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Yes, 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

Yes, 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 ago
That 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.)
- areoform 6mo ago
  Thanks! note - I can't verify any of the following, it's more - for lack of a better term - aerospace nerd fan theory at this point. Post-collapse, people think that the Buran justification was paranoia. But based on what I've read / seen (though this is getting hard to source, so I might be just good ol' hallucinating here), they weren't entirely wrong. The subtext around that large payload bay had to do with the Soviet pursuit of systems like Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment... that weaponized space. Again, there's a reason for those ASAT tests. There's a reason for the weird specifications set in the early 1970s for the Shuttle. And I don't think deploying a spy satellite alone is it. But this is speculation. AFAICT, nothing was put on paper. It would have been an incendiary WW3 starting act to capture a Soviet asset. But I think it is understandable if certain people within the American blob wanted that capability at hand. I wish I was immortal. I'd drop everything for a decade and try to find people from the time who're still alive (and some still are!) and ask them these questions directly - on the record – for posterity's sake. I suspect, we came much closer to war via space than most people think. And because we didn't, we'll eventually repeat these mistakes. --- Oh and then there was the documented attempt to capture Salyut-7 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2554/1 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2554/1 Somehow all the numbers just happened to line right up. :)
  - throwanem 6mo ago
    The only people who took seriously the idea of a Shuttle FOBS were the Soviets, and frankly not even all of them; as far as I've ever seen credible evidence to substantiate, it never went much past a single position paper from the early 80s. The idea that Buran was meant as a MAD-restoring FOBS has, so far as I know, not even that much support. (If you know of primary sources, in translation or otherwise, please link them.) Read Payne Harrison's 1989 novel Storming Intrepid, followed by NASA publication SP-4221, "The Space Shuttle Decision," from 1999. [1] The first is a pretty good depiction of what you're imagining, and the second explains why the imagination of a technothriller author is where that idea went to die. Then maybe give your head a shake. If Reagan had violated the Outer Space Treaty - via NASA of all agencies! - how do you imagine it'd have stayed secret over these forty years just past? [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20241229052235/https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19990056590/downloads/19990056590.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20241229052235/https://ntrs.nasa...
ksymph 6mo ago
Nice article, although I'm not so sure about this part: > There’s a reason why there wasn’t an Apollo 18, or 19 and 20. Even though funding had been secured, an executive decision was made to kill the program early, because LoC was inevitable. Was funding really secure? I believe that was the main sticking point; a quick search [0] seems to confirm this, and the John Young quote below backs it up: "Even if they’d had the money..." Not to say the risk wasn't a factor too of course, but it doesn't look like funding was otherwise guaranteed. Anyway, I think what sets the risk of the Shuttle apart from Apollo is summed up nicely in one of the quotes (in reference to the Apollo program): "The awareness of risk led to intense focus on reducing risk." In the Apollo program, there was a pattern of rigorously hunting down and eliminating any possible known risks, leaving unknowns as the primary source of risk; on the other hand, the Shuttle program let known risks accumulate continuously until crews paid the price for a bad draw. When debris hit Atlantis on STS-27 [1] and the shuttle only survived on a one in a million stroke of luck -- the completely broken tile happened to be over an aluminum mounting plate -- it should have been taken as a free lesson on one more known source of risk to eliminate. Instead, it led to seven people dying completely preventable and unnecessary deaths a few years later. Spaceflight is inherently risky, it's true. That's why things like the Orion heat shield are so worrisome; because it is physically possible at our current level of technology to make it safer, and yet for political / funding / etc. reasons we're not doing the best we can. [0] https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/why-did-we-stop-going-moon https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/why-did-we-stop... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-27 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-27
- WalterBright 6mo ago
  > one more known source of risk to eliminate. How could they have eliminated that risk?
  - nradov 6mo ago
    The risk couldn't have been entirely eliminated, but most likely the external tank insulation could have been modified to at least reduce the risk of chunks breaking loose and damaging the thermal tiles during launch.
pdonis 6mo ago
The Smithsonian article on John Young that you linked to is a good one. The only John Young quote they didn't include that I wish they had was his response to the proposal to make STS-1 an on purpose RTLS abort: "Let's not practice Russian roulette."
- jasomill 6mo ago
