Comment by rustyhancock
6 days ago
To some extent I think since the challenger disaster trying to blow the whistle on safety issues at NASA has been romantacized.
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!
The Artemis program has cost over $100 billion so far.
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.
>It doesn’t make any sense to spend that much money on something that’s still Russian roulette for the astronauts.
Sure it does.
We've got billions of humans to spend on getting humanity out of its gravity well. We can and will spare a few more.
Getting humanity out of our gravity well is the most important task this species faces, along with stabilizing our use of the resources in this one. https://nickbostrom.com/papers/astronomical-waste/
If you're not willing to spend a few lives on this problem you're not serious about the problem.
If you’re willing to spend a few lives, you can do that much cheaper than Artemis which aims to be perfectly safe but doesn’t actually succeed.
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If you need expect perfection then we will never have a space mission.
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.
The point is that a $100B mission that’s still dangerous and only replicates 1960s achievements is completely pointless.
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.
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