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> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. This seems insane to me. That X decades later we accept, with all our advancements in tech, a weaker syste
by irjustin 6mo ago
> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30.
This seems insane to me. That X decades later we accept, with all our advancements in tech, a weaker system than ever before. That if we send 30 people we _accept_ that one is possible to die.
That's the starting point? That's what we document as acceptable?
- spullara 6mo agooverall construction in the US had a measured death rate of 1 in 1000 people in 2023. i think we can accept far higher rate for space travel.
- 627467 6mo ago> That X decades later we accept, with all our advancements in tech, a weaker system than ever before how do you keep past performance while stop performing it for XY decades?
- HWR_14 6mo agoA lot of advancement is multipurpose. CNCs are more accurate than machinists, computers are faster. And we have a lot of the technical knowledge written down.
- 627467 6mo agoMachinist never stopped working even after advanced CNCs proliferated. Humans had records of how things were made and yet new generations had to relearn it - and fail in the process. This mission is not about sending stuff out to deep space. Its about sending out new generation of humans to deep space. Even if you could guarantee that these new humans have exact same experience of past humans, can we guarantee that past decades simulations or theoretical knowledge acquired - while NOT actually doing something - will effectively reduce the chances of mortality?
- atherton94027 6mo agoThis was the farthest humans ever travelled from earth, even farther than apollo 13. Intuitively the farther you go the higher the risks are
- rvnx 6mo agoThey could go twice the same distance, the risk would be roughly the same at that point. It's mostly the complexity and changes that make it more risky once the initial trajectory is in place.
- slow_typist 6mo agoYou need a lot more impulse and more fuel to go twice as far. Probably more correction burns. A longer final burn before entering the atmosphere. So the risk of loosing the engine is much higher and probably increasing more than linear with burn time/change of impulse.
- WalterBright 6mo agoLanding on the moon is enormously riskier than simply going further out.
- atherton94027 6mo agoI'm answering the claim about Artemis being more dangerous than the space shuttle. Obviously landing on the moon is a lot riskier.
- areoform 6mo agoYes, and the memories of Apollo are made rosy by hagiography. I even wrote an entire thing to explain why, https://1517.substack.com/p/1-in-30-artemis-greatness-and-risk https://1517.substack.com/p/1-in-30-artemis-greatness-and-ri... (yeah, shameless plug, sorry - it's more for the citations than not. You can read the standards and reports I've linked to) But if I'm allowed to repeat myself from elsewhere in the thread and the meat of the above thing, It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" due to the distances and energies involved. Even with the Commercial Cargo and Crew Program (C3P), NASA has set the acceptable mortality threshold at 1 in 270 over the entire mission and 1 in 1000 on ascent / descent. If they could set it higher by gaming the math, they would. They can't. We're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. And no, Apollo wasn't much better either, at least 10 astronauts were killed in training or burned alive, as well as (far worse, because astronauts sign up for the risk) one member of ground staff. People love to hate the Shuttle, and it ended up being subpar / fail expectations due to the political constraints NASA was under, but the Shuttle was a genuine advance for its time – a nonsensical, economically insane advance, but still an advance. If you look at the Shuttle alternative proposals / initial proposals as well as stuff like Dynasoar and Star Raker, you'll see NASA iterating through Starship style ideas. But those were rejected due to higher up front capital investment at the time. The Shuttle is an odd franken-turduckling, because it was designed for one mission and one mission only. And that mission never happened. That cargo bay existed to capture certain Soviet assets and deploy + task certain American space assets and then bring them back to Earth. And that's the bit that's hard to emphasize. The fact that the Shuttle could put a satellite up there, watch it fail, then go back up, grab it, bring it back, repair it, then launch again was an insane capability. Was the program a giant fuck up at the end? Yes. But does that mean Artemis will be safer than the Shuttle? No. That's not how the energetics, time from civilization, acceptable risk profiles etc. work out.
- trothamel 6mo agoThat was a great article. Adding to it - Apollo 13 was a mission where 3 men should have died, but somehow didn't. If it had happened while the LM was on the moon, you would have had the CSM lose power, and then two men on the moon would have had no way to return home. (And for the shuttle design mission - my understanding is it was likely the ability to do a HEXAGON-style film return mission in a single orbit, before the Soviets knew what was happeneing.)
