Comment by adamsb6

Get nervous in 10 days, they won't need a heat shield until reentry.

> in the same way that you'll probably survive one round of Russian roulette

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.

Same. I watched last night, UK time, and I couldn't shake the worrying feeling. I was relieved that they got into orbit. Now I can be a little bit excited until re-entry. That worries me for the same reason.

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...

The event itself was a few years before my time, but after reading about it and eventually watching the historical news footage, the phrase "go at throttle up" also seared itself into my brain, and ever since I flinch when I hear it.

Because human beings are remarkably capable, especially the best and the brightest. There's a great paper called the "dispelling the myth of robotic efficiency." https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article-abstract/53/2/2.22... // https://lasp.colorado.edu/mop/files/2019/08/RobotMyth.pdf

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.

Because the goal of the program is to return humans to the moon. Artemis I was the unmanned test. This is the first manned test, and what they learn will support the subsequent missions that eventually land humans on the moon.

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. :)

I suspect it's the optics of it.

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.

Because they want to be on the rocket. To see the moon up close with your own eyes? It's spiritual.

It is a test of the spacecraft. They need people onboard to test all the human systems. But yes, if this was a purely scientific flyby and not part of a larger manned program, machines would do it fine.

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Yeah. Doesn't really make sense. The entire mission could be done remotely.

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.

See this recent blog post about it (I am not the author): https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....

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.

I mean the design.

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.

We already did Artemis I and the heat shield lost a lot more material than it was supposed to on that flight. "Specifically, portions of the char layer wore away differently than NASA engineers predicted, cracking and breaking off the spacecraft in fragments that created a trail of debris rather than melting away as designed. The unexpected behavior of the Avcoat creates a risk that the heat shield may not sufficiently protect the capsule’s systems and crew from the extreme heat of reentry on future missions."

Fixes have been made to the design, but they haven't been tested in flight.

The heat shield is a bit different, and the reentry profile is a bit different as well.

Some people are great at self promotion.