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This 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-art

This 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 ago
for human spaceflight we want a lot more than "likely" (>50%). The standard is usually "extremely likely" (~1/100 to 1/1000 chance of failure)
- irjustin 7mo ago
  1/100 is absolutely terrible. Shuttle had 1.5% failure rate. Bonkers. [edit] For comparison, commercial aviation has something like 1 in 5.8m or 6x 9's of reliability.
  - IshKebab 7mo ago
    It's not terrible for space flight. Flying a rocket to the moon and commercial aviation are obviously very different things.
  - mr_toad 7mo ago
    There have been 412 manned space flights, ever, by anyone, anywhere. A large commercial airport handles many times that number of flights every single day. Worldwide there are a hundred times more flights per day than the number of manned space flights in history. I suspect every model of commercial plane has flown far more flights than all the human rated rockets put together.
- GMoromisato 7mo ago
  Maybe. What was the probability of Loss of Crew during Apollo? There were 9 crewed missions and 1 almost killed its crew (I will omit Apollo 1 for now). I could argue that Apollo had a 1 in 20 chance of killing a crew. Indeed, that was one reason given for cancelling the program. The first Shuttle launch probably had a 1 in 4 chance of killing its crew. It was the first launch of an extremely complicated system and they sent it with a crew of two. Can you imagine NASA doing that today? In a news conference last week, a NASA program manager estimated the Loss of Mission chance for Artemis II at between 1 in 2 and 1 in 50. They said, historically, a new rocket has a 1 in 2 chance of failure, but they learned much from Artemis I, so it's probably better than that. [Of course, that's Loss of Mission instead of Loss of Crew.] My guess is NASA and the astronauts are comfortable with a 1 in 100 chance of Loss of Crew.
  - Someone 7mo ago
    > I could argue that Apollo had a 1 in 20 chance of killing a crew. NASA computed the chance of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth” as less than 1 in 20. I would think a lot more than 1 in 20 of those failures would result in killing crew members. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190002249/downloads/20190002249.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190002249/downloads/20...: “Appreciating and deemphasizing risk in Apollo Joseph Shea, the Apollo program manager, chaired the initial Apollo systems architecting team. The “calculation was made by its architecting team, assuming all elements from propulsion to rendezvous and life support were done as well or better than ever before, that 30 astronauts would be lost before 3 were returned safely to the Earth. Even to do that well, launch vehicle failure rates would have to be half those ever achieved and with untried propulsion systems.” The high risk of the moon landing was understood by the astronauts. Apollo 11's Command Module pilot Mike Collins described it as a “fragile daisy chain of events.” Collins and Neil Armstrong, the first man to step on the moon, rated their chances of survival at 50-50. The awareness of risk let to intense focus on reducing risk. “The only possible explanation for the astonishing success – no losses in space and on time – was that every participant at every level in every area far exceeded the norm of human capabilities.” However, this appreciation of the risk was not considered appropriate for the public. During Apollo, NASA conducted a full Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) to assess the likelihood of success in “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.” The PRA indicated the chance of success was “less than 5 percent.” The NASA Administrator felt that if the results were made public, “the numbers could do irreparable harm.” The PRA effort was cancelled and NASA stayed away from numerical risk assessment as a result.
irjustin 7mo ago
> In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem. Being pedantic, NASA management "ignored" engineers - because money. That said, I 100% agree with you assuming: > “We have full confidence in the Orion spacecraft and its heat shield, grounded in rigorous analysis and the work of exceptional engineers who followed the data throughout the process,” Isaacman said Thursday. I only say assuming not that I don't believe Isaacman, but historically NASA managers have said publicly everything's fine when it wasn't and tried to throw the blame onto engineers. With Challenger, engineers said no-go. With Columbia, engineers had to explicitly state/sign "this is unsafe", which pushes the incentivisation the wrong direction. So, I want to believe him, but historically it hasn't been so great to do so.
- GMoromisato 7mo ago
  There were a lot of mistakes with Challenger and Columbia--I totally agree. But I don't think it was money. It's not like the NASA administrator gets a bonus when a rocket launches (unlike some CEOs, maybe). I think the problem with both Challenger and Columbia was that there were so many possible problems (turbine blade cracks, tiles falling off, etc.) that managers and even engineers got used to off-nominal conditions. This is the "normalization of deviance" that Diane Vaughan talked about. Is that what's going on with the Orion heat shield? I don't think so. I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks and have done the math to convince themselves that this is safe.
  - irjustin 7mo ago
    > It's not like the NASA administrator gets a bonus when a rocket launches It's related to funding. I mean it's always money, right? But in Challenger's case, there was very heavy pressure to launch because of delays and the rising costs. I remember in a documentary they explicitly mentioned there was a backlog of missions and STS-51 had been delayed multiple times. To rollout/fuel, costs a LOT and challenger had been out on the pad for a while. Rollback was a material risk+cost. For columbia, yea less about money. They ignored the requests to repoint spy sats and normalized foam strikes. > I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks and have done the math to convince themselves that this is safe. And that's the way it should be. Everything has a risk value regardless if we calculate it or not. It's never 0... (maybe accidentally going faster than light is though?) We just need to agree what it is and is acceptable. Story time - I was a young engineer at National Instruments and I remember sitting in on a meeting where they were discussing sig figs for their new high precision DMMs. Can we guarantee 6... 7 digits? 7? and they argued that back and forth. No decisions but it really stuck with me. When you're doing bleeding edge work the lines tend to get blurry.
idlewords 7mo ago
If you play a single round of Russian roulette with a revolver, it is likely you will not die, but it is also not safe to do that. The same idea applies here. The foam shedding/impact problem was heavily analyzed throughout the Shuttle program, and recognized as a significant risk. Read the CAIB report for a good history. That report also describes the groupthink dynamic at NASA that made skeptical engineers "come around" for the good of the program in the past. Calling Camarda an outlier is just a different way of stating this problem.
