control: "i guess we'll have to go back".

(paraphrased from memory)

How did they arrive at that number?

(Eg. Did they arbitrily establish the target at the outset? Or did it evolve by gauging the projected failure rate of their core mechanical etc. systems as those began to take shape, then establishing a universal minimum in line with that, to achieve some level of uniformity and avoid drastically under/over-engineering subsequent systems?)

They understood it to be extremely risky immediately. They understood the ice issue early on as evidenced by the fact that they completely changed the coating on the external fuel tank to try to compensate for it. They also added ice bridges and other features to the launch pad to try to diminish the risk. They also planned for in orbit heat shield tile repair. They specifically chose the glue to be compatible with total vacuum conditions so they could actually detach and rebond a whole tile if necessary. They developed a complicated and, unfortunately wrong, computer model to estimate the damage potential of ice strikes to the heat shield tiles. What they _finally_ came to understand was that you just have to swing the arm out on orbit and take high resolution pictures of the vehicle to properly assess it's condition.

NASA was and always is very bad at calculating systemic risk. They have the right people developing risk profiles for individual components but they've never had the understanding at the management level of how to assess them as a complete vehicle in the context of any given mission.

> Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle.

The huge advantage they now have is a capable launch escape system which can possibly jettison them away from the rocket should any issues arise during ascent. That was the one thing the shuttle could not possibly integrate.

On the other hand they could take a far larger crew to orbit and maintain them comfortably for several weeks during the mission. The "space bus" generated a healthy 21kW from it's fuel cells and created so much water that you had to periodically dump it overboard. This was a blessing for the ISS because you could bag up all that excess water and transfer it for long term use.

Anyways.. as you can tell.. I just really loved the shuttle. It was a great vehicle that was ultimately too exceedingly tricky to manage safely.

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?

Do you have a link? I’m asking because it is very easy to make mistakes when comparing risks. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47725961 translates that into “That if we send 30 people we _accept_ that one is possible to die.” If that interpretation is correct, given Artemis has a crew of four, that looks more like a 1:120 chance of a mortality of 4. I think that would make it an improvement over the space shuttle.

I think that audio stream was designed to be POTUS safe.

So with 4 crew members, chance of one dying was 13%! Very lucky they all survived.

(Some would snidely say as long as they don't put seven people on the rocket they'll be fine.)

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uuv6TVv0r44

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.

[wiki link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...).-,During%20spaceflight,fatality%20rate%20at%202.4%20percent.)

If you want a historical comparison, over 200 men left with Magellan on his voyage around the globe and only 40 returned.

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.

"1968 and the country was on fire. Vietnam. Assassinations. Civil unrest. Protests.

Apollo 8 was the one bright event of a terrible year.

2026 and the country is on fire. Iran. Corruption. Fascists. Civil unrest. No Kings.

I hope Artemis II will stand out as a bright spot for our country."

Some more background on her: https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2026/04/01/chicagoan-amy-l...

We can do this because of war.

We know where it will land accurately because that maths and physics has been sharpened with butt loads of data. Even the reentry blackout has links to war in Plasma Stealth[0].

That data was mostly obtained because we want to know where our ICBM warheads will land. And where the enemies ICBM warheads will land so we can work on the problem of shooting them down.

The Russian Kinzhal missile can hit targets at mach-10, with a plasma aura making it's terminal phase hard to track on Radar. But after some data was collected Patriot missile systems were able to intercept about 1 in 3 air launched Kinzhal missiles. Then minor terminal adjustments were introduced and interception fell to about 1 in 20. Now there's a constant cat and mouse game going on in Ukraine.

On the one hand that's a good thing, our combative efforts being sublimated into curiosity of the world.

On the other hand, we still put far more effort into furthering our ability to destroy the world.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_stealth

I like starting from the fact that Ptolemy was able to get the accuracy of the "motions of the heavens" down so well that it took more than a thousand years to get observations that showed discrepancies. The math, it maths.

Note: next time, pack a walkie talkie. ;-)

The commentary said that the initial problems with the boats approaching Integrity was due to an unexpected swell. Unexpected, in the Pacific?