  Also "RTLS requires continuous miracles interspersed with acts of God to be successful."[1] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20171208090538/http://www.tested.com/science/space/460233-space-shuttles-controversial-launch-abort-plan/ https://web.archive.org/web/20171208090538/http://www.tested...
mtlmtlmtlmtl 6mo ago
I often think about the shuttle program in relation to all these crazy complicated, wildly expensive, and incredibly fragile space telescopes we're sending to LEO or the Earth-Sun L2. Would be damn useful to be able to repair/upgrade these things like with Hubble. Obviously I realise the shuttle program was pretty far away from being able to head out to the Earth-Sun L2(AB, and wasn't even working towards it. But man, it would be nice to have that ability.
- nradov 6mo ago
  Really? Seems like it would be cheaper to build extra telescopes (economy of scale). When one of them breaks, just launch another.
  - NetMageSCW 6mo ago
    You will never build enough to get to economies of scale. Building a second one costs just as much as the first one. And, when asked, astronomers invariably choose a new different telescope over another of one they already have.
- NetMageSCW 6mo ago
  For JWST, for example, besides not being designed for repair, it is incredibly delicate and having a spacecraft approach would likely destroy the heat shield and break it permanently.
alex1138 6mo ago
NASA certainly took many risks back then. People remember Apollo 11 for the landing, but for example on Apollo 8, with a fire roughly 2 years earlier that killed 3 astronauts, they had one manned mission (Apollo 7) and then immediately sent Apollo 8 around the moon with ONE rocket nozzle that had to work (and no LM to escape into, as the Apollo 13 astronauts had to do), basing their faith in trajectory mechanics which hadn't been tested that far out The ejection seats on Gemini were a joke, and there's an anecdote Gene Kranz tells in his book about Gemini 9 where he thought it was too risky for them to cut away the shroud on the thing they were going to dock with (the Agena having blown up on launch) but NASA was this close to overriding him and doing it anyway (they were saved by the astronauts vetoing it, which was good because the EVA, separately, that Gene Cernan did was incredibly harrowing. he was sweating, way overworked, could barely see)
j_bum 6mo ago
Thanks for sharing your article - very well written. I am stunned to see that LoC risk assessment. I kept wondering to myself over the past week, “will this be the last USA-supported human space travel if these astronauts don’t survive?” I’d have a hard time imagining the general public would support any future missions if they hadn’t survived. These astronauts are some elite humans. My respect for them is even greater now that I’ve seen the risk quantified.
- varjag 6mo ago
  This happened twice already with U.S. manned missions, and with 7 person crews.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
SloppyDrive 6mo ago
Im not really convinced SLS and Artemis are best effort projects; we improve through refinement, and the only way to get there is cadence. More launches with the same general mission requirements. One launch a year is not even close to what we can manage with our current technology, to the point where the scope is too small to be legitimately worth doing. Its not solely a matter of energy; its about opportunity for learning. The current scale is too small to be worth doing at all. If it was a program of something like >50 payloads over a decade, that gives enough opportunity for refinement, in cost, safety, and scale manufacture methods to actually see something new.
- ETH_start 6mo ago
  The value of a mission like this isn't only in the narrow technical data it returns. Its value is also institutional. Once you have an actual crewed mission orbiting the Moon, the program becomes concrete rather than aspirational. That creates momentum inside NASA and among contractors, strengthens the credibility of follow-on lunar missions, and accelerates work on the many parallel systems a sustained lunar program actually requires. I agree entirely that it's much easier to imagine a successful moon program built around repeatable missions at high cadence, so I'm not disagreeing on that point. I would just push back on the idea that this has little or no value.
  - SloppyDrive 6mo ago
    This is exactly what I mean though; the technical decisions for the SLS, and every bit of "institution" that follow are so flawed that I dont believe you can draw a path from this to future work. It doesnt matter if you are actually running missions, if the scale is so small and wasteful that its not meaningfully comparable to the aspirational future missions.
Teever 6mo ago
> It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" due to the distances and energies involved. That's not true at all. It is entirely within current technical and fiscal means to launch a much more robust and powerful craft that is capable of goign to the moon and returning with lower velocity by sending it up in pieces with Falcon 9 (Heavy) and assembling it in LEO before launching to the moon. This mission architecture is intrinsically compromised by social constraints in the form of pork barrel spending dsfunctional decision making process.
- imtringued 6mo ago
  Given current levels of technology, this would require docking with a series of space tugs. Not impossible, but Blue Origin is the only organisation working on this at a meaningful scale. There was also Nautilus-X which never made it beyond the concept stage.
  - Teever 6mo ago