- arppacket 7mo ago
  It looks like they did some worst case testing that was reassuring, so that it isn't Russian roulette? Any comments on that? I suppose their composite testing and temperature projections could also be wrong, and their trajectory changes might not be mitigating enough for the heat shield chunking, but that's a few different things all simultaneously being wrong for a catastrophic failure to occur. The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry. What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.
  - palata 7mo ago
    I think the point of the article is that there is no particular need to send humans in Artemis II. Sure, they made tests. But it's not the same as trying in real conditions. The argument is that if they were able to predict everything with tests before the real flight, then Artemis I wouldn't have had those issues. But we know what happened.
- Grimburger 7mo ago
  Have you bothered to ask the astronauts on board if they want to risk it? You're getting clicks, they're going to the moon and there's a lot of people on Earth who would happily take any tradeoff for that.
trhway 7mo ago
>The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. it doesn't matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_II "It will be the second flight of the Space Launch System (SLS), the first crewed mission of the Orion spacecraft, and the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972." such "second/first" were ok 60 years ago. Today the only reason for that is that the SLS isn't reusable while the cost is hyper-astronomical. Today's tech complexity, engineering culture and overall managerial processes don't allow the first/second to succeed as a rule. Even the best - Space X - has got several failed launches back then for Falcon and now for Starship. Of course we wish success, and it will probably succeed - just like the Russian roulette so aptly mentioned in the sibling comment.
mpweiher 7mo ago
It is easy to reconcile these two statements. The "likely" in "likely ...to land safely" and "likely to work fine" is not nearly good enough.
waterTanuki 7mo ago
> The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe. This take completely ignores Camarda's observations that there is a culture of fear spreading at NASA which punishes whistleblowers. I'm not saying he's 100% correct, but how can you claim such a take is truly balanced if there's a possibility one of the parties is engaging in a cover-up? The engineers at NASA & astronauts aboard Columbia & Challenger also believed the programs were safe.
cubefox 7mo ago
> It's hard for me to reconcile "It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" with "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly", unless maybe getting clicks is involved. Look up the term "expected value". If pressing a button has a 10% chance of destroying Earth, it is both 1) likely that pressing it will do nothing AND 2) the case that pressing it is extremely unsafe.
wolvoleo 7mo ago
In the space shuttle disasters the hardware had at least been used more than once. A huge lot of this one is only tried and tested on paper. And the idea that 'if we throw this much money at it, it really must be fine' I don't buy either. Look at how that worked out for Boeing. For all my feelings about Musk I would much rather step into a rocket that has exploded in all kinds of imaginable situations before so they know how the materials and design actually behave in real world scenarios. I do really think that is the way to go.
- randomNumber7 7mo ago
  > For all my feelings about Musk I would much rather step into a rocket Definitely, but we still have to figure out if Musk is such a genious or NASA is full of retards.
  - wolvoleo 7mo ago
    Neither is true IMO but musk just picked the right development model. Big space never did this because the current megaproject cost plus is just what they want, a blank check. Witn SpaceX Musk was mainly wasting his own money especially in the beginning. So it made sense. It just makes sense, it's not even a 'shortcut'. Ps yes he did get some grants but not beefy unlimited ones.
    - chasd00 7mo ago
      Another thing SpaceX has going for it is when their tests fail everyone just points and laughs at Musk. When a NASA launch fails the taxpayers don't want to pay for it any longer.
      - wolvoleo 7mo ago
        The laughing was at the start, before Falcon 9 made it into orbit. There was very little laughing at the starship RUDs. I think it's pretty clear that this development model is far superior now. Don't forget that big space had a big incentive to paint it as useless, to protect their pork barrel.
AIorNot 7mo ago
As a former NASA guy I would trust Eric Bergers measured and detailed reporting here over that blog post that says they are all going to die As he shows that Olivas changed his mind: “ Olivas told me he had changed his mind, expressing appreciation and admiration for the in-depth engineering work done by the NASA team. He would now fly on Orion” Anyway we live in an age of armchair experts in youtube (who are often very smart but quick to rush to judgment without enough context) The article explains the situation in a more balanced and fair light
- pie_flavor 7mo ago
  How about former NASA engineer Charles Camarda? Linked from the article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZzIksrs0jy/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
  - joak 7mo ago
    I agree, this report from astronaut Camarda should really alarm NASA.
    - AIorNot 7mo ago
      Not really - read the Berger article for more details above -Camarda is older, in his 70s and his attitude overall (based on the reports) reads more like an ego bruise than serious reflection on the engineering problem Obviously concerns should be vetted by the engineering teams involved but it appears they have been addressed to meet the needs of the mission
sgt 7mo ago
>The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry. > What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean. Indeed, this is a much more balanced take. And it turns out that the OP armchair expert is assuming NASA doesn't know what they are doing or is negligent.
- pie_flavor 7mo ago
  The OP links a document from former astronaut Charles Camarda, who NASA explicitly invited in to check their work, and who observed the press conference the Ars article comes from. He addresses every point in it, including that one. Just because an article is contrary to a strident opinion doesn't make it 'balanced'. It matters whether the actual facts are true or not. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZzIksrs0jy/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
  - joak 7mo ago
    This report from astronaut Camarda is indeed a bomb. Scaring.
- Eisenstein 7mo ago
