It's worth pointing out that this is the first extremely public, widely acknowledged high risk mission NASA has done in over 50 years. The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle.
According to NASA's OIG, Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle. There genuinely is a world where they don't make it back home.
I am grateful that they did. And I'm grateful that we're going to go even further. I can't wait to see what Jared's cooking up (for those who don't know, he made his own version of the Gemini program in Polaris and funded it out of pocket).
> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30.
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?
Yes, and the memories of Apollo are made rosy by hagiography. I even wrote an entire thing to explain why, https://1517.substack.com/p/1-in-30-artemis-greatness-and-ri... (yeah, shameless plug, sorry - it's more for the citations than not. You can read the standards and reports I've linked to)
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.
"As of 1 April 2026, there have been five incidents in which a spacecraft in flight suffered crew fatalities, killing a total of 15 astronauts and 4 cosmonauts.[2][how?] Of these, two had reached the internationally recognized edge of space (100 km or 62mi above sea level) when or before the incident occurred, one had reached the U.S. definition of space at 266,000 ft, and one was planned to do so. In each of these accidents, the entire crew was killed. As of April 2026, a total of 791 people have flown into space and 19 of them have died in related incidents. This sets the current statistical fatality rate at 2.4 percent."
I suspect that it is NOT a weaker system than before, it is more accurate about the mortality rate. In other words, there are fewer "unknown unknowns" than there were in the 60s and 80s, partially because of explosions that took out previous astronauts.
(Some would snidely say as long as they don't put seven people on the rocket they'll be fine.)
Crossing the Atlantic and the discovery of the Americas? How many deaths were acceptable during that initial period of exploration? That’s where we still are with space.
And the atmospheric entry is still the same as 1969. Physics doesn’t change.
1 out of the 12 crewed Apollo missions resulted in the death of the crew, so a 1 in 12 effective mortality rate.
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.
It honestly says something about how absurdly risk averse our society has become that an 1/30 chance of death is considered too high for a literal moonshot. You can advertise a 1/3 rate of slowly choking in vacuum and I bet you will still get a five mile long queue of people signing up for the mission.
If you want a historical comparison, over 200 men left with Magellan on his voyage around the globe and only 40 returned.
We stopped going to the moon because it's a vanity project. It's expensive, risky, and there isn't much more science to do or that can't be done by robots.
Come on! No one is forced to get on the rocket. If you don’t think it’s worth it, don’t go!
From a social perspective, I
would recommend to think of the average death per capita of an effort, which is effectively nil for Artemis (very few astronauts vs us population) compared to generating electricity with coal, which kills many annually.
That was the fair estimate for the Shuttle program. NASA caught hell in public, justifiably, for pretending otherwise. But astronaut memoirs such as Mullane's excellent Riding Rockets paint a much more nuanced picture.
I waited until splashdown to permit my emotions to get involved, and I'm glad I did. It was really something earlier, to hear my whole neighborhood bar set up a cheer for an American mission to the Moon.
The shuttle didn’t accomplish that much and didn’t get us as far as Artemis just did, the risks are well worth it. Nobody is forcing the astronauts to do their astronaut thing, imo they’re aware of the risks they’re taking, and kudos to them for that.
Eh yeah? This is frontier, pioneer stuff. We should have a greater appetite for risk as long as it’s completely transparent and the astronauts know what they’re getting into. Realistically though, there is essentially a rocket a day going up and they rarely fail anymore, so the true risk is probably much lower than 1 in 30.
Astronauts are, as a group, extremely risk loving. Every single person who signs up to go into space knows what they’re signing up for - they’ve spent their entire life working for the opportunity to be put in a tin can and shot into orbit atop a million pounds of explosives. There’s a very valid critique that NASA has become far too risk averse - we owe it to the astronauts to give them the best possible chance to complete the mission and make it back safely, but every single person who signs up for a space mission wants to take that risk, and we don’t do anyone any favors by pretending that space can be safe, that accidents are avoidable, or that the astronauts themselves don’t know what they’re signing up for. A mission that fails should not be considered a failure unless it fails because we didn’t try hard enough.
