This broken safety culture has been around since the beginning of the Shuttle program.
In 1980, Gregg Easterbrook published "Goodbye, Columbia" in The Washington Monthly [1], warning that NASA's "success-oriented planning" and political pressure were creating the conditions for catastrophe. He essentially predicted Columbia's heat shield failures in the article 1 year before the first flight.
Challenger in 1986, and the Rogers Commission identified hierarchy, communication failures, and management overriding engineering judgment.
Then Columbia happened in 2003. The CAIB found NASA had not implemented the 1986 recommendations [2].
Now Charles Camarda (who flew the first shuttle mission after Columbia and is literally a heat shield expert!) is saying it's happening again.
[1] https://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.ht...
[2] Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, Chapter 8: https://www.nasa.gov/columbia/caib/html/start.html
https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDU...
It’s pretty clear at this point that the shuttle was already broken at design. But seeing the same powder keg of safety/budget/immovable time constraints applied to a totally different platform decades in the future feels like sitting through a bad movie for the third time.
Looking at the people on the program, and specialty from the ones on this press conference [1] I see only, a bunch of check list fillers and government employees, that will cover their back with reports and third party recommendations, of the style, “I was told” or the “the technical reports said”. Its also commiserating the idiotic and irrelevant questions from most of the press present. How do these people get accredited there?
Here are some facts. When NASA flew Orion uncrewed around the Moon in 2022, the heat shield came back with deep gouges. Large chunks of Avcoat material had blown out, and three of four structural bolts had melted through. NASA own Inspector General identified three independently lethal failure modes:
- Heat shield spalling exposing the capsule to burn through
- Debris striking the parachute compartment
- Hot gas ingestion through the melted bolts
Noting the latter could cause the "breakup of the vehicle and loss of crew." Then...NASA found a credible root cause. The Avcoat was not porous enough, so pyrolysis gas built up underneath and blew pieces out, like steam cracking a lid.
Critically, areas of the Artemis I shield that were porous did not spall. But where it gets alarming is that the Artemis II heat shield was manufactured to be even less porous, a choice made before anyone knew porosity mattered.
Rather than replace it, NASA changed the reentry trajectory, instead of a skip reentry meaning dipping in, bouncing out, then re-entering, Orion will dive in steeper. The counterintuitive logic here is more intense, sustained heating actually allows the char layer to form properly and become porous enough for gas to escape, whereas the gentler intermittent heating of the skip paradoxically trapped gas. The physics reasoning is sound, but it has never been validated at full scale. As incredible as it may sound no one has flown this shield design, at this porosity, on this trajectory, at 25,000 mph lunar return speed, on a spacecraft twice the weight of Apollo.
The computer model certifying it as safe can predict crack initiation but cannot model crack propagation or the coupled multi physics material response, which is precisely what you need when your failure mode is cascading spalling that creates unpredictable hot spots and alters hypersonic airflow in ways that compound.
NASA also failed to recover the Artemis I parachutes, so there is literally zero data on whether debris impacted the system that slows the capsule from 300 mph to 15 mph for splashdown...
Perhaps most tellingly, NASA has announced its switching to an entirely new heat shield design! starting with Artemis III, simultaneously certifying this shield as safe to fly while deciding never to fly it again!
The strongest argument against crewing this flight is the simplest. NASA recently added an extra Artemis mission to its manifest, removing any programmatic need for astronauts on Artemis II.
Flying it uncrewed on the new trajectory would validate or invalidate the models at zero risk to human life, produce full-scale flight data on the actual shield at the actual porosity on the actual trajectory, and let NASA recover the parachutes to close the debris impact gap.
Then crew the next mission with data instead of models. As Camarda, a former NASA astronaut and heat shield expert has warned, this is the same organizational pattern, meaning schedule pressure, simplified models substituted for physical understanding of the system, motivated reasoning to reach a predetermined conclusion that preceded both Challenger and Columbia.
Lets say a SpaceX Dragon or Boeing Starliner came back with this level of damage, would NASA certify it for crew without an uncrewed validation flight?
NASA is risking four lives, when a straightforward, safe alternative, exists.