  I mean, it isn't like there are not multiple precedents for NASA to find a surprise safety issue, talk it down, and then see it literally blow up in their faces. NASA is an institution and the incentives align with launching despite risk in cases where the risk was completely unanticipated. The project has its own momentum that it has gathered over time as it rolls down collecting opportunity costs and people tie themselves to it. If you think an astronaut would pull out of a launch because of a 5% risk of catastrophe... well you are talking about a group of people which originated from test pilot programs post-WWII where chances of blowing up with the gear was much much higher, so even though modern astronauts don't have the same direct experience, it isn't beyond reason to assume they inherent at least a bit of that bravado.
quasistasis 7mo ago
Camarda isnt an outlier. Lots of people left that project after the Experimental Flight Test, which was done with the honeycomb (making Avcoat truly Avcoat) in 2014. Without Avcoat, spalling was inevitable and breakoff, oh yeah. The design change by LM, not commentedkn by Textron is like. a beehive with no honeycomb-a crystallized block of honey. i'll take the structural support of honeycomb any day. It's a normalization of deviance. That is what Charlie is bringing voice to. Many of us fear reprisals and even when talking to heads of, like with Columbia, we are ignored. So, Charlie is a voice of many people, not an outlier.
mikkupikku 7mo ago
> In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem. False on both counts. Both the SRB joint design issue and the foam shedding were known, researched and dismissed very early in the shuttle program. They suspected it after STS-1 and confirmed it within a few flights.
- LorenPechtel 7mo ago
  No. They were noted, the fact that they didn't destroy the vehicle was taken as evidence they wouldn't destroy the vehicle. Neither received any real scrutiny.
eqvinox 7mo ago
TFA is ridiculous with its stance. Yeah, there's this aspect of the design they can't test in their labs. It might even be an important aspect. But safety isn't a boolean "safe"/"not safe", it's a risk assessment, and I'm quite sure there are 100 (or 10000) other things they didn't test for. As long as they're taking all of this into their risk calculations… it's fine. And if it doesn't blow up due to heat shield failure, TFA (and its references) will be forgotten. And if it does blow up due to heat shield failure, TFA (and its references) can suddenly claim prescience, all the while this is one of thousands of factors that went into the risk assessment. If one really wanted to claim prescience, it'd need to be a ranking of a sufficient number of failure modes. To illustrate the problem: I hereby claim they will have a "toilet failure". Now if they actually have one, I'll claim `m4d ch0pz` in rocket engineering. (P.S.: it's a joke but toilet failures on spacecraft are actually a serious problem, if it really happens… shit needs to go somewhere…)
- gus_massa 7mo ago
  > And if it doesn't blow up due to heat shield failure, TFA (and its references) will be forgotten. The HN hivemind will remember, he's a well known user with a well known site. Let's hope there is no accident, but after the landing there will be reports anyway. We will take a look at the report of the shield and see if it shows a problem in spite it didn't explode, and compare with the prediction in the article. He may even write another article after the fly. For comparison, I remember the Feynman appendix. One important detail was that Nasa said the the probability of accidents was 1/100000, but he concluded that it was closer to 1/100. Nobody expect to fly a hundred Artemis missions to get a good statistic. Even if the current version explosion rate is super high like 1/10, then you can probably fry a few missions without problems if you cross your fingers hard enough.
  - eqvinox 7mo ago
    I'm not super happy with the pattern of thinking in these numbers; arguing 1/100000 vs 1/100 for "accidents" is again a boolean thing. They probably had a very specific definition, which does make this viable, but we don't have that definition here. So the numbers are meaningless to us. And not having that definition, "accidents" is a sliding scale… e.g. I'm pretty sure astronauts injured themselves banging various bodyparts against various parts of the spaceship. That's technically an accident. And in this concrete example — the heat shield isn't boolean either. I don't know how steep the gradient between pass and fail is, but it certainly exists, and it's possible they come back successfully but with it singed significantly outside expected parameters. (Even "less than expected" would indicate a problem here IMHO.) That does mean it's not necessarily a question of having enough boolean datapoints.
cmsefton 7mo ago
Minor nitpick: OP didn't say "maybe very likely". He said "hopefully very likely". They are, in my mind, different things.
Arodex 7mo ago
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deleted 7mo ago
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oefrha 7mo ago
That “balanced take” severely mischaracterizes dissenting expert Camarda’s attitude, so it’s not balanced at all. Its answer to “Could the NASA engineers convince Olivas and Camarda?” is a “maybe” for Camarda, which couldn’t be further from what Camarda had to say himself, which is he was more concerned after the meeting than before. From Camarda’s own account after the meeting: > Hold a “transparent” meeting with invited press to “vet” the Artemis II decision with one of the most public technical dissenters, me, in attendance (Jan 8th, 2026). > Control the one-sided narrative and bombard the attendees with the Artemis Program view > Do not allow dissenting voices to present at the meeting > Do not even allow the IRT or the NESC to present their findings > Rely on the attending journalists to regurgitate the party line and witness the overwhelming consensus of knowledgeable people The whole thing is a good read https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZzIksrs0jy/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz... Characterizing someone being (slightly?) more diplomatic as “maybe convinced” is shameful.
antonio0720 7mo ago
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vannevar 7mo ago
All of the controversy over the heat shield is obscuring the much bigger safety issue: Artemis has had only a single unmanned test flight. By contrast, the Saturn launch system had seven successful unmanned tests before being trusted with a crew, including two unmanned flights of the complete Saturn V stack. And even then, three astronauts were lost during ground testing of the crew capsule due to a critical design flaw. Artemis's closest modern counterpart, the SpaceX Starship, has had 11 test flights, several of which resulted in loss of the vehicle. There is no reason to believe that Artemis has a significantly higher reliability rate than Starship or Saturn V. Even without the heat shield controversy, this is the most dangerous mission NASA has launched since the first flight of the Space Shuttle.
- chasd00 7mo ago
  > Artemis's closest modern counterpart, the SpaceX Starship, has had 11 test flights, several of which resulted in loss of the vehicle. I don't think you can compare the two. Starship's risks are so high failure is almost the expected outcome, it's a trial and error based process. Starship and Artemis is an apples/oranges comparison with respect to how the programs approach risk tolerance.