Edit: all of the Apollo missions, except 8, had their stabilization collars inflated in under 20 minutes. With Integrity today it took nearly an hour more.

I don’t see how anything as substantive like this can be seen as “vanity” (unless you mean to count that as a bonus).

It’s amazing to see NASA doing newer great things (Webb, Mars probes, all have been incredibly cool too, but manned stuff always hits a different note). Yes they’re way more expensive than SpaceX, I get all that. But it’s nice to see something so overwhelmingly positive and a true example of human ingenuity, collaboration, and bravery, that we need a lot more of that to remind us these days of the positive times we live in.

And the fact that we did this 50 years ago, at least to me, means I appreciate even more how we got it done with that age’s technology and knowledge the first time.

You can't just start from zero and fly to Mars. You need to build an entire workforce able to produce and operate fantastically complicated machines. And you need to fly regular missions, each more ambitious than the last, until finally we can land people on the Red Planet.

Artemis II is the beginning.

Because it's useless doesn't mean it is not cool. Sport and art are "useless", too.

SpaceX catching with chopsticks and doing booster catches has already done that for me. Crazy advances.

Not to say it's the best of times, nor to say it's the worst of times, mind you. Just that it's really hard to objectively compare.

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.

That was indeed quite a year. The Rest is History podcast on it was quite good.

> 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.

"Death, from disease or excess, was a commonplace, and two-thirds of the Company servants who came out never made it back – fewer still in the Company’s army, where 25 per cent of European soldiers died each year."

Indeed, it's rather amazing to think about just how recently things changed. The generation that first went to the moon had a much lower infant mortality rate than in the 1500s, but it was still about 20 times higher than today, and critically they were all raised by parents and lead by people who had grown up around normalized high infant mortality rates. Boomers are the first generation where infant mortality was continually below 5%, and millennials are the first generation to be raised by parents who considered their children's survival to adulthood a given. And of course that's for the developed world; global infant mortality only fell below 5% in 2010. Right now is the first time in human history that you can say with 95% confidence that a random human newborn will survive to adulthood. We should be much more risk averse than our ancestors, we are on average anteing up many more happy, healthy years than they were.

If it means that, on average, a team member dies every 30 flights, with a crew of four, it’s likely there are fatalities in ‘only’ one in every 120 flights.

For space shuttle, that number was about one in every 60 flights. So, with that interpretation, Artemis would be about twice as safe as the Space Shuttle.

If, on the other hand, it means that, if you step aboard Artemis, your chance of dying during the flight is about one in 30, the Space Shuttle would be about twice as safe as Artemis.

Gordo! Who's the best pilot you ever saw? -- You're lookin' at him!

Loan me a stick of Beemans.

Light this candle!

It just blew!

No bucks, no Buck Rogers.

Wild stuff really. There is a book about it, using an Abe Lincoln quote he said hoping that the civil war wouldn’t happen, “better angels of our nature”.

It’s all in fun, really, like the old analogies involving hard drive heads and jet planes.

But the interception rate for the Kh-32 is basically nonexistence (<1%).

The Kh-22/32 is why mach-5 + maneuverability is the current goal of offensive missile systems.

The plasma has complex interaction with radar, it's not stealth as in entirely invisible just chaotic scattering and reflections. The result is a jamming effect preventing a definite intercept solution.

On the other hand the plasma shows up on satilite based IR tracking systems.

All of these factors and more have to be taken into account if you want your predictions to be accurate. Aside from telemetry processing, most of the computing power on the ground during a space mission is used for churning out navigation solutions.

Fun info: The NASA orbital codes include things like photon pressure... from sunlight reflected off of other planets in the solar system. At some point, I think they are just showing off :)

What is the alternative, not go to Mars?

My opinion is that landing humans on Mars could be the start of a new age of exploration, which would massively benefit humanity. And the risk of contamination is worth the potential reward.

That's just my opinion, of course, but it happens to be NASA's opinion as well.

Was the first automobile so slow and clunky it was useless, or did it lead to the F1 cars of today?

Was Alan Touring’s computer so slow it was useless, or did it lead to this comment being typed on a device that is many orders of magnitude faster and smaller?