My father, who flew combat missions for the Navy in Vietnam and then became a test pilot, told me after the loss of Columbia that if he had had a chance to make that flight and spend 7 days in Earth orbit, even knowing that he'd burn up on reentry, he'd have done it.
> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30.
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?)
> but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle.
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.
> The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle.
I think they did think of it as risky and acknowledge that it was risky, they just had a different tolerance for risk.
The Artemis mission is "more difficult" - you're firing folk way out into space and hoping you hit a fairly narrow channel where they swing around the Moon back towards you, and not just keep going straight on out beyond any hope of rescue, or biff it in hard becoming a new lunar crater. You've got to carry a lot more fuel, and a lot more technology. You're going to have them up there in a much smaller space than the Shuttle for a lot longer.
The Shuttle by contrast was kind of "proven technology" by the end of its life, and we really should have developed some new stuff off it. Columbia first flew in 1981 but "the keel was laid" as it were in 1975! Think about the massive shifts in technology between 1975 and 1981, and then maybe 1981 and 1987.
I remember someone saying in 1981 that their new car had more computer power controlling the engine than took man to the Moon (the first time round!), and my late 90s car has more computer power than took man to the Moon in the instrument cluster. Your car is probably a lot newer, and has about as much computer power as NASA had on the ground for the Apollo missions just to operate the buttons on the steering wheel that turn the radio up and down, in a chip the size of your fingernail, that costs the price of a not very good coffee.
The main failure modes of space travel have always been "we can't get the astronauts back down", "we can't get the astronauts back down at less than several times the speed of sound", or "the astronauts are now a rapidly expanding cloud of hot fried mince". What's changed is the extent to which we accept that, I guess.
I’d bet a million dollars that Orion will win every safety metric compared to the shuttle once it is retired. NASA deluded itself in thinking the Shuttle was safe. The reality is that the Shuttle was the most dangerous spaceship anyone ever built.
That's physically not possible 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 (8 NASA, 2 sister MIL programs), 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.
How could a comparison between such dissimilar programs ever be meaningful? NASA flew 135 Shuttle missions over the course of 30 years; Orion will be doing well to approach a tenth of that number.
I mean it's the first space crew on an anti-science mission, right?
The point of them being there isn't discovery, it's to try to discourage anyone who wants try to understand and protect the planet that we all rely on for life
As an American I feel like I've been going through a bit of an identity crisis from what I remember growing up.
Probably the rose tinted glasses of being a child but being from Florida I always had a sense of amazement and wonder as I heard the sonic boom of the shuttle returning to earth.
Really felt like I was coexisting in this incredible scientific powerhouse of a country full of bright and enabled peoples that knew how to prioritize curiosity and innovation.
Feeling like a bit of a "vibe" post which is everything wrong lately but I can't help but feel some satisfaction that we're still able to accomplish something like this in our space endeavors.
I think especially online there's a lot of emphasis on "everything is wrong". A mission like this is hard to ignore and highlights the bias. On the whole, despite setbacks, we continue.
If you want to dispel a bit more of the ever-pervasive online pessimism bias, read up on global rates of hunger the last time we flew to the moon (1972) vs now. The reality is, for all the problems we face today, there's no sane answer other than today to the question "when would you prefer to be born as a random person on earth"
I had to explain to my wife and kids (not that I'm in this field, but I also have to remind myself) that we are able to pinpoint where the craft will land, when it will land down to the minute, because of ... just ... math. And we're able to get them there and back because of science.
It all boils down to equations that describe the world accurately, and a way of experimentation, iteration, thinking that gets us all the way to do something this unbelievably complex.
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.
The analogies for these things like "hitting a golf ball into a hole in one 5,000 miles away" are always fun.
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.
I feel like it’s “easier” with space math because there’s so little to interfere with the course. With a golf ball, the basic math is easy, but the slightest bit of wind throws it off way beyond the acceptable error, and you can’t model all the wind perfectly.
I always feel like these analogies don't really fit the real space flight as you quite often have a lot of time to correct the trajectory if you get it roughly right during launch and even that takes a couple minutes. You also have closed circuit guidance and external radar stations to verify the trajectory.