It seems that in modern times, humans focus on safety almost to the exclusion of everything else. As much as the more traditional salutations "godspeed" or "have a nice day", we're even more likely to hear "drive safe" or "have a safe trip" or "be safe".
We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe. Surely you've heard the mantra "...if it saves just one life...".
The optimal amount of tragedy is not zero. It's correct that we should accept some risk. We just need to be up-front and recognize what the safety margins really are.
Are we? People saying "have a safe trip" is pretty weak evidence.
The counter evidence is just about everything else going on, at least in the US. Relaxed worker safety standards, weakened environmental protections, and generally moving as fast as possible.
That being said, I'm a big proponent of "you can't make ICBM's carrying humans 100% safe", but you sure can try your best.
If you’re interested in a heck of a good read, the Columbia Accident Investigation Report is a good place to start:
https://ehss.energy.gov/deprep/archive/documents/0308_caib_r...
It looks at the safety culture in NASA and at how that safety culture ran into budget issues, time pressure and a culture that ‘it’s always been okay’. But people were aware of the problems.
There’s a really frustrating example from Columbia where engineers on the ground badly wanted to inspect the shuttle’s left wing from the ground using ground based telescopes or even observations from telescopes or any other assets. There’s footage available was an email circulated where an engineer all but begged anyone to take a look with anything. That request was not approved - they never looked.
Realistically there’s a point to be made that NASA wasn’t capable of saving those astronauts at that point. But they had a shuttle almost ready to to, they could have jettisoned its science load and possibly had a rescue of some sort available. They never looked though but alarm bells were ringing.
It’s more accurate to say people are highly aware of safety but when you get a bunch of us together, add in cognitive biases and promotion bands we can get stuck in unsafe ruts.
> Moon-to-Mars Deputy Administrator Amit Kshatriya said: “it was very small localized areas. Interestingly, it would be much easier for us to analyze if we had larger chunks and it was more defined”. A Lockheed Martin representative on the same call added that "there was a healthy margin remaining of that virgin Avcoat. So it wasn’t like there were large, large chunks.”
Followed by:
> The Avcoat material is not designed to come out in chunks. It is supposed to char and flake off smoothly, maintaining the overall contours of the heat shield.
This is echoes both Shuttle incidents. Challenger: no gasses were supposed to make it past the o-rings no matter what, but when it became clear that gasses were escaping and the o-rings were being damaged, there was a push to suggest that it's an acceptable level.
There was a similar situation with heat shield damage and Columbia.
In both cases some models were used to justify the decision, with wild extrapolations and fundamentally, a design that wasn't expected to fail in that mode /at all/.
I know the points that astronauts make about the importance of manned space exploration, but I agree with this author that it seems to make sense to run this as an unmanned mission, and probably test the new heat shield which will replace the Artemis II design in an unmanned re-entry as well.
> but when it became clear that gasses were escaping and the o-rings were being
> damaged, there was a push to suggest that it's an acceptable level.
Interestingly, the article<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...> by heat shield expert and Shuttle astronaut Charles Camarda, the former Director of Engineering at Johnson Space Center, asserts that it was *not* the O-rings:
"The Challenger accident was not caused by O-rings or temperature on the day of launch; it was caused by a deviant joint design which opened instead of closed when loaded. It was caused by mistaking analytical adequacy of a simplified test for physical understanding of the system. The solution, post Challenger, was the structural redesign of the SRB field joint and the use of the exact same O-rings."
I find that highly surprising, because "it was the O-rings" explanation seems universally believed and sanctified by no lesser authority than the Nobel prize laureate Richard Feynman.
The o-ring failure was a measurable consequence of the joint design failure. The data behind the model didn't go down to temperatures as low as that at Challenger's launch date.
For more inappropriate extrapolation to justify a decision: the data for the heat shield tile loss model was based on much less damage than sustained by Columbia (3 orders of magnitude IIRC).
Now they are looking at the same style of fallacy and don't even have a model based on damage sustained in flights.