Going to Mars will teach us a lot. In the future when we go further it will be useful in ways we can’t imagine today.

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.)

> 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...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-27

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.

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.

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.

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/Shanghaiing

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.

  1) Eventually you will die, no matter what. It can be the most mundane thing. Slipping on a ketchup splatter can cause great damage for example.

  2) It's a profession where you intentionally kill people, so, that changes the calculation for your own risk.

  3) It's a unique opportunity.

  4) Gives a sense of living / be in history books for his family.

I definitely don’t envy kids that are born nowadays.

But what about comparing the same country/region? After all that's a better sense of how things are progressing locally to you, and when people are asked "are things better or worse" they probably compare the way they live with the way their parents lived.

Would you rather be born in 1980 or 2020 in China? In Poland? No question. Same question but in the USA? In the UK? The West in general? I'm really not so sure.

I think you're being a pedant, if your point is a grazing entry causing rebound skip ultimately returns to some orbital path downward.

Artemis II never escaped Earth’s pull.

That video that NASA put out where the craft did a sling shop around the moon is extremely deceptive. The pull of the moon had very little effect.

If they had missed, they would have eventually crashed back to earth in the worst case, and best case just re-adjusted and returned a little bummed.

There was also Nautilus-X which never made it beyond the concept stage.

What was the real reason? Tradition? Lack of imagination? Photo opportunities?

The rest was great tho.

Memory foam, smart phone cameras, tech miniaturization in general, GPS, baby formula, cordless tools... just a tiny sliver of things we use daily that are directly attributable to the pursuit of space travel.

It is far from useless

Yep, while we are measurably destroying the Earth's biodiversity orders of magnitudes faster than the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs. And this is without global warming, which is another great thing we are doing.

Arguably, the biggest thing humanity is doing is killing the Earth. Great that we have some comfort in doing fun things on the side.

Sorry, what science and discovery is that bringing?

I mean it's technically really cool, but I fail to see the science and discovery there.

Otherwise I would also just bet on RCS venting like in Apollo.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20171208090538/http://www.tested...

And from an older NASA explanation: https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-shares-orion-heat-shi...

> Engineers already are assembling and integrating the Orion spacecraft for Artemis III based on lessons learned from Artemis I and implementing enhancements to how heat shields for crewed returns from lunar landing missions are manufactured to achieve uniformity and consistent permeability.

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... 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

Somehow all the numbers just happened to line right up. :)

How could they have eliminated that risk?

    > Was funding really secure?

The Saturn V's existed. Saturn V serial numbers were designated as S-5## where # is an increment from 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#Launch_history <--- see the Saturn V numbering scheme here.

SA-513 was repurposed from Apollo 18 to Skylab. SA-514 was meant for Apollo 19. They put it on display. SA-515 was also chopped up and put on display. Some parts were used in Skylab. https://www.space.com/nasa-extra-apollo-moon-saturn-v-rocket...

So there were 3 Saturn V already assembled and in existence.

Did the CSMs and LEMs exist? CSMs had a similar serial number scheme. And they designated "Block 1" and "Block 2" (iterations of the spacecraft design based on testing) CSM-0## and CSM-1##

The CSM used in Apollo 17 was CSM-114. On wikipedia it says that CSM-115 and CSM-115a were never fully assembled and cancelled, but if you look past that, you can also see that Skylab used, CSM-116, CSM-117 and CSM-118. These were Apollo CSMs, fresh off the same assembly line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_command_and_service_mod...

So there were 3 CSMs.

What about LEM? Similar number scheme, LM-## which is incremented with each one made. So first one was LM-1 and the last one used on Apollo 17 was LM-12. LM-13 is on display in a museum. LM-14 was on the production line (along with LM-15??) and a "stop work" order was issued and they were scrapped. Yes, they were literally broken down and turned into scrap. https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-lunar-modules-lm14-lm15...

So NASA had 1 LEM and 2 were on the way. I think, we can charitably say that there were 3 LEMs available at the time. I think it's fair to say that...

There were 3 LEMs.