You really don't have anything like that when playing golf, so I don't thin it is a good analogy.
But for the old Sprint anti balistic missile - that was spot on. :D Hitting ICBM warheads kilometers abobe ground, second before detonation - yeah, that fits. It also dispelled the myth that you can't communicate to compact craft due to re-entry plasma. Of course you can, just use a 30 MW radar beam & it will get through just fine! Not to mention the Sprint missile was protected by an ablative heatshield and covered by plasma going up during launch. :D
Wild that they manage to fly to the moon but still seem to be having those comms problems. Asking the astronauts if they’re really pressing the PTT button is wild.
My friends and I have been deriving much amusement from the comms issues. We can fly people around the moon, talk with them, send back high res video, but talk to the boat that’s close enough to swim to? Forget about it!
i was thinking maybe astronauts can be disoriented when splashing down and that's why they figured they should ask if the right buttons were being pushed?
This whole mission was amazing, and the most positive and hopeful thing I have seen as a global event in the last 5 years at least. Bravo and cheers to everyone involved :)
Impressive mission but I feel it's not capturing the public attention because it's actually a step back from the mission 50 years ago when they actually landed men on the moon with tech that was orders or magnitude simpler and less powerful.
I think it you ask the average person they're more surprised that people haven't been going to the moon for the past 50 years. In people's minds it's a solved problem and it's been boring for decades now. If supersonic air travel came back it would only interest people because of reduced journey times. But this doesn't even have anything that directly benefits people so they don't care.
1 hour 29 minutes seems excessive to extract the astronauts; if any of them _did_ have a medical issue they'd be in for a long wait.
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 imagine if there was a medical emergency they'd worry less about capsule recovery and safe shutdown. IIRC because the sat phone wasn't working, they had to wait an extra 15 mins to power down the capsule (I guess so they could use its radios?). In an emergency I imagine they'd just leave it as-is
I also like how they waffled on about how winching them up to a helicopter was the fastest option, when they obviously could have shaved an hour off the recovery time by simply having them step out onto the waiting boats!
Having worked for various government agencies for a while I've learned to recognise the signs of the "We're following the procedure whether it makes sense or not, dammit!" attitude you get with large bureaucracies.
It’s been amazing - and inspirational - watching the live stream of Mission Control and the capsule over the last ten days. Or at least having it as background audio. I’m going to miss all these folks I’ve grown to know.
Watching this, I can only describe it as holy. An incredible reminder of what humanity can do, and the beauty of our curiosity and the universe around us. I grew up learning that my great uncle was in Mission Control for Apollo; missions like this are what inspired me to pursue engineering in the first place.
If we're going to have a surveillance state, let's use it for superlative control - one dollar in taxes for every superlative you use in personal life; $0.01/viewer for each one you use in any live televised event.
I was wondering about that, so I looked up the heat shield issues. It seems like their solution was very defensible and there was every reason to believe it would work out just fine. The plan that did not work as they wanted had a new idea, a double re-entry, and when the results were concerning they backed off to using a traditional single re-entry. That seems like a legitimate fix?
Scott Manley went into the details in a recent video.
The reason the heat shield failed was due to gas buildup inside the ablative material.
This was due to the skip reentry profile they used, where the craft does a single skip (as in skipping stones) during reentry. The high bounce caused the shield to be heated enough that the heat penetrated the material causing gas release but not enough that the material ablated. Thus gas would build up deep inside up until it caused large chunks to break off. They could reproduce this in tests.
The fix was two-fold. First they lowered the bounce height, so a much less pronounced skip, avoiding the lowered heating of the shield. And they tweaked the material formula a bit so it was more porous, allowing subsurface gas to escape rather than build up.
Watching that capsule fall out of the sky at high speed from the teaching cameras was nerve wracking! Awesome footage, exciting to watch it live in such detail.
It's hard to know who was right. All of these things can be true: it made it back ok; it had a high chance of making it back ok; it should've had a much higher chance of making it back ok. Most of the concerned people were stressing this last point, that it should've been safer than it was. They still thought it had a quite high chance of making it back ok. It took a lot of shuttle missions before Columbia failed.