Another parallel I haven't seen discussed here yet, though I haven't read all comments: I recall Feynman feeling like he was on the investigation panel as a prop, that the intention of the investigation was to clear NASA of any wrongdoing. They used a model, considered risks, etc. Feynman recognized the need for a clear and powerful visual to cut through an information dump and pull it to front page news. The invitation of Camarda to a presentation with a pre-determined conclusion has the same feeling. I don't know what Camarda can do to put it on a (non-HN) front page today.
> although they were moving they were getting shoved deeper into the joint,
Why would they be "shoved deeper," when the problem is that the joint opens wider under load?
Essentially you are mischaracterizing what Feynman did or say, although this is also Feynman fault :-), by doing the famous public demonstration, with the ice water in a glass [2], although even there he only said it has "significance to the problem...". In other words, we should not simplify, even for the general public, what are complex subtle engineering issues. This is also the reason why current AI, will fail spectacularly, but I digress...
Feynman documented the joint rotation problem in his written Appendix F, but his televised demonstration became the explanation...[3]
Camarda is correct here. There was a fundamentally flawed field joint design, meaning the tang-and-clevis joint opened under combustion pressure instead of closing. This meant the O-rings were being asked to chase a widening gap something the O-ring manufacturer explicitly told Thiokol O-rings were never designed to do. Joint rotation was known as early as 1977, a full nine years before the disaster.
The cold temperature made things worse by stiffening the rubber so it could not chase the gap as quickly, but O-ring erosion and blow-by were occurring on flights in warm weather too and nearly every flight in 1985 showed damage.
The proof is how they fixed. NASA redesigned the joint metal structure with a capture feature to prevent rotation, added a third O-ring for redundancy, and installed heaters but kept the exact same Viton rubber. If the O-rings were the real problem, you would change the O-rings. They did not need to.
The report [1] is public for everybody to read...but not from the NASA page... who funnily enough has a block on the link from their own page, so I had to find an alternative link...
[1] - https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-99hrpt1016/pdf/...
[2] - https://youtu.be/6TInWPDJhjU
[3] - https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf
Also I'm not sure the assertion is correct. If the sealant and O-Rings were adequate, the joint would not have failed. It was suboptimal, and increased risk, sure, but it in itself wasn't the reason for the accident. It was the joint and the o-rings in combination. The holes in the swiss cheese model lined up that day, and a lot of small problems combined into one big problem
Not surprising if you understand what the real cause was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47585889
That assertion requires some reasoning and evidence to back it.
No. The whole assembly --joint, sealant and O-rings, -- failed.
"They were not adequate" - yet, after the redesign, they kept those same O-rings and declared that boosters are safe to fly, in manifest contradiction to your assertion. So your reasoning is clearly flawed.
presumably "redesign" means some stuff changed. why is it not possible that the O-rings were inadequate for the old design, but adequate for the new design?
I don't know how a big organisation can think like that. But I guess these calculations were ones out of millions of ones made for the project.
At this point in time, manned space exploration should come out of our entertainment budget. The same budget we use for football or olympic games.
I can't agree more.
Another thing I believe needs to be watched periodically is Pale Blue Dot [2].
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-COlil4tos
Look at what happened with William Shatner and Jeff Bezos when they came back from space. Shatner started to say something about what an impactful experience it was, but Bezos cut him off and was like “Woo! Partay!” and switched his attention to a magnum of champagne.
Astronauts are regular smart people capable of making good and bad life decisions too.
I don't know if it's a thing that wears off, if Bezos was just in business-mode the entire time, or just didn't want someone monologuing right after getting back.
You could have the same effect with LSD/Psilocybin for quite a bit less $$$$.
Perhaps, but they should also get a few free orbits of the Earth *after* their term ends, on a launch system built by whichever contractor has given the most "campaign donations" to politicians. Surely they'll trust it to be safe, right?
Give them the rest and recreation they need in these wonderful places.
Yeah, you may be right.
Trying and seeing what happens is also science, after all.
"I've seen things up there that are huge, absolutely huge. And let me tell you, astronauts, they came up to me, they were crying, big men crying. Earth, it's a good name, but it's not big enough, not grand enough. So, I'm thinking we rename it. How about 'The Trump Sphere'? It's got a nice ring to it, doesn't it? And let me tell you, nobody would argue with that name!"