    Mir and the ISS were built this way and the Space shuttle, Dragon, and Soyuz have/had no problem docking with the ISS. If you feel constrained by the size of the Falcon Heavy fairing the now defunct Bigelow Aerospace launched several prototype inflatable habitats that apparently tested well in LEO. Combine this with a lunar cycler[0] orbit and you could keep reusing the same craft over and over and expanding to it if you want to ferry the astronauts to the moon. You'll note that everything I'm describing requires existing technology and very proven techniques (except maybe the inflatable stuff) but the thing it doesn't require is a giant rocket like SLS or Starship. I'm not saying that we shouldn't build machines like that, it's just that they really aren't needed for a mission like this and I question why something like SLS was built in the first place. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_cycler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_cycler
    - NetMageSCW 6mo ago
      It is very reasonable to question why SLS was built - during much of its history there was no reason or destination and the destinations that were used changed periodically. OTOH, Statship has a very good rationale for existing - it is required to be the size it is to support full reuse with reasonable cargo to orbit and lower the cost of launch another ten times.
7952 6mo ago
Artemis certainly seems safer at least in launch. It has an escape system that could be triggered throughout launch. In comparison shuttle could not abort at all until srb separation and after that could have needed risk aerodynamic manoeuvres.
imiric 6mo ago
Well said. > We're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. It's absolutely wild to me that we went from inventing flying machines to putting people on the freaking moon in the span of a human lifetime. What we've accomplished with technology in the last 500 years, let alone in the last century, is nothing short of remarkable. But, yes, in the grand scheme of things, we're still highly primitive. What's holding us back isn't our ingenuity, but our primitive instincts and propensity towards tribalism and violence. In many ways, we're not ready for the technology we invent, which should really concern us all. At the very least our leaders should have the insight to understand this, and guide humanity on a more conservative and safe path of interacting with technology. And yet we're not collectively smart enough to put those people in charge. Bonkers.
slow_typist 6mo ago
Wouldn’t the soviets or any other adversary prepare against letting NASA capture their satellites? You need a very small amount of C4 in the satellite to destroy the shuttle in the event of capture. Tampering with other entity‘s satellites can best be done with satellites. That also frees resources needed for bringing life support systems to orbit.
- Applejinx 6mo ago
  But at that point if you're building in a self-destruct for a weapon that can be so dangerous it's worth sending a shuttle to take it away from you, surely it's better to adversarially trigger the self-destruct and not bother sending the shuttle. So the C4 option might simply be a bad idea: make it more difficult and costly to remove your weapon, rather than triggering your own self-destruct.
  - ericcumbee 6mo ago
    There are easier cheaper ways of destroying a satellite than sending a space shuttle. We would have only sent a space shuttle to capture it for intelligence purposes.
throwpoaster 6mo ago
Shuttle was awesome and the people who love to hate it can personally fight me.
jackmott42 6mo ago
>It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" Absolutely it is, if NASA was not constrained by congress to use shuttle components to build the spacecraft, they could have had double the payload mass capability at least (the Saturn V was almost twice as capable, we should be able to do a little better now). This would provide tons of extra margin for safety, and allow a shorter and thus safer route to the moon as well.
class3shock 6mo ago
If I may be allowed one nitpick. Without fully understanding the FAA doc you link to in the article, I think it would be better to say something like loss of a plane is a 1 in a billion event for commercial airplanes. Many types of parts used in airplanes and jet engines break at much higher rates though, they just don't necessarily cause a plane loss when they do.
fnord77 6mo ago
> We're a very primitive species, compared to what? We're the most advanced species we know of. It might even hold true over the entire universe. All species might top out at where we are. We don't know.
- brewdad 6mo ago
  What a sad view of the universe. To hold that humanity in the year 2026 is the best the universe can do.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - chuckadams 6mo ago
    I don't think it's sad to admit that we may never know the answer. I'd like to be surprised, but the laws of physics make it pretty unlikely. Besides, maybe the other species are worse than us.
NetMageSCW 6mo ago
I strongly disagree that Artemis couldn’t be made safer today. If they had delayed Artemis I until the ECLSS was available to run in space for the mission, that would have improved Artemis II’s safety and possibly eliminated the need for the extra Earth orbit. If they had replaced the Artemis II heat shield (or swapped with III’s Orion) they would have reduced the risk of 2 & 3. SLS+Orion is already safer than the Shuttle with improved SRB knowledge and better abort modes on ascent. If Congress and NASA had assured SLS and Orion weren’t so expensive and slow to manufacture, they would have the money and hardware to fly more test flights without risking crew. If Congress hadn’t mandated using left over STS parts, there could have been a cheaper and faster to manufacture clean sheet design that wasn’t so inefficient it can’t deliver Orion to LLO.