While I agree with your main point (it's hard to know who was right), the people who agreed to proceed were NASA engineers/astronauts who had actual numbers to analyze, while the doubters (even Camarda) only had theories.
We'll need a post mortem to know what the margin of failure was. This said they had made changes since the first flight so we'd expect less to no damage this time.
What is coming into view from the top center at 08:26:25 [0], right after the commentator says, "the weather conditions remain go"? It stays visible for more than seven minutes before disappearing behind the horizon.
Not for the same reason as you, the whole time I was thinking "I'm pretty sure NASA can assess the risk of their mission better than an Internet famous blogger", despite the sentiment on HN at the time being very negative after reading these words [1].
These days the only qualification required for people believing anything you say is to have a blog and strong critical opinions about $AUTHORITY. Software engineers somehow believe they are knowledgeable in any topic just because they spend a lot of time reading on the Internet.
Can somebody help me understand why this does a water landing, like the old Apollo missions, instead of like the space shuttle that lands like a plane?
A big part of the reason is that Orion (and Apollo) reentry speeds are way higher due to the orbital mechanics involved in going to the moon and back. Today's was actually the fastest manned reentry ever attempted.
For reference the shuttle generally reentered at ~17.5K mph, and today's was 24K-25K mph.
It's not clear that we could build a craft with wings that could survive that. So then you're looking at adding fuel just to slow down, plus fuel for the weight of the wings themselves, plus fuel to carry all this extra fuel to the right place, etc.
The space shuttle landed like something resembling a plane, but it is more accurate to say it landed like a concrete brick traveling faster than the speed of sound.
Splashdown-style landings are the simplest and safest, parachutes are always good but adding water makes for another layer of safety (and of risk, to be fair, it could sink).
Lot of the world is ocean & they basically decided the landing point the moment they entered the free return trajectory, 9 days prior - easier to shift the landing point a little to a different place in the ocean place with better weather tha. to switch to a backup airport.
With lunar landing flights they would still have to choose 4 days before, as long as they do direct return.
Eventually you want to break to Earth orbit (propulsively or aerodynamically) and board a dedidacted craft for landing. But till then water landing capsules work.
A Space Planes is needed to land at a runway like a plane.
Space Planes are not only much more dangerous, but are not ideal for this type of mission. They carry a lot of extra weight (wings) that would affect how much fuel is needed to launch them to the Moon.
Capsules are safer and more lean in terms of weight.
The Shuttle was not ideal in many ways. It was used so long not because it was the best option, but because Congress wanted it to keep it going for jobs.
So why do they need to use helicopters and a risky airlift to return the astronauts to the main vessel? Why not just use the speedboats to take them back? Seems really odd and I can’t find any reasonable explanation.
>Buoyancy is an easier equation to solve than lift.
That's a snappy one-liner but it doesn't address the real concerns.
First of all, subsonic lift is well understood and has been for decades. The answer is much more mundane: The Artemis mission profile does not require payload doors that open, no Canadarm, no requirement to service, launch, and/or capture satellites in orbit, and so like good engineers they designed the minimum vehicle that satisfies the requirements.
Also, the Shuttle was actually much more expensive to reuse than originally predicted.
Wings and rudders and landing gear are very heavy. Then there's the flight control system in all its complexity, along with redundant hydraulic systems and so on.
Aerospace engineer here: The simple answer is that the Shuttle form factor is unnecessarily complex for this mission.
A small Apollo-style capsule that parachutes into the ocean has a simpler mission profile, which allows for simpler technical and operational requirements, which in turn reduces program cost.
Too fast. The space shuttle used to reenter sometimes over us in California. I remember in elementary school the entire building shook, and that was just one building! The amount of energy being dissipated is literally astronomical! If you've never experienced the sonic boom of reentry it is something to marvel at. It literally feels like an earthquake!
I get that there are people who think the moon landing was staged, but are there really people who think rocket launches are staged? Because it's pretty easy to go witness one yourself.