Did they have 3 crews? Funnily enough, they did have 3 crews already assigned! What a coincidence. https://web.archive.org/web/20181224161154/https://nssdc.gsf... :)

So the Saturn Vs existed and had been paid for. The CSMs existed and had been paid for. The LMs existed / were on the line and had been paid for. The crews existed (and had been partially paid for).

So what is the "funding shortfall" that caused America to stop going to the moon?

The "funding shortfall" here is the money required to pay for the ground crews and personnel for carrying out the mission. And that amount was $42.1 million out of $956 million for Apollo. The total NASA budget was, $3.27 billion that year.

   > NASA was canceling Apollo missions 15 and 19 because of congressional cuts in FY 1971 NASA appropriations, Administrator Thomas O. Paine announced in a Washington news conference. Remaining missions would be designated Apollo 14 through 17. The Apollo budget would be reduced by $42.1 million, to $914.4 million - within total NASA $3.27 billion.

It's probably a coincidence that this happened right after Apollo 13. The decision was announced on September 2nd, 1970. Apollo 13 happened in April, 1970.

----

So yes, the funding was there. I suspect the "funding cut" argument was an attempt to save face; after the US Government (and I mean the Government, it's clear both the White House and Congress were involved) decided to cut the cord post-Apollo 13.

I also suspect this is one of the many "open secrets" lost to time. It might have been known by "everyone" in the know at the time, but those who knew died off, and history crystallized around the written page.

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.

From the broadcast, they made it sound like a big factor is the 2 hour program requirement to get the crew out of the capsule. Maybe they can't reliably hit that mark with a well deck recovery?

[1] https://www3.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/orion-recove...

Not being an astronaut (or being a test pilot, for that matter). That's the context in which he was speaking.

I was born in 1978, and in the early '80s, beat approximately 50/50 odds by not getting infected with HIV from the only available treatments at the time, and as a result of this and other risks including hepatitis, treatments were only used in response to active bleeding episodes throughout my childhood, resulting in arthritis in my ankles and elbows by the time I was around 8.

And I still wound up with hepatitis C from near birth (at which point it was referred to as "non-A, non-B", as the virus would not be identified until the late '80s) until a cure was developed decades later, fortunately never symptomatic.

So, while I beat the odds, my life expectancy from birth until much later would have been considerably longer had I been born in 2020, and my joints would work a lot better.

Oh, and as someone who grew up with the Shuttle and attended both Space Camp and Space Academy in Huntsville, inevitable political nonsense notwithstanding, I'm elated about the successful mission.

As for the odds, given the opportunity, I wouldn't even hesitate unless they were worse than 1 in 10.

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

Hope is powerful, cynicism is an opiate.

At no point were the astronauts piloting a boat. The reasons they splash down into the ocean has nothing to do with buoyancy being easier to solve, and even less to do with the ease of piloting a boat.

>It’s also hyperbole to suggest we understand lift. We don’t.

Maybe you personally do not understand lift, but "we" do in fact understand it. Please educate yourself before continuing this discussion any further.

I'm also a pilot (CFI). My day job is space operations. And I can tell you've had too many hangar arguments about how wings work.

Pilots don't understand lift. Aero engineers understand it just fine.

This isn’t true. The same article even explains that.

From that article: “It takes only some basic fact checking to debunk all the preposterous allegations…”

- They replaced the specific foam insulation that struck Columbia with external heaters, and redesigned other areas where foam was necessary to ensure greater structural stability + minimize damage to the shuttle in case of breakage. They also began more thorough inspection of any heat shield panels that would be reused between missions

- They added various cameras, both on the shuttle and on the ground, to monitor the heat shield throughout launch, plus accelerometers and temperature sensors. Also, the heat shield was checked manually on every mission once in orbit for damage, both with an extension to the Canadarm, and with ISS cameras when possible (a funky maneuver [0] where they would do a backflip to flash the shuttle's belly at the ISS for it to take high res pictures)

- Every mission from then on had a backup plan in case the shuttle wasn't in a state to return to Earth (this wasn't really the case before then, which is kinda wild). Another shuttle was always ready to launch, with a new configuration of seats to allow for sufficient crew space

- They sent up equipment and materials for repairs in space with every launch, though admittedly the usefulness of that was dubious and the repair kits were never used

Perhaps 'eliminate' was too strong a word, but there's no reason these precautions couldn't or shouldn't have been taken before it resulted in deaths and the loss of a spacecraft. (well, other than the aforementioned funding/politics/organizational failure)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_pitch_maneuver

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...