- mackman 6mo agoYou are comparing orbiting earth in a shuttle to a lunar flyby in a pod. Very different risk profiles.
- paulgerhardt 6mo agoFirst couple of crews to orbit the earth at 0’ AGL had mortality rate of 9 in 10. I’d say we’re doing better!
- zhoujing204 6mo ago"As of 1 April 2026, there have been five incidents in which a spacecraft in flight suffered crew fatalities, killing a total of 15 astronauts and 4 cosmonauts.[2][how?] Of these, two had reached the internationally recognized edge of space (100 km or 62mi above sea level) when or before the incident occurred, one had reached the U.S. definition of space at 266,000 ft, and one was planned to do so. In each of these accidents, the entire crew was killed. As of April 2026, a total of 791 people have flown into space and 19 of them have died in related incidents. This sets the current statistical fatality rate at 2.4 percent." [wiki link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents#:~:text=/cosmonaut%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...).-,During%20spaceflight,fatality%20rate%20at%202.4%20percent.)
- api 6mo ago2.4% is not bad given how new this still is and how extreme the speeds and energies are. Note that all the fatalities have been launch or landing related, not in space itself. Clawing out of this gravity well is tough. Make Earth a bit larger and you’d never get off it without something like NERVA or nuclear pulse Orion. I wonder sometimes if that’s another thing to toss in the Fermi paradox bucket. Many rocky planets might be much more massive than Earth. On one with 3X our gravity a space program might never get going.
- Shitty-kitty 6mo agoThe lack of plate tectonics is a much bigger obstacle on Super-Earths, then g.
- api 6mo agoYeah the more I learn the more I buy the rare Earth explanation. Life may not be that unusual but it might be mostly just goo: little extremophile type bacteria and maybe very tiny creepy crawlies living in deep seas, underground, in liquid mantles in ice moons, etc. But to get stuff even as sophisticated as frogs and bunnies, let alone something that can try space flight, requires a place that is all of: big, stable, with abundant energy, with high enough metallicity, and in an environment well shielded from flares and impacts. There may not be a lot of places like this.
- throwanem 6mo agoThat was the fair estimate for the Shuttle program. NASA caught hell in public, justifiably, for pretending otherwise. But astronaut memoirs such as Mullane's excellent Riding Rockets paint a much more nuanced picture. I waited until splashdown to permit my emotions to get involved, and I'm glad I did. It was really something earlier, to hear my whole neighborhood bar set up a cheer for an American mission to the Moon.
- bombcar 6mo agoI suspect that it is NOT a weaker system than before, it is more accurate about the mortality rate. In other words, there are fewer "unknown unknowns" than there were in the 60s and 80s, partially because of explosions that took out previous astronauts. (Some would snidely say as long as they don't put seven people on the rocket they'll be fine.)
- icehawk 6mo agoWai how is it weaker, like genuinely?
- stetrain 6mo ago1 out of the 12 crewed Apollo missions resulted in the death of the crew, so a 1 in 12 effective mortality rate. Apollo 13 was a very close call. If that had ended in failure the mortality rate would have been 1 in 6. So 1 in 30 would be a pretty clear improvement from Apollo, and we are a lot better and more thorough at modeling those risks and testing systems than we were during the Apollo program.
- shash 6mo agoIs 12 enough of a sample size to make a statistical judgement? What if there were 20 more which didn’t have a loss of life? Is it then 1/30? What if there were 20 more? The risk factor is calculated _per mission_ from what I understand. You can have three accidents in a row and nothing for decades but the risk itself can still be 1 in 30.
- stetrain 6mo agoSo the risk factor for Apollo could have actually been 1/1000 but they were just really unlucky?
- d1sxeyes 6mo agoIf I toss a coin four times and it comes up heads three and tails once, it doesn’t mean that there’s a 75% chance that this coin lands heads up. Be careful about conflating risk factor and mortality rate.
- WalterBright 6mo agoYou cannot really determine what the risks are before trying something new.
- dehrmann 6mo agoWe stopped going to the moon because it's a vanity project. It's expensive, risky, and there isn't much more science to do or that can't be done by robots.
- throwaway132448 6mo agoHopefully this time we can keep going for what we can do for engineering instead of what we can do for science.