  - vannevar 7mo ago
    Until Artemis actually flies a comparable number of missions, any advantage in reliability is pure speculation. Which is not a good way to approach crewed spaceflight. I don't think the two programs are as different as you think, prospectively: both take great care to ensure that their vehicles don't fail. Starships may be cheaper than the SLS, but they're still very expensive. SpaceX doesn't go into a flight expecting to lose a vehicle. The difference in culture is more in the reaction to failure. As a private company, SpaceX moves very quickly in the wake of failure, whereas NASA has in recent decades become much more cautious once a failure has occurred. And while you say SpaceX is more tolerant of risk, I would note that they've never flown a crew on a launch vehicle that had only one previous unmanned launch. Falcon 9 had 85 unmanned launches before there was a crew aboard. And they expect to launch 100 unmanned Starships before they fly one with a crew. Now which program seems the more risk tolerant?
cryptonector 7mo ago
Absolutely not. I will not even consider the word of an organization that has repeatedly failed to learn from its past mistakes. They need to demonstrate an ability to learn first, and to do so they need to take these concerns seriously. That means no astronauts on Artemis II.
randomNumber7 7mo ago
> In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem. Problems with the O-Rings had been known and on the morning before the challenger launched the engineers begged management to delay the launch.
gbgarbeb 7mo ago
They have analyzed the problem with 1D non-coupled models that are so poorly matched to reality they would receive an F in a high school science class. They are YOLOing it. It is insulting that clowns like yourself continue to cover for them. NASA lowers its standards every time an accident happens. When they designed Shuttle, they intended for a failure rate of 1 in 10,000 or thereabouts. Remember, it was meant to fly dozens of times per year. At the real failure rate, we would have lost dozens of Shuttles by now. The public would have shut NASA down in protest for massacring astronauts. Good job moving the goalposts. > They just slink away, and then when the next event happens, they cry wolf again. When they happen to be right 2 of ~130 times, they get to say "see I told you so!" and go on speaking tours about how they figured it out but NASA wouldn't listen, say they should be considered for a leadership position in NASA etc. NASA does not have a single model that accurately predicts the heatshield damage. They are lying about this fact and crossing their fingers that all is okay. That might work in SWE's little AWS and GCP world, it doesn't work during hypersonic reentry. IOW they are gambling. If you have a college degree, especially one that taught statistics, put it in a shredder and remove it from your CV. This is embarrassing.
- NewsaHackO 7mo ago
  The issue with arguments like this is that people who make the claim "it's not safe!" never feel the negative consequences when everything goes to plan. They just slink away, and then when the next event happens, they cry wolf again. When they happen to be right 2 of ~130 times, they get to say "see I told you so!" and go on speaking tours about how they figured it out but NASA wouldn't listen, say they should be considered for a leadership position in NASA etc. To the people who think they are YOLO'ing it and that disaster is inevitable, they should be willing to actually put something on the line (promising never to talk about the topic again, money, etc.) and have some skin in the game. Otherwise, such claims are worthless.
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- NewsaHackO 7mo ago
  You seem to have ignored an important statement in your reply. Will you be willing to put $20,000 on a bet whether or not the Artemis will have a catastrophic failure? Or willing to record a statement and release it on all of your social media if the Artemis does not have a catastrophic failure? It is extremely easy to sit on the sidelines at home and say to delay everything because something may go wrong, and you will actually be right, because eventually something always goes wrong occasionally. But the people who actually get work done have to make decisions.
aeternum 7mo ago
It's kind of sad that we've become so risk averse. Risks should be fully disclosed but let the adventurers adventure. Would Columbus' ship ever have been allowed to sail in the modern day? Proximity wingsuit flying and free-climbing is legal and people choose to do it even though the probability of death is extremely high. Spaceflight is significantly safer and far more beneficial to humanity, yet we block it. No one counts the lives lost due to slowing scientific progress but we should. How much further behind would we be scientifically if Darwin hadn't ventured out on the Beagle due to endless safety reviews. Would the US be what it is today if Lewis and Clark had to prove to congress that the trip was safe? Given the opportunity, many of us would choose to die as part of a grand adventure in service to humanity vs. wither away of old age.
- Analemma_ 7mo ago
  I wish I could downvote this comment more than once. It's incredibly ghoulish to use the perfectly-sensible argument that modern culture is too risk-averse to handwave away known critical safety problems. Those two things are completely orthogonal. Yes, astronauts should be willing to accept that there are "unknown unknowns" and that they will be facing some amount of unquantifiable risk, and they should be celebrated for this. That does not, not at all, mean that when a mission comes back with heat shield failures we know should not have happened, and multiple Inspector-General reports say the ship is not safe, those concerns should be blown off with rambling about Charles Darwin. That's pure insanity. Or to put it another way, if you were the manager on the day of the Challenger launch issuing the "go" command over the objections of the Thiokol engineers saying it was unsafe to launch in below-freezing temperatures, would you have done so with paeans to Christopher Columbus? That's the sense I get from your post.
  - aeternum 7mo ago
    >Camarda is an outlier. The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe. Former astronaut Danny Olivas was initially skeptical of the heat shield but came around. How do you explain so many people believing it is safe? The problem is risks are far too easy to brainstorm, anyone can come up with endless risks that it takes endless time to mitigate. If I were the manager for challenger, I would have run the o-ring experiment as soon as it was brought up as a concern. Put the fuel pumps in a freezer, test if they leak. Feynman famously demonstrated it with a glass of icewater. Experiment is what separates made up risks from real risks, I would have definitely told the engineers to take a hike and would have hit launch if they couldn't provide experimental evidence of o-ring failure in cold temps. (Spoiler alert: in that case they easily could have)

