby where there should be none was known, but nobody dug into why. There was no determination that it wasn't enough to be a problem, just an observation that it hadn't blown the booster up yet. For something with a wide spread in the data points, no way to model the maximum expected values. Once they got serious about looking it didn't take much to reproduce the problem. They built a single joint, mostly filler inside, fuel to model the real thing during ignition. Maybe worked, maybe spot-welded, maybe complete failure. The colder the more likely to fail.