Godspeed crew of Artemis II.
Seriously though I hope they're able to get up and walk around
I don't know if I could handle that 10 days in that small room
Trying to imagine how big the thing is like 10x10 feet room
I did lockdown in a ~450 sq. ft. Habitable under 400. Partner. Cat. Me. The astronauts will be fine.
I’m 6’, so that’s the usable volume. (I’m not claustrophobic heighwise.)
I honestly don’t see an issue spending a couple days with folks I respect and admire in close quarters for ten days.
Have you ever been on a boat?
What is a "boat"?
Not in a storm you can't! Granted I didn't do ten days. But I was with two other people for close to a week and it was...fine. We're old friends. There were moments it got annoying. But it was never boring or restrictive. We just played games, drank, looked out of the portholes, cursed hangovers and talked the one person who occasionally wanted to call it.
And with modern forms of entertainment to make the trip less boring.
"We're sorry, your Prime subscription appears to have cancelled. Would you like to renew it? We can send you a text message to get this started ..."
But these satellites are very close to earth compared to the moon. It wouldn’t only save 0.3% transmit power vs just sending right to the surface. It’s very unlikely the consumer antennas could manage hitting an earth satellite from the moon.
Well, one side of it.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/theres-a-bit...
Is that with or without spinning the chamber between rounds? The odds are worse if you spin each time. They get worse as the game goes on if you don't spin.
How do they get worse if you spin? It’s still 1/6 odds of dying,iid events.
From a quick search, this page explains it: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/RussianRoulette.html
Talk about space stuff here, not the statistical nature of Russian roulette.
There are about 500 different HN browser extensions that let you collapse threads, btw.
I was only a teenager and it burned into my brain badly
To this day cannot watch any launch with people onboard live
In the UK as a kid, when Challenger happened, our children's news programme reported it before the mainstream TV.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/sci_tech/newsid_2701000/27...
Yes, a robot car that drives on its own will be a better driver than most humans who text and drive, or have 400ms reaction times.
But making a machine that can beat a 110ms reaction time human with 2SD+ IQ, and the ability to override the ground controllers with human curiosity is much harder. Humans have high dexterity, are extremely capable of switching roles fast, are surprisingly efficient, and force us to return back home.
So in terms of total science return, one Apollo mission did more for lunar science and discovery than 53 years of robots on the surface and in orbit.
I would like to point out that the current misadventure in the ME has cost at least $38,035,856,006 in 32 days. And that won't receive half of the "this is a waste of money" critiques this mission will. And there are a ton of people who are against that excursion.
Most people who will come across this will react with either extreme negativity or indifference. Very few people will react positively. This thread itself is evidence of that. This is a nerdy community filled with people who are deeply positive about space exploration and excluding my comments, the straw poll was,
~81 positive (48%), ~43 negative (25%), ~45 neutral (27%).
It might not be the allocation of capital we like, but it doesn't disappear.
Goods like longer-lasting food, medical supplies or a strategic oil reserve are not wasted. The money that went into supplying them has gone back into the economy, and they serve a more strategic purpose than the market participants could have borne (i.e. societal insurance policies). The same could also be said of military stockpiles, and continuing to buy them sustains a capability that is hard to get back once lost.
You make wealth concentration sound like a good thing somehow. This was publicly collected tax money, that will go on to enrich some already rich douchebag.
This is a fair question. The closest answer I can get is eyes and ears onboard complement sensors.
True. I wasn’t thinking about training the ground crews.
This is not just training the current flight crew and ground crews, but is also generally testing the entire system - including operations and hardware too, with feedback important to logistics and component manufacturers, etc. With possible exception of Falcon 9 launches, space missions are still infrequent enough that each of them is providing knowledge and experience meaningfully relevant to all work in and adjacent to space exploration and space industry.
This can be done autonomously. The human training cannot.
Is this really helpful for a tech validation flight? We can put those sensors onboard.
> We can recover that and more data later, but it's a delayed, after-the-fact analysis. There's value in immediate feedback and immediate decisions
To a degree. We’ve validated vehicles remotely for LEO enough times that I’m sceptical we need humans for that. (Again, we do for ground-crew interaction training.)
> Apollo was over three orders of magnitude more efficient in producing scientific papers per day of fieldwork than are the MERs. This is essentially the same as Squyres’ (2005) intuitive estimate given above, and is consistent with the more quantitative analogue fieldwork tests reported by Snook et al. (2007).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Ultraviolet_Camera/Spectro...