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 ago

for human spaceflight we want a lot more than "likely" (>50%). The standard is usually "extremely likely" (~1/100 to 1/1000 chance of failure)

irjustin 7mo ago
1/100 is absolutely terrible. Shuttle had 1.5% failure rate. Bonkers. [edit] For comparison, commercial aviation has something like 1 in 5.8m or 6x 9's of reliability.
- IshKebab 7mo ago
  It's not terrible for space flight. Flying a rocket to the moon and commercial aviation are obviously very different things.
- mr_toad 7mo ago
  There have been 412 manned space flights, ever, by anyone, anywhere. A large commercial airport handles many times that number of flights every single day. Worldwide there are a hundred times more flights per day than the number of manned space flights in history. I suspect every model of commercial plane has flown far more flights than all the human rated rockets put together.
GMoromisato 7mo ago
Maybe. What was the probability of Loss of Crew during Apollo? There were 9 crewed missions and 1 almost killed its crew (I will omit Apollo 1 for now). I could argue that Apollo had a 1 in 20 chance of killing a crew. Indeed, that was one reason given for cancelling the program. The first Shuttle launch probably had a 1 in 4 chance of killing its crew. It was the first launch of an extremely complicated system and they sent it with a crew of two. Can you imagine NASA doing that today? In a news conference last week, a NASA program manager estimated the Loss of Mission chance for Artemis II at between 1 in 2 and 1 in 50. They said, historically, a new rocket has a 1 in 2 chance of failure, but they learned much from Artemis I, so it's probably better than that. [Of course, that's Loss of Mission instead of Loss of Crew.] My guess is NASA and the astronauts are comfortable with a 1 in 100 chance of Loss of Crew.
- Someone 7mo ago
  > I could argue that Apollo had a 1 in 20 chance of killing a crew. NASA computed the chance of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth” as less than 1 in 20. I would think a lot more than 1 in 20 of those failures would result in killing crew members. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190002249/downloads/20190002249.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190002249/downloads/20...: “Appreciating and deemphasizing risk in Apollo Joseph Shea, the Apollo program manager, chaired the initial Apollo systems architecting team. The “calculation was made by its architecting team, assuming all elements from propulsion to rendezvous and life support were done as well or better than ever before, that 30 astronauts would be lost before 3 were returned safely to the Earth. Even to do that well, launch vehicle failure rates would have to be half those ever achieved and with untried propulsion systems.” The high risk of the moon landing was understood by the astronauts. Apollo 11's Command Module pilot Mike Collins described it as a “fragile daisy chain of events.” Collins and Neil Armstrong, the first man to step on the moon, rated their chances of survival at 50-50. The awareness of risk let to intense focus on reducing risk. “The only possible explanation for the astonishing success – no losses in space and on time – was that every participant at every level in every area far exceeded the norm of human capabilities.” However, this appreciation of the risk was not considered appropriate for the public. During Apollo, NASA conducted a full Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) to assess the likelihood of success in “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.” The PRA indicated the chance of success was “less than 5 percent.” The NASA Administrator felt that if the results were made public, “the numbers could do irreparable harm.” The PRA effort was cancelled and NASA stayed away from numerical risk assessment as a result.

irjustin 7mo ago

> In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem. Being pedantic, NASA management "ignored" engineers - because money. That said, I 100% agree with you assuming: > “We have full confidence in the Orion spacecraft and its heat shield, grounded in rigorous analysis and the work of exceptional engineers who followed the data throughout the process,” Isaacman said Thursday. I only say assuming not that I don't believe Isaacman, but historically NASA managers have said publicly everything's fine when it wasn't and tried to throw the blame onto engineers. With Challenger, engineers said no-go. With Columbia, engineers had to explicitly state/sign "this is unsafe", which pushes the incentivisation the wrong direction. So, I want to believe him, but historically it hasn't been so great to do so.

GMoromisato 7mo ago
There were a lot of mistakes with Challenger and Columbia--I totally agree. But I don't think it was money. It's not like the NASA administrator gets a bonus when a rocket launches (unlike some CEOs, maybe). I think the problem with both Challenger and Columbia was that there were so many possible problems (turbine blade cracks, tiles falling off, etc.) that managers and even engineers got used to off-nominal conditions. This is the "normalization of deviance" that Diane Vaughan talked about. Is that what's going on with the Orion heat shield? I don't think so. I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks and have done the math to convince themselves that this is safe.
- irjustin 7mo ago
  > It's not like the NASA administrator gets a bonus when a rocket launches It's related to funding. I mean it's always money, right? But in Challenger's case, there was very heavy pressure to launch because of delays and the rising costs. I remember in a documentary they explicitly mentioned there was a backlog of missions and STS-51 had been delayed multiple times. To rollout/fuel, costs a LOT and challenger had been out on the pad for a while. Rollback was a material risk+cost. For columbia, yea less about money. They ignored the requests to repoint spy sats and normalized foam strikes. > I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks and have done the math to convince themselves that this is safe. And that's the way it should be. Everything has a risk value regardless if we calculate it or not. It's never 0... (maybe accidentally going faster than light is though?) We just need to agree what it is and is acceptable. Story time - I was a young engineer at National Instruments and I remember sitting in on a meeting where they were discussing sig figs for their new high precision DMMs. Can we guarantee 6... 7 digits? 7? and they argued that back and forth. No decisions but it really stuck with me. When you're doing bleeding edge work the lines tend to get blurry.

idlewords 7mo ago

If you play a single round of Russian roulette with a revolver, it is likely you will not die, but it is also not safe to do that. The same idea applies here. The foam shedding/impact problem was heavily analyzed throughout the Shuttle program, and recognized as a significant risk. Read the CAIB report for a good history. That report also describes the groupthink dynamic at NASA that made skeptical engineers "come around" for the good of the program in the past. Calling Camarda an outlier is just a different way of stating this problem.