Here we are, half a century after the first moon landing, doing a flyby of the moon in preparation for landing and supposedly for establishing a base there that makes no sense. We’re not even close to being able to send humans to the nearest planets, and even if we did send people to Mars, in one of the most pointlessly dangerous and expensive missions in history, it’d be extremely unlikely to lead even to a base, let alone a settlement.

Yet with all that, people still talk about the Fermi paradox as though it’s a mystery.

It makes me think we’re really dealing with a kind of religious belief. Religion backfills reality with comforting fantasies, like life after death. In this case, the fantasy that there are much more advanced, interstellar spacefaring civilizations than ours elsewhere in the galaxy. This implies that humans too could one day become an interstellar species (with enough grit and determination and pulling back on the control stick and yelling, I suppose!) But somehow, mysterious effects prevent us from ever observing any evidence of this belief.

  - Historical. Low N as you say. (Even though each mission and spacecraft is different and they're spread out over time, there's value in this)
  - Bureaucrat number; absurdly low, but looks good to politicians etc
  - Engineering estimate

They certainly could've gotten the return wrong but with a perigee of 119 miles they arent even in a stable orbit and likely could deorbit themselves using only rcs thrusters at apogee, or by just waiting a few orbits.

No, it had a very significant effect: it's what made possible the free return trajectory while observing the far side of the moon.

>> Under Artemis, NASA will send astronauts on increasingly difficult missions to explore more of the Moon for *scientific discovery*, economic benefits, and to build on our foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.

Yeah fuck me for thinking this was about that that.

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.

For me, it's a fun conspiracy theory to engage with. I'm only doing this for the love of the game as it were. Please don't take it that seriously.

But you have to admit, it is a fun theory. A lot of the claims made by the Russians / Roscosmos are most likely false, but if you notice the article says,

    > The only concrete document referred to is an intelligence memo that Defense Minister Sokolov supposedly received on February 24 about the assignment of the French astronauts. Whether such a memo really landed on his desk that day is questionable (after all, Baudry’s assignment to 51E had been publicly announced by NASA in August 1984), but the idea that the assignment raised some suspicions in Soviet circles about the objectives of the Challenger mission may not be so far-fetched. There had always been a high level of paranoia in the Soviet Union about the military potential of the Space Shuttle. Misconceptions about the military applications of the shuttle, such as the belief that it was capable of diving into the atmosphere to drop bombs over Moscow, had been a key factor in the Soviet decision to develop Buran in 1976. The Buran orbiter was a virtual carbon copy of its US counterpart in shape and dimensions, exactly to counter the perceived military threat of the Shuttle. Furthermore, a couple of developments in the Shuttle program in early 1985 may have fueled the Soviet paranoia. The Shuttle had flown its first dedicated Defense Department mission (STS-51C) in January 1985 and a controversial laser experiment in the framework of SDI was planned for the STS-51G mission in June.

    > The least one can say is that Salyut-7, which was 13.5 meters long and had a maximum diameter of 4.15 meters, would have fit inside the Shuttle’s cargo bay, whose dimensions were 4.6 by 18 meters. In fact, after the final crewed mission to Salyut-7 in 1986, the Russians significantly raised its orbit in hopes that one day it could be retrieved by Buran, which had the same dimensions as the American shuttle.

and this is one of my favorite missions, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-A (with my favorite space selfie)

Fun fact, the original deorbit plan for the Hubble was for the Shuttle to bring it back and then put it inside the Smithsonian, https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/orbitaldebris2019/orbital2...

(the Smithsonian part is IRL lore, and isn't mentioned online, AFAICT)

Actually the backup plan almost every time was to just stay on the ISS until another Shuttle could be prepared. They only had another Shuttle on standby a couple times, during missions where they weren’t going to the ISS.