trothamel 6mo ago

That 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.)

areoform 6mo ago
Thanks! note - I can't verify any of the following, it's more - for lack of a better term - aerospace nerd fan theory at this point. Post-collapse, people think that the Buran justification was paranoia. But based on what I've read / seen (though this is getting hard to source, so I might be just good ol' hallucinating here), they weren't entirely wrong. The subtext around that large payload bay had to do with the Soviet pursuit of systems like Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment... that weaponized space. Again, there's a reason for those ASAT tests. There's a reason for the weird specifications set in the early 1970s for the Shuttle. And I don't think deploying a spy satellite alone is it. But this is speculation. AFAICT, nothing was put on paper. It would have been an incendiary WW3 starting act to capture a Soviet asset. But I think it is understandable if certain people within the American blob wanted that capability at hand. I wish I was immortal. I'd drop everything for a decade and try to find people from the time who're still alive (and some still are!) and ask them these questions directly - on the record – for posterity's sake. I suspect, we came much closer to war via space than most people think. And because we didn't, we'll eventually repeat these mistakes. --- Oh and then there was the documented attempt to capture Salyut-7 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2554/1 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2554/1 Somehow all the numbers just happened to line right up. :)
- throwanem 6mo ago
  The only people who took seriously the idea of a Shuttle FOBS were the Soviets, and frankly not even all of them; as far as I've ever seen credible evidence to substantiate, it never went much past a single position paper from the early 80s. The idea that Buran was meant as a MAD-restoring FOBS has, so far as I know, not even that much support. (If you know of primary sources, in translation or otherwise, please link them.) Read Payne Harrison's 1989 novel Storming Intrepid, followed by NASA publication SP-4221, "The Space Shuttle Decision," from 1999. [1] The first is a pretty good depiction of what you're imagining, and the second explains why the imagination of a technothriller author is where that idea went to die. Then maybe give your head a shake. If Reagan had violated the Outer Space Treaty - via NASA of all agencies! - how do you imagine it'd have stayed secret over these forty years just past? [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20241229052235/https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19990056590/downloads/19990056590.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20241229052235/https://ntrs.nasa...