I also looked up the NSF's 2024 budget, which, at $9B, was much lower than I expected.
Look at this joke of a list https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/20-breakthroughs-from-... for an illustration. And those were the 20 best things they could come up with.
Apart from the research into the effects of microgravity on humans, pretty much everything else could have been done cheaper and better without humans.
Or take this example:
> Deployment of CubeSats from station: CubeSats are one of the smallest types of satellites and provide a cheaper way to perform science and technology demonstrations in space. More than 250 CubeSats have now been deployed from the space station, jumpstarting research and satellite companies.
Cubesats are great! But you don't exactly need a manned space station to deploy them. Similar with many other 'achievements' like the 'Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer'.
See also how they don't mention any actual impact. Only stuff like "This achievement may provide insight into fundamental laws of quantum mechanics."
And this is supposed to be the list of highlights. The best they have to offer.
Welcome to the macroeconomics practical, where we'll dig a ditch, refill it, and count it as a productive addition to the economy both times!
If a company could spend 24B in research they would probably produce a lot more things than NASA
NASA could do a lot more good science, if they didn't (have to) launch primates into space.
About war: in our universe we got the first digital computers because of military efforts during the second world war. However, without a war IBM and Konrad Zuse and others would have gotten there, too. With much less human suffering.
Most US investment in associated tech - including the Internet - came through DARPA.
Not pointing this out because I support war, but to underline that the US doesn't have a culture of aggressive government investment in non-military R&D.
NASA and the NSF both get pocket money in budget terms. And at its height Apollo was a Cold War PR battle with the USSR that happened to funnel a lot of of money to defence contractors.
The original moon landings were not primarily motivated by science.
Private sector doesn't do much without obvious short-term gain, and it especially doesn't do basic research. It may be good at fitting more pixels in ever thinner phones, but it wouldn't get to that point if not the government that needed number-crunching machines for better modelling of nuclear fission some 80 years earlier.
So I think the opposite: we are way past the point of space exploration being directly useful for weapons.
1) It's better aligned with mission profile (inspirational, emotional, but not strictly necessary;
2) There's much more of it to go than NASA gets;
3) It would be a better use of that money than what it's currently used for.
We'd get more and better science by spending it on unmanned space stuff. Or you could even just leave the money with the taxpayer.
(And, if you don't like the monetary framing: just look at the real resources spend instead.)
However I'm not nearly as harsh on unmanned space exploration.
Just don't spend tax payer money.
It is astounding to me how such a successful, rich group of companies manage to get subsidies in quantities that groups you'd think deserve or need it more, from valuable science endeavours to orphans dying of cancer, can only dream of.
Do Fijian rugby games see a 0.5% increase in longest drop goal distance?
On a slightly related note, I always found the games played in Pretoria in South Africa fascinating. It's 1350 m above sea level, so kicks all go 10% to 15% further (my estimate) which makes quite a difference when there are players kicking penalties from over halfway even at sea level.
Though the US could just do it. Who's to stop them from selling these pieces of paper?
Their inability at social cues will cut right through.
Works every time.
It's pithy, but correct.
Source: I'm "on the spectrum." This often resulted in me being the skunk at the rationalization picnic, because I didn't realize the boss wanted me to rubberstamp a bad design.
NASA desperately needs more options. They shouldn't need to expend an SLS to launch an uncrewed Orion with a test heatshield on a trajectory equivalent to a moon return. They should be able to launch that on top of a Falcon Heavy. A Falcon Heavy can launch 63 tons to LEO and a fueled Orion plus service module weights slightly north of 20 tons. An Orion mass simulator with enough attitude control mated with a FH second stage would leave a lot of delta-v to accelerate the capsule back into the atmosphere.
Landing on the moon in 1969 was an extraordinary achievement, perhaps the most beautiful thing ever done by mankind. But now? What's the point exactly?
We know we can't go much further than the moon anyway (as this very same blog has demonstrated many times); what do we expect to achieve with astronauts that robots can't do?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It just depends on whether you think that the fact that they accept the risks is reason enough to let them fly a potentially-dangerous spacecraft.