>They sent up equipment and materials for repairs in space with every launch, though admittedly the usefulness of that was dubious and the repair kits were never used

Yeah it wasn’t even useful for a situation like Columbia. It didn’t lose a few tiles or something, it had a giant hole punched into its wing.

There’s no fixing that in space. So I personally think they focused on situations they could theoretically fix, even though those situations weren’t what happened to Columbia.

Hmm. Maximum speed attained by Artemis II when they left their initial orbit was about 11.1 km/s IIRC. While this is somewhat less than true escape velocity from Earth (11.2 km/s) and you are technically correct, it is also enough of a speed that if you fly away in any random direction (and not a carefully calculated one), perturbances from the Sun and other massive objects will probably prevent you from reaching any sort of stable orbit around the Earth, and you will start bouncing around the inner Solar System in an erratic way.

I certainly wouldn't like to model that trajectory for months or years.

While I have no reason to believe this particular escapade, I do expect that there are a thousand such wild stories that have remained secret. Watergate seems obvious and explosive to moderns, but at the time it could easily have gone undiscovered or unremarked. How many other similar scale plots, domestic and international, succeeded or failed without ever being surfaced into the history books? A few? Dozens? Hundreds? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And the public is not fooled. Whatever benefits they got from Apollo (Tang? Zero-G pens?) were not worth the cost. But no matter how long the USA lasts, it will always be remembered as the country that landed humans on the moon.

What IIRC was actually done was that some antennas were placed on the back of the shuttle & its size was big enough that the plasma bubble would not fully envelope it - it would be open up to space. And that antenna on the back would communicate with TDRS satellites through this gap, enabling contact through the whole re-entry.

Starship does basically the same, just with Starlink satellites instead of TDRS.

Also Orion and other capsules fall like a rock (steep reentry profile ) compared to shuttle/starship, which intentionally slow down the reentry and kinda glide (ballpark 10min with capsules compared to 30min with shuttle/starship).

tl;dr: capsules get fully enveloped in plasma due to their shape, size and reentry profile

Sending people in space? Mostly cool engineering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)

"Sprint accelerated at 100 g, reaching a speed of Mach 10 (12,000 km/h; 7,600 mph) in 5 seconds. Such a high velocity at relatively low altitudes created skin temperatures up to 6,200 °F (3,400 °C), requiring an ablative shield to dissipate the heat. The high temperature caused a plasma to form around the missile, requiring extremely powerful radio signals to reach it for guidance. The missile glowed bright white as it flew."

By comparison, Earth may be barely habitable. It is amusing to think that we may be living on the galactic equivalent of Australia.

Perhaps the upside is that our gravity well is low enough to make routine spaceflight possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superhabitable_world

"In 1995, geologists Roger Buick, Davis Des Marais, and Andrew Knoll reviewed the apparent lack of major biological, geological, and climatic events during the Mesoproterozoic era 1.6 to 1 billion years ago (Ga), and, thus, described it as "the dullest time in Earth's history"

Why is this so difficult to understand? Honestly I think that misleading NASA graphic did a lot of damage.

You throw in acceleration, which I never mentioned and doesn’t matter. The Artemis II never left Earth’s gravitional pull, the original issue was effectively what if it missed - and the answer is no big deal.

That assumes a fair coin. The fact is you don't know what the odds were of getting heads or tails for that particular coin, all you know is that you got 3/4 heads. And in this analogy, a few hundred coins have every been made, in maybe a dozen styles, none of which have been fair, so you have no good reason to believe that this particular coin should have 50/50 odds of landing heads up.

SETI BTW is kind of a joke. The only way we would hear anything is if someone was very close or was intentionally blasting a signal at us at incredible transmit power (like terawatts or more). Radio signals fade pretty quickly.

The public doesn't care if Apollo had a theoretical risk rate lower or higher than 1/12, what they saw was that 1/12 missions resulted in the death of the crew. The NASA administrator explaining that their estimated risk was only 1/1000 doesn't change the real-world perception or outcome.

I’m sorry? Wut?

FWIW, the 1/12 is also actually off, the long-term mortality rate for Apollo astronauts is high.

But so is the 1/1000, Nasa's own estimates were so bad that they decided it was bad optics to keep doing them - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190002249/downloads/20...