arppacket 7mo ago
It looks like they did some worst case testing that was reassuring, so that it isn't Russian roulette? Any comments on that? I suppose their composite testing and temperature projections could also be wrong, and their trajectory changes might not be mitigating enough for the heat shield chunking, but that's a few different things all simultaneously being wrong for a catastrophic failure to occur. The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry. What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.
- palata 7mo ago
  I think the point of the article is that there is no particular need to send humans in Artemis II. Sure, they made tests. But it's not the same as trying in real conditions. The argument is that if they were able to predict everything with tests before the real flight, then Artemis I wouldn't have had those issues. But we know what happened.
Grimburger 7mo ago
Have you bothered to ask the astronauts on board if they want to risk it? You're getting clicks, they're going to the moon and there's a lot of people on Earth who would happily take any tradeoff for that.

trhway 7mo ago

>The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. it doesn't matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_II "It will be the second flight of the Space Launch System (SLS), the first crewed mission of the Orion spacecraft, and the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972." such "second/first" were ok 60 years ago. Today the only reason for that is that the SLS isn't reusable while the cost is hyper-astronomical. Today's tech complexity, engineering culture and overall managerial processes don't allow the first/second to succeed as a rule. Even the best - Space X - has got several failed launches back then for Falcon and now for Starship. Of course we wish success, and it will probably succeed - just like the Russian roulette so aptly mentioned in the sibling comment.

mpweiher 7mo ago

It is easy to reconcile these two statements. The "likely" in "likely ...to land safely" and "likely to work fine" is not nearly good enough.

waterTanuki 7mo ago

> The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe. This take completely ignores Camarda's observations that there is a culture of fear spreading at NASA which punishes whistleblowers. I'm not saying he's 100% correct, but how can you claim such a take is truly balanced if there's a possibility one of the parties is engaging in a cover-up? The engineers at NASA & astronauts aboard Columbia & Challenger also believed the programs were safe.

cubefox 7mo ago

> It's hard for me to reconcile "It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" with "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly", unless maybe getting clicks is involved. Look up the term "expected value". If pressing a button has a 10% chance of destroying Earth, it is both 1) likely that pressing it will do nothing AND 2) the case that pressing it is extremely unsafe.

wolvoleo 7mo ago

In the space shuttle disasters the hardware had at least been used more than once. A huge lot of this one is only tried and tested on paper. And the idea that 'if we throw this much money at it, it really must be fine' I don't buy either. Look at how that worked out for Boeing. For all my feelings about Musk I would much rather step into a rocket that has exploded in all kinds of imaginable situations before so they know how the materials and design actually behave in real world scenarios. I do really think that is the way to go.

randomNumber7 7mo ago
> For all my feelings about Musk I would much rather step into a rocket Definitely, but we still have to figure out if Musk is such a genious or NASA is full of retards.
- wolvoleo 7mo ago
  Neither is true IMO but musk just picked the right development model. Big space never did this because the current megaproject cost plus is just what they want, a blank check. Witn SpaceX Musk was mainly wasting his own money especially in the beginning. So it made sense. It just makes sense, it's not even a 'shortcut'. Ps yes he did get some grants but not beefy unlimited ones.
  - chasd00 7mo ago
    Another thing SpaceX has going for it is when their tests fail everyone just points and laughs at Musk. When a NASA launch fails the taxpayers don't want to pay for it any longer.
    - wolvoleo 7mo ago
      The laughing was at the start, before Falcon 9 made it into orbit. There was very little laughing at the starship RUDs. I think it's pretty clear that this development model is far superior now. Don't forget that big space had a big incentive to paint it as useless, to protect their pork barrel.

AIorNot 7mo ago

As a former NASA guy I would trust Eric Bergers measured and detailed reporting here over that blog post that says they are all going to die As he shows that Olivas changed his mind: “ Olivas told me he had changed his mind, expressing appreciation and admiration for the in-depth engineering work done by the NASA team. He would now fly on Orion” Anyway we live in an age of armchair experts in youtube (who are often very smart but quick to rush to judgment without enough context) The article explains the situation in a more balanced and fair light

pie_flavor 7mo ago
How about former NASA engineer Charles Camarda? Linked from the article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZzIksrs0jy/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
- joak 7mo ago
  I agree, this report from astronaut Camarda should really alarm NASA.
  - AIorNot 7mo ago
    Not really - read the Berger article for more details above -Camarda is older, in his 70s and his attitude overall (based on the reports) reads more like an ego bruise than serious reflection on the engineering problem Obviously concerns should be vetted by the engineering teams involved but it appears they have been addressed to meet the needs of the mission

sgt 7mo ago

>The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry. > What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean. Indeed, this is a much more balanced take. And it turns out that the OP armchair expert is assuming NASA doesn't know what they are doing or is negligent.

pie_flavor 7mo ago
The OP links a document from former astronaut Charles Camarda, who NASA explicitly invited in to check their work, and who observed the press conference the Ars article comes from. He addresses every point in it, including that one. Just because an article is contrary to a strident opinion doesn't make it 'balanced'. It matters whether the actual facts are true or not. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZzIksrs0jy/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
- joak 7mo ago
  This report from astronaut Camarda is indeed a bomb. Scaring.
Eisenstein 7mo ago
I mean, it isn't like there are not multiple precedents for NASA to find a surprise safety issue, talk it down, and then see it literally blow up in their faces. NASA is an institution and the incentives align with launching despite risk in cases where the risk was completely unanticipated. The project has its own momentum that it has gathered over time as it rolls down collecting opportunity costs and people tie themselves to it. If you think an astronaut would pull out of a launch because of a 5% risk of catastrophe... well you are talking about a group of people which originated from test pilot programs post-WWII where chances of blowing up with the gear was much much higher, so even though modern astronauts don't have the same direct experience, it isn't beyond reason to assume they inherent at least a bit of that bravado.