The philosopher Randall Munroe once wrote:
> The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.This is the same way that all manned spaceflight programs are conducted. You iterate and learn a little bit at a time. "Move fast and break things" doesn't work here. :)
If you can fly people around the moon, then landing people on the moon is a more reasonable next step.
I agree that it may not be entirely logical, but keeping public and funding opinion positive & invested _is_ important.
edit: I thought RocketLab flew their elecron rocket around the moon a few years ago? So it's definitely doable... so again I think it's about the optics.
That's probably the justification for sending four people. First test flight probably could have been done with one or two pilots.
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
Money being fungible and all, the rest can pretend their tax money is going exclusively to their favorite programs, whether that's healthcare or environment or building roads or starting wars or funding more startups or whatever.
I don't think so. Some people are good at small tasks and stewardship. Some people want to ambitiouslyl build. If there isn't a space program, the engineers who were inspired to join NASA cannot be assumed to have gone into semiconductors or material science. They probably wound up, in the alternate timeline, bureaucrats or financiers.
I guess this is why in this timeline, all engineers in the world are at NASA working on sending humans to space, and everybody else in the world is a bureaucrat.
Do you actually know any kind of engineering that is not happening at NASA? Because it may explain your bias here.
Finance literally bids rocket scientists away from the satellite industry. The result is that erstwhile scientists, people who in another age dreamt of curing cancer or flying to Mars, today dream of becoming hedge fund managers.
Personally, I'd also add "Big Tech" to the list, as per a more recent quote:
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.
How does this follow? Are you arguing the Moon programs didn’t increase American engagement in STEM?
The point is the people who worked on a partial solution to a terrestrial problem because they were working on space may not be inspired—or incentivized—to work on that problem directly. We’re willing, as a society, to spend big on the Moon. Spending big on creek maintenance and desal, comparatively, is boring. Yet both benefit from the first.
> you actually know any kind of engineering that is not happening at NASA?
Yes. Have you done any heavy engineering?
> it may explain your bias here
Do tell me, someone who has never worked at or particularly close to NASA, what my bias is here.
Nope. You are arguing that without a space program, people don't go into STEM and instead become "bureaucrats or financiers". I am saying that this is preposterous.
> We’re willing, as a society, to spend big on the Moon.
No. Society doesn't have a say in how that money is being spent, that's my original point.
I never used such hyperbole. I’m arguing fewer people go into STEM. And the people who do cannot be assumed to work on the projects that matter to you.
> Society doesn't have a say in how that money is being spent
Of course we do. Space programmes are popular. That’s why they get funded.
That's the case with or without a space program that sends humans to space for the sake of sending humans to space.
> Space programmes are popular. That’s why they get funded.
Space programs are popular because they are cool. The people don't get to vote the budgets, though. Because DOGE did not cut the budget of the space programs does not mean that "society is willing to spend big on the Moon". At all.
DOGE absolutely tried to gut Artemis [1]. The popularity is part of what saved it. (Weirdly myopic metric for what is and isn’t popular? Since when did DOGE become arbiters of anything.)
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/19/g-s1-49451/artemis-moon-nasa-...
Where did I imply that? I said that DOGE not doing something did NOT imply something. Too many negations for you, maybe?
> you're mad about space exploration?
Exploration? It's not exploration at all: it's sending 4 humans for a 10 days trip around the Moon. I wish they used the money for actual space exploration, though.
Or not farming. Lots of CRE. Also constant bail-outs because e.g. the soybean farmers got tariffed. Also ethanol.
I'm much more concerned about my tax dollars going toward the US military, especially with Trump wanting another $200B so he can murder more people in Iran while making the world and the US measurably less safe.
Even with a goal of eventually putting humans on the moon, it'd be better to do an automated run, measure everything in the cockpit, and put in sandbags and/or something to consume O2 to make sure the CO2 scrubbers are working correctly. It's maybe cruel, but a few dogs would work fine for that sort of thing. A flame would be better, but it's pretty dangerous.
The first mission in decades doesn't need to have humans in it.
It says that it is not safe to fly. They are sending humans without having tested in real conditions that their design was sound, GIVEN that the first time they did that (without humans), it turned out that their design was unsafe.
The takeaway, is that the software was fine, but other systems like the main engine used too much cutting edge technology and have a lot of unexpected failure modes and too many problems like partialy broken parts that should no get partialy broken. [For a weird coincidence, Artemis II uses the same engines.] He concluded that when you consider all the possible problems the failure rate was closer to 1/100, but management was underestimating them and the official value that was 1/100000. [Anyway, the engines didn't fail in Columbia, it was one of the other possible problems.]