ksymph 6mo ago

Nice article, although I'm not so sure about this part: > There’s a reason why there wasn’t an Apollo 18, or 19 and 20. Even though funding had been secured, an executive decision was made to kill the program early, because LoC was inevitable. Was funding really secure? I believe that was the main sticking point; a quick search [0] seems to confirm this, and the John Young quote below backs it up: "Even if they’d had the money..." Not to say the risk wasn't a factor too of course, but it doesn't look like funding was otherwise guaranteed. Anyway, I think what sets the risk of the Shuttle apart from Apollo is summed up nicely in one of the quotes (in reference to the Apollo program): "The awareness of risk led to intense focus on reducing risk." In the Apollo program, there was a pattern of rigorously hunting down and eliminating any possible known risks, leaving unknowns as the primary source of risk; on the other hand, the Shuttle program let known risks accumulate continuously until crews paid the price for a bad draw. When debris hit Atlantis on STS-27 [1] and the shuttle only survived on a one in a million stroke of luck -- the completely broken tile happened to be over an aluminum mounting plate -- it should have been taken as a free lesson on one more known source of risk to eliminate. Instead, it led to seven people dying completely preventable and unnecessary deaths a few years later. Spaceflight is inherently risky, it's true. That's why things like the Orion heat shield are so worrisome; because it is physically possible at our current level of technology to make it safer, and yet for political / funding / etc. reasons we're not doing the best we can. [0] https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/why-did-we-stop-going-moon https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/why-did-we-stop... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-27 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-27

WalterBright 6mo ago
> one more known source of risk to eliminate. How could they have eliminated that risk?
- nradov 6mo ago
  The risk couldn't have been entirely eliminated, but most likely the external tank insulation could have been modified to at least reduce the risk of chunks breaking loose and damaging the thermal tiles during launch.

pdonis 6mo ago

The Smithsonian article on John Young that you linked to is a good one. The only John Young quote they didn't include that I wish they had was his response to the proposal to make STS-1 an on purpose RTLS abort: "Let's not practice Russian roulette."

jasomill 6mo ago
Also "RTLS requires continuous miracles interspersed with acts of God to be successful."[1] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20171208090538/http://www.tested.com/science/space/460233-space-shuttles-controversial-launch-abort-plan/ https://web.archive.org/web/20171208090538/http://www.tested...

mtlmtlmtlmtl 6mo ago

I often think about the shuttle program in relation to all these crazy complicated, wildly expensive, and incredibly fragile space telescopes we're sending to LEO or the Earth-Sun L2. Would be damn useful to be able to repair/upgrade these things like with Hubble. Obviously I realise the shuttle program was pretty far away from being able to head out to the Earth-Sun L2(AB, and wasn't even working towards it. But man, it would be nice to have that ability.

nradov 6mo ago
Really? Seems like it would be cheaper to build extra telescopes (economy of scale). When one of them breaks, just launch another.
- NetMageSCW 6mo ago
  You will never build enough to get to economies of scale. Building a second one costs just as much as the first one. And, when asked, astronomers invariably choose a new different telescope over another of one they already have.
NetMageSCW 6mo ago
For JWST, for example, besides not being designed for repair, it is incredibly delicate and having a spacecraft approach would likely destroy the heat shield and break it permanently.

