Comment by russdill

4 days ago

An article written by a "Polish-American web developer, entrepreneur, speaker, and social critic" says it's not safe to fly. And? What do the astronauts flying on board with significantly more information say?

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russdill

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gus_massa  4 days ago

There is also an old article written by a professional bongo player about the Challenger explossion. He has other hobbies, but he was not a Rocket Scientist https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v2appf.htm

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.

  • Silamoth  3 days ago

    Calling Richard Feynman a “professional bongo player” is hardly an honest description. He was a Nobel prize winning physics professor renowned for his problem-solving abilities. He was certainly qualified to analyze the Challenger explosion.

  • ActorNightly  4 days ago

    Anyone can write an article when the hindsight is 20-20. You can make all sorts of justifications about what happened.

    Much different than predicting future.

    • gus_massa  3 days ago

      The in the article I linked has a lot of other qualifications. Someone wrote a comment complaining about my misscharacterization, but deleted it before I could say sorry. Sorry for the joke!

      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.

glenstein  4 days ago

Did you read it? They're prolific here and the essence of the post is a bunch of citations and quotes from Nasa's own staff and literature.

  • russdill  4 days ago

    Yes, I've also read material outside of that article from NASA's own staff and literature.

    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.

    • glenstein  4 days ago

      So did they! And they showed their work. So far you're just beating around the bush.

      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 _____."

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