The articles explain that the shield has problems but management is underestimating them again. Let's hope the mission goes fine, but in case of a explosion it would be like a deja vu.
Much different than predicting future.
If you have 2 or 3 spare hours, it's worth reading.
The guy got a lot of first hand information about the Challenger disaster. He analyzed not only what went wrong, that is in the 20-20 category, but also what could have gone wrong, that is in the speculation category.
But if you read that report after the Columbia disaster, it's almost a premonition. He didn't identify the exact problem that caused the explosion, but the decisions that made that posible were quite similar.
Statements like this:
"Put more simply, NASA is going to fly Artemis II based on vibes, hoping that whatever happened to the heat shield on Artemis I won’t get bad enough to harm the crew on Artemis II."
Are just so intellectually dishonest and completely ignore the extensive research and testing that's gone into qualifying this flight.
What would would help is if you said something like "Maceij says modeling a different entry approach on computers is no substitute for a bona fide re-entry testing a new design, but that's incorrect because _____."
Either theres a functional literacy issue here keeping you from understanding what it means to express a substantive thought or you overestimate other people's toleration for writing checks promising unmade arguments that never cash. You can't keep buying time with nothingburgers.
If that is so, put your money where you mouth is and place a bet on polymarket. If you are too scared to do so, then admit it to yourself, and understand that you don't believe this shit anyway.
Because you being a cuck for a contrarian for the sole reason that he is going against the grain is basically the same as Joe Rogan being anti-vaxx because its trendy and cool to think government=bad.
Aww, it would make me sad if people were betting on astronauts dying.
"Maciej says modeling a different entry approach on computers is no substitute for a bona fide re-entry testing a new design, but that's incorrect because _____."
The most clear cut indicator of intelligence is the ability to present both sides of the coin, and even more so state the conditions which make either side true or false.
Isn't that a platform for insider trading? Not sure it qualifies here.
They've changed the AVCOAT to be less permeable and altered the re-entry profile.
One of the findings of Artemis I is that lack of permeability led to trapped gas pockets which expanded and blew out pieces of heat shield. The reason for the change to be less permeable is to make it easier to perform ultrasonic testing, not to improve performance.
They altered the re-entry profile on the theory that the skip period contributed to spalling, but Charles Camarda disagrees in this doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
> Another chart which the Artemis Tiger Team did not intend to show on Jan. 8th, was the figure showing the spallation events as a function of time during the skip entry heating profiles (Figure 6.0-4 of NESC Report TI-23-0189 Vol. 1). In this figure, it was quite clear that the Program narrative they were feeding to the press, that it was the dwell time during the skip which allowed the gases generated to build up and cause the delta pressures which caused most of the spallation was, again, patently false. In fact, during the first heat pulse (t ≈ 0 to 240 sec), approximately 40-45% of all the medium to large chunks of ablator spalled off the Artemis I heatshield.
> Hence, varying the trajectory would do little to prevent spallation during Artemis II. I was never shown the new, modified trajectory at the Jan. 8th meeting.
I found this visual schematic of the spalling helpful - https://vectree.io/c/the-physics-of-ablative-spalling-in-ori...
It finally makes sense why the gas needs to leak out... if it gets trapped behind the burnt outer crust, the pressure just blows pieces of the shield off like a tiny bomb
Fixes have been made to the design, but they haven't been tested in flight.
So that means this capsule will fly a different re-entry profile to attempt to avoid the issue and Artemis IV will fly with untested fixes for lunar return.
Sort of. At a certain threshold, everything is untested. I’d put this closer to modified than untested—the general config was tested in Artemis I and the specific configuration in a variety of ground tests.
If it fails and the mission fails with loss of life while knowing it went ahead despite the IG report about the heat shield... It might be the end of NASA.
Hopefully it will return safely.
If idiots and emotions rein, maybe. Then the centre of gravity for space exploration correctly shifts to Musk and China.
The problem is that the purpose of NASA's manned spaceflight program isn't to explore space. It's to make the President look good (and I'm not just talking about the current one here) and funnel money to contractors. In that respect it's doing quite well.
We're commenting on NASA's live stream that exists to get us pumped up about the tens of billions of dollars we overpaid for this launch.
I'm probably much more happy than the next guy about getting to see a flyby of the moon this week even if I really wish we'd gotten here another way, but the accusation is a bit funny in this thread in particular.