quasistasis 7mo ago

Camarda isnt an outlier. Lots of people left that project after the Experimental Flight Test, which was done with the honeycomb (making Avcoat truly Avcoat) in 2014. Without Avcoat, spalling was inevitable and breakoff, oh yeah. The design change by LM, not commentedkn by Textron is like. a beehive with no honeycomb-a crystallized block of honey. i'll take the structural support of honeycomb any day. It's a normalization of deviance. That is what Charlie is bringing voice to. Many of us fear reprisals and even when talking to heads of, like with Columbia, we are ignored. So, Charlie is a voice of many people, not an outlier.

mikkupikku 7mo ago

> In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem. False on both counts. Both the SRB joint design issue and the foam shedding were known, researched and dismissed very early in the shuttle program. They suspected it after STS-1 and confirmed it within a few flights.

LorenPechtel 7mo ago
No. They were noted, the fact that they didn't destroy the vehicle was taken as evidence they wouldn't destroy the vehicle. Neither received any real scrutiny.

eqvinox 7mo ago

TFA is ridiculous with its stance. Yeah, there's this aspect of the design they can't test in their labs. It might even be an important aspect. But safety isn't a boolean "safe"/"not safe", it's a risk assessment, and I'm quite sure there are 100 (or 10000) other things they didn't test for. As long as they're taking all of this into their risk calculations… it's fine. And if it doesn't blow up due to heat shield failure, TFA (and its references) will be forgotten. And if it does blow up due to heat shield failure, TFA (and its references) can suddenly claim prescience, all the while this is one of thousands of factors that went into the risk assessment. If one really wanted to claim prescience, it'd need to be a ranking of a sufficient number of failure modes. To illustrate the problem: I hereby claim they will have a "toilet failure". Now if they actually have one, I'll claim `m4d ch0pz` in rocket engineering. (P.S.: it's a joke but toilet failures on spacecraft are actually a serious problem, if it really happens… shit needs to go somewhere…)

gus_massa 7mo ago
> And if it doesn't blow up due to heat shield failure, TFA (and its references) will be forgotten. The HN hivemind will remember, he's a well known user with a well known site. Let's hope there is no accident, but after the landing there will be reports anyway. We will take a look at the report of the shield and see if it shows a problem in spite it didn't explode, and compare with the prediction in the article. He may even write another article after the fly. For comparison, I remember the Feynman appendix. One important detail was that Nasa said the the probability of accidents was 1/100000, but he concluded that it was closer to 1/100. Nobody expect to fly a hundred Artemis missions to get a good statistic. Even if the current version explosion rate is super high like 1/10, then you can probably fry a few missions without problems if you cross your fingers hard enough.
- eqvinox 7mo ago
  I'm not super happy with the pattern of thinking in these numbers; arguing 1/100000 vs 1/100 for "accidents" is again a boolean thing. They probably had a very specific definition, which does make this viable, but we don't have that definition here. So the numbers are meaningless to us. And not having that definition, "accidents" is a sliding scale… e.g. I'm pretty sure astronauts injured themselves banging various bodyparts against various parts of the spaceship. That's technically an accident. And in this concrete example — the heat shield isn't boolean either. I don't know how steep the gradient between pass and fail is, but it certainly exists, and it's possible they come back successfully but with it singed significantly outside expected parameters. (Even "less than expected" would indicate a problem here IMHO.) That does mean it's not necessarily a question of having enough boolean datapoints.

cmsefton 7mo ago

Minor nitpick: OP didn't say "maybe very likely". He said "hopefully very likely". They are, in my mind, different things.

Arodex 7mo ago

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deleted 7mo ago

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oefrha 7mo ago

That “balanced take” severely mischaracterizes dissenting expert Camarda’s attitude, so it’s not balanced at all. Its answer to “Could the NASA engineers convince Olivas and Camarda?” is a “maybe” for Camarda, which couldn’t be further from what Camarda had to say himself, which is he was more concerned after the meeting than before. From Camarda’s own account after the meeting: > Hold a “transparent” meeting with invited press to “vet” the Artemis II decision with one of the most public technical dissenters, me, in attendance (Jan 8th, 2026). > Control the one-sided narrative and bombard the attendees with the Artemis Program view > Do not allow dissenting voices to present at the meeting > Do not even allow the IRT or the NESC to present their findings > Rely on the attending journalists to regurgitate the party line and witness the overwhelming consensus of knowledgeable people The whole thing is a good read https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZzIksrs0jy/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz... Characterizing someone being (slightly?) more diplomatic as “maybe convinced” is shameful.

antonio0720 7mo ago

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vannevar 7mo ago

All of the controversy over the heat shield is obscuring the much bigger safety issue: Artemis has had only a single unmanned test flight. By contrast, the Saturn launch system had seven successful unmanned tests before being trusted with a crew, including two unmanned flights of the complete Saturn V stack. And even then, three astronauts were lost during ground testing of the crew capsule due to a critical design flaw. Artemis's closest modern counterpart, the SpaceX Starship, has had 11 test flights, several of which resulted in loss of the vehicle. There is no reason to believe that Artemis has a significantly higher reliability rate than Starship or Saturn V. Even without the heat shield controversy, this is the most dangerous mission NASA has launched since the first flight of the Space Shuttle.