- dyauspitr 6mo agoEh yeah? This is frontier, pioneer stuff. We should have a greater appetite for risk as long as it’s completely transparent and the astronauts know what they’re getting into. Realistically though, there is essentially a rocket a day going up and they rarely fail anymore, so the true risk is probably much lower than 1 in 30.
- pibaker 6mo agoIt honestly says something about how absurdly risk averse our society has become that an 1/30 chance of death is considered too high for a literal moonshot. You can advertise a 1/3 rate of slowly choking in vacuum and I bet you will still get a five mile long queue of people signing up for the mission. If you want a historical comparison, over 200 men left with Magellan on his voyage around the globe and only 40 returned.
- tempaccount5050 6mo agoYou're acting like if it fails they can just say "Well we said it was 1/3!" and then just get on with it. "Oops we lost a zillion taxpayer dollars and no one will mind and maybe they'll give us more money this time around!" That's just not how the world works.
- paganel 6mo agoCrazy indeed, glad that someone else has already mentioned Magellan, because that’s whom I also had in mind. Not sure there’s a solution for this because at this point the risk scare has been institutionalized among most if Western (and not only) society.
- anon7000 6mo agoAgreed, but people were often forced into those conditions. Or were forced to make an impossible survival decision. Were Magellan’s men volunteers? For example, in the incident with The Wager, 1,980 men left on 6 ships, and only 188 survived. Men of the original men were press-ganged (kidnapped to crew these ships), and a lot of them were even taken from an infirmary and not in great health. And, of course, conditions were pretty terrible. So yeah, we’re more risk adverse… and also a lot better at keeping people alive. I think most people would not have signed up for some of these really risky endeavors if they knew the true risk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wager_Mutiny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wager_Mutiny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghaiing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghaiing
- 627467 6mo agoMaybe we should be glad that afawct none of the people exposed to the risks of artemis ii mission were force on it against their will. I'd bet the even in The Wager you would have have some clear headed people who knew the risk and still chose it
- segmondy 6mo agoInsane to you? why don't you tell us what you have contributed to the world to improve this outcome even if by .01%
- hammock 6mo agoActual death rate for astronauts so far is 19/791, or 1 in 40.
- paganel 6mo agoThe shuttle didn’t accomplish that much and didn’t get us as far as Artemis just did, the risks are well worth it. Nobody is forcing the astronauts to do their astronaut thing, imo they’re aware of the risks they’re taking, and kudos to them for that.
- golem14 6mo agoCome on! No one is forced to get on the rocket. If you don’t think it’s worth it, don’t go! From a social perspective, I would recommend to think of the average death per capita of an effort, which is effectively nil for Artemis (very few astronauts vs us population) compared to generating electricity with coal, which kills many annually.
- DrBazza 6mo agoCrossing the Atlantic and the discovery of the Americas? How many deaths were acceptable during that initial period of exploration? That’s where we still are with space. And the atmospheric entry is still the same as 1969. Physics doesn’t change.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- throwaway132448 6mo agoThere are over 8 billion people on earth.
- cmiles8 6mo agoSpace is hard. If we didn’t accept these parameters we wouldn’t go to space. Apollo lost one entire crew and almost two, the Space Shuttle lost two missions where the whole crew died. The risks are real.
- philwelch 6mo agoIf we got to a point where going to the Moon was significantly safer than that, we’d better start trying things even more ambitious and risky or we’ll stagnate as a species. The fatality rates for circumnavigating the globe or settling in North America or attempting to invent a working flying machine were much, much higher than that.
- tomrod 6mo agoTurns out riding on top of controlled explosions is a risky engagement.
- slibhb 6mo agoIt's unclear if the shuttle was actually safer or if NASA is just more honest about the odds of catastrophic failure. There are reasons to think Artemis is safer. It has a launch abort system that the shuttle lacked. Reentry should also be much safer under Artemis; the capsule is a much simpler object to protect.
- b112 6mo agoThat's the starting point? That's what we document as acceptable? Better to document risk, than lie to brave volunteers. And they knew the risk, and wanted to go. So I see zero issues here.
- temp0826 6mo agoIs this better odds than sailing across the Atlantic in the 1400-1500s?