That's not reassuring, though. And it isn't just about them.
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.
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.
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.
This sounds more like there is money in the room than it’s about the money. None of the decision makers personally profited from saying go. It was much more of a prestige thing.
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/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
Characterizing someone being (slightly?) more diplomatic as “maybe convinced” is shameful.
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…)
Reminder that during COVID, idlewords mused that Belarus was doing something right without masks nor lockdown because their casualty numbers were low, and when challenged that maaaayyyybe the Belarusian dictatorship wasn't giving honest numbers, he ignored it.
And when I showed him statistical analysis showing the numbers were indeed very likely fake, he blocked me. I didn't spam him, I was only moderately snarky (the way he is all the time) and that was his behaviour.
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.
Definitely, but we still have to figure out if Musk is such a genious or NASA is full of retards.
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.
> 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.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
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.
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.
That's not how risk analysis works.
Let's say every Apollo mission had gone flawlessly, and no one even came close to dying. Would you then say that the risk of death for future missions would be zero? No, of course not.
Of course one should also analyze the technical sytems involved and then it is clear that 0% failure is not reasonable.
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/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.
[edit]
For comparison, commercial aviation has something like 1 in 5.8m or 6x 9's of reliability.
The "likely" in "likely ...to land safely" and "likely to work fine" is not nearly good enough.
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.
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.
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.
it doesn't matter.
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.
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
1. The application method is different. Apollo applied it to a metal honeycomb structure with very small cells, while Orion uses blocks of the material. (NASA tried the honeycomb approach for Orion, but it was too labor-intensive).
2. Orion is much bigger and heavier than the Apollo command module. The informal consensus is that Apollo may have been at the upper size limit for using Avcoat.
So cost cutting, as always.
The contractor has no trouble inflating the first one whenever they can, but they want to strip the second one to the bone to maximize profits.
> The paste-like material was gunned into each of the 330,000 cells of the fiberglass honeycomb individually, a process taking about six months. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVCOAT#Apollo_Command_Module
Amortized over the whole program, each launch cost the same as building 2 Gerald Ford class nuclear carriers, or $26 billion USD.
SLS already costs about as much as a nuclear submarine. Per launch.
Just out of curiosity, do we know if the honeycomb method worked before it was deemed too labor intensive? Because I'm told that using this block method results in chunks blowing out.
I'm also having a problem with this set-up: Apollo is at the upper size limit for avcoat; Orion is way bigger; use avcoat.
Reading a real front-fell-off aura from this project. It makes me wonder if spending 6% of GDP to develop and run a crewed lunar program 60 years ago and then immediately destroying the evidence, r&d artifacts, and materials fab capabilities was a good idea.
Artemis, launching on April Fools Day, seems like a joke waiting to happen.
This is a strange claim, considering NASA used to have 2 facilities that were capable of this - one at Johnson and one at Ames. They were consolidated (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160001258/downloads/20...) but it seems like the Arc Jet Complex at Ames is still operational https://www.nasa.gov/ames/arcjet-complex/
Also, they don't have anything human rated going beyond LEO. Coming back from the moon means you're going significantly faster and thus need a better heat shield
> That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget
And there are options now.
Does anyone know any more about this?
Maybe this is a perspective or semantics thing, but I think it’s distinct and important. They’re not Mavericks they’re Icemans.
Hopefully they're well-understood and meticulously mitigated risks. Because if they're not... well there's always modern day Boeing.
>> Artemis II could fly just as easily without astronauts on board
Ergo the mission design is wrong, not the heat shield design.
The flight risk is surely acceptable if this is not the first flight of many but the last.
At least this one had real missions fly if it suffers the same fate. The crew of Artemis is among the ones most aware that most space missions never happen. The anxiety of being in these astronaut classes must be unbearable, especially as the ISS ages. I don't know if this mission can maintain public confidence in the program as the world grows more chaotic and people's attentions are not focused on the sky but the ground.
What I'm seeing from Artemis recently is "good signs of life" rather than the opposite.