alex1138 6mo ago

NASA certainly took many risks back then. People remember Apollo 11 for the landing, but for example on Apollo 8, with a fire roughly 2 years earlier that killed 3 astronauts, they had one manned mission (Apollo 7) and then immediately sent Apollo 8 around the moon with ONE rocket nozzle that had to work (and no LM to escape into, as the Apollo 13 astronauts had to do), basing their faith in trajectory mechanics which hadn't been tested that far out The ejection seats on Gemini were a joke, and there's an anecdote Gene Kranz tells in his book about Gemini 9 where he thought it was too risky for them to cut away the shroud on the thing they were going to dock with (the Agena having blown up on launch) but NASA was this close to overriding him and doing it anyway (they were saved by the astronauts vetoing it, which was good because the EVA, separately, that Gene Cernan did was incredibly harrowing. he was sweating, way overworked, could barely see)

j_bum 6mo ago

Thanks for sharing your article - very well written. I am stunned to see that LoC risk assessment. I kept wondering to myself over the past week, “will this be the last USA-supported human space travel if these astronauts don’t survive?” I’d have a hard time imagining the general public would support any future missions if they hadn’t survived. These astronauts are some elite humans. My respect for them is even greater now that I’ve seen the risk quantified.

varjag 6mo ago
This happened twice already with U.S. manned missions, and with 7 person crews.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

SloppyDrive 6mo ago

Im not really convinced SLS and Artemis are best effort projects; we improve through refinement, and the only way to get there is cadence. More launches with the same general mission requirements. One launch a year is not even close to what we can manage with our current technology, to the point where the scope is too small to be legitimately worth doing. Its not solely a matter of energy; its about opportunity for learning. The current scale is too small to be worth doing at all. If it was a program of something like >50 payloads over a decade, that gives enough opportunity for refinement, in cost, safety, and scale manufacture methods to actually see something new.

ETH_start 6mo ago
The value of a mission like this isn't only in the narrow technical data it returns. Its value is also institutional. Once you have an actual crewed mission orbiting the Moon, the program becomes concrete rather than aspirational. That creates momentum inside NASA and among contractors, strengthens the credibility of follow-on lunar missions, and accelerates work on the many parallel systems a sustained lunar program actually requires. I agree entirely that it's much easier to imagine a successful moon program built around repeatable missions at high cadence, so I'm not disagreeing on that point. I would just push back on the idea that this has little or no value.
- SloppyDrive 6mo ago
  This is exactly what I mean though; the technical decisions for the SLS, and every bit of "institution" that follow are so flawed that I dont believe you can draw a path from this to future work. It doesnt matter if you are actually running missions, if the scale is so small and wasteful that its not meaningfully comparable to the aspirational future missions.

Teever 6mo ago

> It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" due to the distances and energies involved. That's not true at all. It is entirely within current technical and fiscal means to launch a much more robust and powerful craft that is capable of goign to the moon and returning with lower velocity by sending it up in pieces with Falcon 9 (Heavy) and assembling it in LEO before launching to the moon. This mission architecture is intrinsically compromised by social constraints in the form of pork barrel spending dsfunctional decision making process.

imtringued 6mo ago
Given current levels of technology, this would require docking with a series of space tugs. Not impossible, but Blue Origin is the only organisation working on this at a meaningful scale. There was also Nautilus-X which never made it beyond the concept stage.
- Teever 6mo ago
  Mir and the ISS were built this way and the Space shuttle, Dragon, and Soyuz have/had no problem docking with the ISS. If you feel constrained by the size of the Falcon Heavy fairing the now defunct Bigelow Aerospace launched several prototype inflatable habitats that apparently tested well in LEO. Combine this with a lunar cycler[0] orbit and you could keep reusing the same craft over and over and expanding to it if you want to ferry the astronauts to the moon. You'll note that everything I'm describing requires existing technology and very proven techniques (except maybe the inflatable stuff) but the thing it doesn't require is a giant rocket like SLS or Starship. I'm not saying that we shouldn't build machines like that, it's just that they really aren't needed for a mission like this and I question why something like SLS was built in the first place. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_cycler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_cycler
  - NetMageSCW 6mo ago
    It is very reasonable to question why SLS was built - during much of its history there was no reason or destination and the destinations that were used changed periodically. OTOH, Statship has a very good rationale for existing - it is required to be the size it is to support full reuse with reasonable cargo to orbit and lower the cost of launch another ten times.