chasd00 7mo ago
> Artemis's closest modern counterpart, the SpaceX Starship, has had 11 test flights, several of which resulted in loss of the vehicle. I don't think you can compare the two. Starship's risks are so high failure is almost the expected outcome, it's a trial and error based process. Starship and Artemis is an apples/oranges comparison with respect to how the programs approach risk tolerance.
- vannevar 7mo ago
  Until Artemis actually flies a comparable number of missions, any advantage in reliability is pure speculation. Which is not a good way to approach crewed spaceflight. I don't think the two programs are as different as you think, prospectively: both take great care to ensure that their vehicles don't fail. Starships may be cheaper than the SLS, but they're still very expensive. SpaceX doesn't go into a flight expecting to lose a vehicle. The difference in culture is more in the reaction to failure. As a private company, SpaceX moves very quickly in the wake of failure, whereas NASA has in recent decades become much more cautious once a failure has occurred. And while you say SpaceX is more tolerant of risk, I would note that they've never flown a crew on a launch vehicle that had only one previous unmanned launch. Falcon 9 had 85 unmanned launches before there was a crew aboard. And they expect to launch 100 unmanned Starships before they fly one with a crew. Now which program seems the more risk tolerant?

cryptonector 7mo ago

Absolutely not. I will not even consider the word of an organization that has repeatedly failed to learn from its past mistakes. They need to demonstrate an ability to learn first, and to do so they need to take these concerns seriously. That means no astronauts on Artemis II.

randomNumber7 7mo ago

> In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem. Problems with the O-Rings had been known and on the morning before the challenger launched the engineers begged management to delay the launch.

gbgarbeb 7mo ago

They have analyzed the problem with 1D non-coupled models that are so poorly matched to reality they would receive an F in a high school science class. They are YOLOing it. It is insulting that clowns like yourself continue to cover for them. NASA lowers its standards every time an accident happens. When they designed Shuttle, they intended for a failure rate of 1 in 10,000 or thereabouts. Remember, it was meant to fly dozens of times per year. At the real failure rate, we would have lost dozens of Shuttles by now. The public would have shut NASA down in protest for massacring astronauts. Good job moving the goalposts. > They just slink away, and then when the next event happens, they cry wolf again. When they happen to be right 2 of ~130 times, they get to say "see I told you so!" and go on speaking tours about how they figured it out but NASA wouldn't listen, say they should be considered for a leadership position in NASA etc. NASA does not have a single model that accurately predicts the heatshield damage. They are lying about this fact and crossing their fingers that all is okay. That might work in SWE's little AWS and GCP world, it doesn't work during hypersonic reentry. IOW they are gambling. If you have a college degree, especially one that taught statistics, put it in a shredder and remove it from your CV. This is embarrassing.

NewsaHackO 7mo ago
The issue with arguments like this is that people who make the claim "it's not safe!" never feel the negative consequences when everything goes to plan. They just slink away, and then when the next event happens, they cry wolf again. When they happen to be right 2 of ~130 times, they get to say "see I told you so!" and go on speaking tours about how they figured it out but NASA wouldn't listen, say they should be considered for a leadership position in NASA etc. To the people who think they are YOLO'ing it and that disaster is inevitable, they should be willing to actually put something on the line (promising never to talk about the topic again, money, etc.) and have some skin in the game. Otherwise, such claims are worthless.
- deleted 7mo ago
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NewsaHackO 7mo ago
You seem to have ignored an important statement in your reply. Will you be willing to put $20,000 on a bet whether or not the Artemis will have a catastrophic failure? Or willing to record a statement and release it on all of your social media if the Artemis does not have a catastrophic failure? It is extremely easy to sit on the sidelines at home and say to delay everything because something may go wrong, and you will actually be right, because eventually something always goes wrong occasionally. But the people who actually get work done have to make decisions.

aeternum 7mo ago

It's kind of sad that we've become so risk averse. Risks should be fully disclosed but let the adventurers adventure. Would Columbus' ship ever have been allowed to sail in the modern day? Proximity wingsuit flying and free-climbing is legal and people choose to do it even though the probability of death is extremely high. Spaceflight is significantly safer and far more beneficial to humanity, yet we block it. No one counts the lives lost due to slowing scientific progress but we should. How much further behind would we be scientifically if Darwin hadn't ventured out on the Beagle due to endless safety reviews. Would the US be what it is today if Lewis and Clark had to prove to congress that the trip was safe? Given the opportunity, many of us would choose to die as part of a grand adventure in service to humanity vs. wither away of old age.

Analemma_ 7mo ago
I wish I could downvote this comment more than once. It's incredibly ghoulish to use the perfectly-sensible argument that modern culture is too risk-averse to handwave away known critical safety problems. Those two things are completely orthogonal. Yes, astronauts should be willing to accept that there are "unknown unknowns" and that they will be facing some amount of unquantifiable risk, and they should be celebrated for this. That does not, not at all, mean that when a mission comes back with heat shield failures we know should not have happened, and multiple Inspector-General reports say the ship is not safe, those concerns should be blown off with rambling about Charles Darwin. That's pure insanity. Or to put it another way, if you were the manager on the day of the Challenger launch issuing the "go" command over the objections of the Thiokol engineers saying it was unsafe to launch in below-freezing temperatures, would you have done so with paeans to Christopher Columbus? That's the sense I get from your post.
- aeternum 7mo ago
  >Camarda is an outlier. The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe. Former astronaut Danny Olivas was initially skeptical of the heat shield but came around. How do you explain so many people believing it is safe? The problem is risks are far too easy to brainstorm, anyone can come up with endless risks that it takes endless time to mitigate. If I were the manager for challenger, I would have run the o-ring experiment as soon as it was brought up as a concern. Put the fuel pumps in a freezer, test if they leak. Feynman famously demonstrated it with a glass of icewater. Experiment is what separates made up risks from real risks, I would have definitely told the engineers to take a hike and would have hit launch if they couldn't provide experimental evidence of o-ring failure in cold temps. (Spoiler alert: in that case they easily could have)