They acknowledged that Artemis III is "system tests" rather than "a full landing", which gives it far better chances of happening before 2030. They're trimming the fat deposits from the program by removing things like Gateway or NRHO. They're pushing for a more aggressive launch cadence. They're actually seriously bringing up "a persistent Moon base" and "manned flights every 6 months" as Artemis program goals.
This is more focus and ambition than what NASA had in actual literal decades.
I changed projects bc it was obvious to that the risk was substantial, long befor Artemis was called Artemis, people said this.
Examples could be the Challenger disaster where managers overruled the engineers (who said in a meeting a launch was too dangerous) or the Boing 737max. Also a lot of companies in germany that I experienced (as employee and as consultant) seem similiar.
One reason could be (and I saw that myself) is that there can be a situation where the best employees start leaving. It's likely natural since they can find something else easier than the others.
I've snorted my coffee. I happens to any organization that's run by people who are only in it for power, not outcomes.
Humans don't seem to learn in the way we think or what them to
reminds me of automotive safety recalls that trace back to "simplified" component designs. sometimes the old complex way was complex for a reason.
I didn’t even have a strong interest in space before the dude started writing about it. Maciej could write about literal rocks and make it worthwhile to read.
Fun wording. This isn't news, concerns have been raised about Artemis II saftey in the past 3+ years since Artemis I and before then as well.
Anyone know if there's a detailed response from NASA to the article?
The only thing the author of this blog piece has to offer that’s new is his very strong personal intuition that the new design hasn’t been properly validated, without any engineering explanation about why the testing the performed won’t adequately simulate real world performance.
"countdown clock started ticking down" "to a targeted launch time of 6:24 p.m. on Wednesday, April 1."
> NASA’s initial instinct was to cover up the problem.
to at least warrant a link.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
Is there truly no engineering or science merit to flying astronauts by the Moon?
It reminds me of both the movies Capricorn 1 and Iron Sky ... and not in any good way.
I had forgotten that O.J Simpson had been in the movie, to be honest.
Is Orion’s heat shield really safe? New NASA chief conducts final review on eve of flight. https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/nasa-chief-reviews-ori...
The Avcoat blocks, which are about 1.5 inches thick, are laminated onto a thick composite base of the Orion spacecraft. Inside this is a titanium framework that carries the load of the vehicle. The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry.
What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.Starliner was not safe to fly either, thrusters couldn't be trusted, but Boeing and NASA managed pushed on and decided to fly anyway. The flight demonstrated that the problems were bad indeed. NASA communications pretended things were not good but not disastrous.
Turns out things were much worse than NASA and Boeing wanted to admit: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/02/nasa-chief-classifies-...
“Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware,” Isaacman wrote in his letter to the NASA workforce. “It is decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight.”
Still, after astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams eventually docked at the station, Boeing officials declared it a success. “We accomplished a lot, and really more than expected,” said Mark Nappi, vice president and manager of Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program, during a post-docking news conference. “We just had an outstanding day.”
The true danger the astronauts faced on board Starliner was not publicly revealed until after they landed and flew back to Houston. In an interview with Ars, Wilmore described the tense minutes when he had to take control of Starliner as its thrusters began to fail, one after the other.
One thing that has surprised outside observers since publication of Wilmore’s harrowing experience is how NASA, knowing all of this, could have seriously entertained bringing the crew home on Starliner.
Isaacman clearly had questions as well. He began reviewing the internal report on Starliner, published last November, almost immediately after becoming the space agency administrator in December. He wanted to understand why NASA insisted publicly for so long that it would bring astronauts back on Starliner, even though there was a safe backup option with Crew Dragon.
“Pretending that that did not exist, and focusing exclusively on a single pathway, created a cultural issue that leadership should have been able to step in and course correct,” Isaacman said during the teleconference. “What levels of the organization inside of NASA did that exist at? Multiple levels, including, I would say, right up to the administrator of NASA.”
Some of NASA’s biggest lapses in judgment occurred before the crew flight test, the report found. In particular, these revolved around the second orbital flight test of Starliner, which took place two years earlier, in May 2022.