7952 6mo ago

Artemis certainly seems safer at least in launch. It has an escape system that could be triggered throughout launch. In comparison shuttle could not abort at all until srb separation and after that could have needed risk aerodynamic manoeuvres.

imiric 6mo ago

Well said. > We're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. It's absolutely wild to me that we went from inventing flying machines to putting people on the freaking moon in the span of a human lifetime. What we've accomplished with technology in the last 500 years, let alone in the last century, is nothing short of remarkable. But, yes, in the grand scheme of things, we're still highly primitive. What's holding us back isn't our ingenuity, but our primitive instincts and propensity towards tribalism and violence. In many ways, we're not ready for the technology we invent, which should really concern us all. At the very least our leaders should have the insight to understand this, and guide humanity on a more conservative and safe path of interacting with technology. And yet we're not collectively smart enough to put those people in charge. Bonkers.

slow_typist 6mo ago

Wouldn’t the soviets or any other adversary prepare against letting NASA capture their satellites? You need a very small amount of C4 in the satellite to destroy the shuttle in the event of capture. Tampering with other entity‘s satellites can best be done with satellites. That also frees resources needed for bringing life support systems to orbit.

Applejinx 6mo ago
But at that point if you're building in a self-destruct for a weapon that can be so dangerous it's worth sending a shuttle to take it away from you, surely it's better to adversarially trigger the self-destruct and not bother sending the shuttle. So the C4 option might simply be a bad idea: make it more difficult and costly to remove your weapon, rather than triggering your own self-destruct.
- ericcumbee 6mo ago
  There are easier cheaper ways of destroying a satellite than sending a space shuttle. We would have only sent a space shuttle to capture it for intelligence purposes.

throwpoaster 6mo ago

Shuttle was awesome and the people who love to hate it can personally fight me.

jackmott42 6mo ago

>It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" Absolutely it is, if NASA was not constrained by congress to use shuttle components to build the spacecraft, they could have had double the payload mass capability at least (the Saturn V was almost twice as capable, we should be able to do a little better now). This would provide tons of extra margin for safety, and allow a shorter and thus safer route to the moon as well.

class3shock 6mo ago

If I may be allowed one nitpick. Without fully understanding the FAA doc you link to in the article, I think it would be better to say something like loss of a plane is a 1 in a billion event for commercial airplanes. Many types of parts used in airplanes and jet engines break at much higher rates though, they just don't necessarily cause a plane loss when they do.

fnord77 6mo ago

> We're a very primitive species, compared to what? We're the most advanced species we know of. It might even hold true over the entire universe. All species might top out at where we are. We don't know.

brewdad 6mo ago
What a sad view of the universe. To hold that humanity in the year 2026 is the best the universe can do.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- chuckadams 6mo ago
  I don't think it's sad to admit that we may never know the answer. I'd like to be surprised, but the laws of physics make it pretty unlikely. Besides, maybe the other species are worse than us.

NetMageSCW 6mo ago

I strongly disagree that Artemis couldn’t be made safer today. If they had delayed Artemis I until the ECLSS was available to run in space for the mission, that would have improved Artemis II’s safety and possibly eliminated the need for the extra Earth orbit. If they had replaced the Artemis II heat shield (or swapped with III’s Orion) they would have reduced the risk of 2 & 3. SLS+Orion is already safer than the Shuttle with improved SRB knowledge and better abort modes on ascent. If Congress and NASA had assured SLS and Orion weren’t so expensive and slow to manufacture, they would have the money and hardware to fly more test flights without risking crew. If Congress hadn’t mandated using left over STS parts, there could have been a cheaper and faster to manufacture clean sheet design that wasn’t so inefficient it can’t deliver Orion to LLO.