During this flight, which was declared to be successful, three of the thrusters on the Starliner Service Module failed. In hindsight, this should have raised huge red flags for what was to come during the mission of Wilmore and Williams two years later.
However, in his letter to NASA employees, Isaacman said the NASA and Boeing investigations into these failures did not push hard enough to find the root cause of the thruster failures.
And so on. Lots of parallels with the Artemis program, though in Artemis Isaacman doesn't seem to be following his own conclusions from the Starliner failure.
For me, so long as the information is transparently discussed with the astronauts they can agree or disagree. But the task is intrinsically extremely risky.
It makes it very challenging for anyone to really know how to balance those risks.
The peak outcome (modal, mean at least) is a good outcome. But the tail is very very long with all the little ways a catastrophe can occur. I think the median outcome is also deeply in the "good" category.
And we sample this curve a few times a decade!
It doesn’t make any sense to spend that much money on something that’s still Russian roulette for the astronauts.
If the purpose of the human risk is to let the agency accomplish more, then it needs to be reflected in the cost as a drastic reduction (so you can actually spend the money on doing more). Now Artemis is the worst of both worlds.
Let the astronauts give informed consent. If they mission is to dangerous for NASA then we can only hope, ISRO, CNSA or ROSCOSMOS will go.
If they had set out to replicate the Moon landing at much lower cost and a controlled risk, that could have been different. Now they ended up with a very expensive, unsafe, and uninteresting mission - the worst possible combination.
Or Extend the mission to something novel? Some how without ballooning the project?
Neither is possible in the slightest.
For what it's worth the Apollo program adjusted for inflation is pushing 200bn USD compared to Artemis 100bn.
The Artemis programme is far safer than the Apollo program in terms of risk, Apollo sampled a much flatter high risk curve just 7 times.
Bottom line let the Astronauts decide what they consider safe enough they're very smart people and deserve to be allowed to give informed consent.
There are a lot of funerals in chapter 1 of Tom Wolfe's book, "The Right Stuff".
I suggest that some choice of profession come with a higher life-risk tolerance than others. "Accountants willing to risk their lives for the job" would be news. Firefighters, less so. Test pilots or astronauts, not much at all.
Neither of these are major risks compared to never being what you want to be.
I want you to repeat those words as you melt away re-entering the atmosphere.
The Shuttle deaths no problem.
I’m not a rocket scientist, but then neither is the author.
Orian is everything erong with US technology development and procurment.
This is the most frustrating part. The Pentagon can fail the same audit multiple times and be missing trillions of taxpayer dollars but NASA has to move heaven and earth to show their relatively paltry $100B budget isn't going to waste. I'm tired of the double standards.
Are you sure about that?
https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/05/24/spacex-swapping-heat-s...
Then again I'm not one of those people who roots for NASA to fail for some reason.
They had a heat shield on the capsule that failed testing, so they swapped out the interchangeable heat shield for one that passed testing.
There was no entirely new design, there was no new material science, it was the same heat shield that the previous crewed capsules have used without the manufacturing defect.
I don't know what "new" or "different" or "updated" or "structure" mean then anymore.
Humans in space are currently still a waste of time/money, largely just a big surrender to PR, space-selfies, the attention economy, and the general emphasis on "seem not be" you see elsewhere. Please just send robots, build a base, and let us know when we can put more than ~10 freaking people up there at one time. If that fails, then at least we'll have results in robotics research that can be applicable elsewhere on Earth right now as well as help us achieve the more grand ambitions later.
House is on fire, has been for a while, fuck business as usual. I honestly think all those smart people ought to be charged with things like using their operations research to improve government generally, or with larger-scale high tech job programs. If you don't want to let NASA big-brains try to fix healthcare, we could at least let them fix the DMV. Hell, let them keep their spin-offs too, so they actually want success, and have some part of their budget that won't disappear. Basic research and fundamental science is (still) something we need, but we need to be far more strategic about it.
Food for thought: The way things are going, we can definitely look forward to a NASA that's completely transformed into an informal, but publicly funded, research/telemetry arm for billionaire asteroid-mining operations, and thus more of the "public risk, private-profits" thing while we pad margins for people who are doing fine without the help. OTOH, if NASA is running asteroid mining businesses at huge profits, then they can do whatever they want with squishy volunteers as a sideshow, and maybe we'll have enough cash left over to fund basic income.
I'm tired of nickle and diming science funding. You had scientists like Sabine Hossenfelder cheerleading NSF cuts cause of "waste" on string theory and particle accelerators. NSF is 0.1% of the federal budget, and it has funded a remarkable number of world changing inventions over the last 40 years.
We don't spent JACK on space. Look at the huge returns from the Hubble and James Webb. Why aren't we building HUGE HUGE space telescopes as immediate followups? We should have 50 James Webb equivalents. NASA once had plans for a "Terrestial Planet Mapper", a bunch of giant space telescopes flying in formation that combine their signals for truly incredible resolution, good enough to image planets around distant solar systems to a few pixels.
We've now seen plenty of planets in the habitable zone with nearby signatures of biological precursor molecules. We've found asteroids with sugars and amino acids in them. Give NASA 10x the budget and end these damn wars. The Pentagon failed 7 audits and can't account for $2 TRILLION and we're talking about humans in space a waste? It's a drop in the bucket, and it provides a beacon for humanity to dream.
The Apollo projects created a whole generation of people who wanted to go into STEM, that's the biggest ROI.
NASA, the NSF, the NIH, et al, are not the problem. Their spending is insignificant, NASA+NSF is < 1% of the budget.
As for defense spending, to be clear I'm all for swapping the pentagon/nasa budgets, but afterwards I'd still call bullshit if I think there's gross mismanagement at NASA. Pandering to the public with space-selfies is mismanagement, even if it's brought on by desperation and shrinking budgets. I think there's a strong argument Webb was also is bad strategy / mismanagement, but it's too long to get into here.
Unfortunately, like everyone else, NASA, NSF et al do need to worry about public trust, ROI, and the dreaded question: What have you done for me lately? There's this idea that basic research must be incompatible with that sort of thing, but I disagree.
You think that was her wish? Typical situation is "We only get X, too much of it goes to Y, which is bad for Z". Of course X is not negotiable in an upwards direction, Y is some entrenched status-quo that's difficult to change, and Z is lots and lots of stuff. Everyone who cares about Z attacks Y because they can't increase X and don't expect they can decrease it (although sometimes just calling attention to the zone does that anyway).
DOGE is/was stupid and awful, not for their mission, but because of their methods, missing skill sets, sheer repugnant criminality, etc. As a general rule in any push for efficiency you'll be way better off exercising a little creative intelligence rather than doing straight austerity anyway. And while I don't think the entire government should be run like a business, why isn't more of it self-funding? So maybe let serious people with good intentions at NASA or NSF do DOGE-style work, creating tech or process that cuts costs for other less intellectually-gifted sections of the government, and then let them keep half of what they save the tax payers. Half of what they save could triple their budget! It's not ideal to use our best and brightest this way honestly, but house on fire, you work with what you have at hand.
Not only that, for truly long term perspective its about mankind survival. Even that POS musk realizes that (at least he did, not sure where his psychosis got him now and don't care much TBH).
If we stay around just Earth, we will be eventually wiped out. Maybe not in next million years (or maybe yes), but but given enough time one of many ways that would happen will happen, from the sky or from processes happening purely down here, manmade or not.
Its not rocket science, its not some magical theoretical what-if, just hard facts when digging around a bit and looking at history. Anybody who has power to change things and decides not to should be treated accordingly.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
There are rumors (that I've never been able to run down) that the astronaut corps insisted on this so the Shuttle could not be flown unmanned.
The outcome doesn’t determine the risk. I agree that this kind of office politics / face savings definitely is the cause of these two things.
Of course, six decades later, we should be able to do a lot better.
I didnt know, cus I just dont give a shit about this stupid project.
You’re not including the lives in your risk assessment .
There were 135 events and 14 people died .
If you were asked to join mission 136 would you say yes or no?
Which risk profile fits: 1% fatality or 10%?