For All Mankind aired an episode today that movingly commemorated the fictional lead character Ed Baldwin's Apollo 10-like in-universe mission on the same day that the real world Artemis II mission which also strongly resembles Apollo 10 landed safely. A strange and moving coincidence.
This almost brought tears to my eyes. I can only imagine how people felt when the first astronauts got to the Moon, and then when they got back to Earth in one piece.
I noticed a delay between video and audio - the announcer on the NASA official live broadcast said splashdown before the the capsule splashed down on video. Was it intentional (in case something happened)?
Also, what were these puffs on thermal camera after the main chutes were deployed?
My suspicion was they were burning excess propellant, rather than attitude adjustment while under the parachutes. Though who knows how much propellant remained. It could be quite a bit more than it appears was used.
Not just excess - excess and toxic. Hydrazine derivatives and nitrogen tetroxide, IIRC. They are hypergolic, too, so the easiest way to vent them is just to run the engines until empty. However, to prevent moving the craft too much, you do short bursts.
I was wondering about that too, I assume maybe there was some additional adjustments needed to land in the right spot, but they didn't mention it on the stream.
How? I struggle with this. It all seems like a fearful waste of money and resources. We can't live on the moon. We can't live on Mars. It is a fantasy. We have so many problems here on Earth that are more important to solve than sending a handful of men to the moon (again).
As I've said before. This is a huge achievement. And also is the most effective political propaganda ever. Bravo to everyone involved .
This is not sarcastic. This is very much meant. I love that America does this. We still get to evoke an awe which previous empires awesome as they may be, could never match. American superlatives are amazing. God bless America
I don't know how to describe the feeling but it feels like a bad movie remake. Maybe I am just a sucker for practical effects and not 2020s CGI to stick with the metaphor and conspiracy...
In 2028, so only 2 years from now. They will be able to bring 4K pictures and videos of the walk on the moon and they promised not to delete them this time.
They will have Nikon cameras, GoPros, and iPhones with them.
Very different from the videos taken with the Gameboy Camera.
As a long time space nerd, I'm not sure what this accomplishes by repeating the previous stunts that failed to usher in the promised space frontier.
Apollo was, IMO, not successful at changing the course of human history. A really cool footnote, sure, but everything else that was to follow, nope, just a bunch of neat, interesting but ultimately meh science missions.
An exciting change would be more like Delta-V/Critical Mass, but NASA is not going to deliver that, at least not in any form it has taken thus far.
The guidelines ask us to avoid being curmudgeonly. I'm sure you didn't mean to come across that way, but could you try not to make Hacker News the kind of place that responds with “meh” to a successful space mission?
My pessimism comes from a hindsight that the Apollo missions, while amazing failed to create the future they promised. Looking at how the missions were designed, the political focus, the academic infighting of NASA scientists trying to keep niche research funded.
I fail to see how this time, the same strategy will produce a different result.
I also don't expect benevolent billionaires to fill that either. I hope I would in their place, but I'll not likely get the chance.to find out.
To end on an optimistic note, tang and Velcro are pretty dope.
My point is this path doesn't lead to the future, it leads to the sad state of space between Apollo and this Shark Jump.
The first Orion (nuclear pulse) has a much more interesting story and would have made us an interplanetary species before we had the iPhone. But it was killed by Kennedy, became space wasn't what he was worried about.... And maybe hundreds of nukes in space might make some countries edgy.
More than that, people today seem to be saturated with sarcasm.
It's especially tragic with younger people who seem to have no experience with handling genuine sincerity. They laugh nervously at it, as if they're unfamiliar with how to handle someone saying what they actually think and feel.
Why this was such a big deal? Haven't people reach the moon so many years ago? By this time we should have lunar bases, not cheer so much that we got past the moon at a few thousands miles away.
Glad that they're safe and sound.
It's worth pointing out that this is the first extremely public, widely acknowledged high risk mission NASA has done in over 50 years. The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle.
According to NASA's OIG, Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle. There genuinely is a world where they don't make it back home.
I am grateful that they did. And I'm grateful that we're going to go even further. I can't wait to see what Jared's cooking up (for those who don't know, he made his own version of the Gemini program in Polaris and funded it out of pocket).
> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30.
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?
Yes, and the memories of Apollo are made rosy by hagiography. I even wrote an entire thing to explain why, https://1517.substack.com/p/1-in-30-artemis-greatness-and-ri... (yeah, shameless plug, sorry - it's more for the citations than not. You can read the standards and reports I've linked to)
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.
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"As of 1 April 2026, there have been five incidents in which a spacecraft in flight suffered crew fatalities, killing a total of 15 astronauts and 4 cosmonauts.[2][how?] Of these, two had reached the internationally recognized edge of space (100 km or 62mi above sea level) when or before the incident occurred, one had reached the U.S. definition of space at 266,000 ft, and one was planned to do so. In each of these accidents, the entire crew was killed. As of April 2026, a total of 791 people have flown into space and 19 of them have died in related incidents. This sets the current statistical fatality rate at 2.4 percent."
[wiki link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...).-,During%20spaceflight,fatality%20rate%20at%202.4%20percent.)
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I suspect that it is NOT a weaker system than before, it is more accurate about the mortality rate. In other words, there are fewer "unknown unknowns" than there were in the 60s and 80s, partially because of explosions that took out previous astronauts.
(Some would snidely say as long as they don't put seven people on the rocket they'll be fine.)
Crossing the Atlantic and the discovery of the Americas? How many deaths were acceptable during that initial period of exploration? That’s where we still are with space.
And the atmospheric entry is still the same as 1969. Physics doesn’t change.
1 out of the 12 crewed Apollo missions resulted in the death of the crew, so a 1 in 12 effective mortality rate.
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.
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It honestly says something about how absurdly risk averse our society has become that an 1/30 chance of death is considered too high for a literal moonshot. You can advertise a 1/3 rate of slowly choking in vacuum and I bet you will still get a five mile long queue of people signing up for the mission.
If you want a historical comparison, over 200 men left with Magellan on his voyage around the globe and only 40 returned.
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We stopped going to the moon because it's a vanity project. It's expensive, risky, and there isn't much more science to do or that can't be done by robots.
You are comparing orbiting earth in a shuttle to a lunar flyby in a pod. Very different risk profiles.
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> That X decades later we accept, with all our advancements in tech, a weaker system than ever before
how do you keep past performance while stop performing it for XY decades?
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Actual death rate for astronauts so far is 19/791, or 1 in 40.
This was the farthest humans ever travelled from earth, even farther than apollo 13. Intuitively the farther you go the higher the risks are
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You cannot really determine what the risks are before trying something new.
Come on! No one is forced to get on the rocket. If you don’t think it’s worth it, don’t go!
From a social perspective, I would recommend to think of the average death per capita of an effort, which is effectively nil for Artemis (very few astronauts vs us population) compared to generating electricity with coal, which kills many annually.
overall construction in the US had a measured death rate of 1 in 1000 people in 2023. i think we can accept far higher rate for space travel.
That was the fair estimate for the Shuttle program. NASA caught hell in public, justifiably, for pretending otherwise. But astronaut memoirs such as Mullane's excellent Riding Rockets paint a much more nuanced picture.
I waited until splashdown to permit my emotions to get involved, and I'm glad I did. It was really something earlier, to hear my whole neighborhood bar set up a cheer for an American mission to the Moon.
The shuttle didn’t accomplish that much and didn’t get us as far as Artemis just did, the risks are well worth it. Nobody is forcing the astronauts to do their astronaut thing, imo they’re aware of the risks they’re taking, and kudos to them for that.
Wai how is it weaker, like genuinely?
Eh yeah? This is frontier, pioneer stuff. We should have a greater appetite for risk as long as it’s completely transparent and the astronauts know what they’re getting into. Realistically though, there is essentially a rocket a day going up and they rarely fail anymore, so the true risk is probably much lower than 1 in 30.
Insane to you? why don't you tell us what you have contributed to the world to improve this outcome even if by .01%
Astronauts are, as a group, extremely risk loving. Every single person who signs up to go into space knows what they’re signing up for - they’ve spent their entire life working for the opportunity to be put in a tin can and shot into orbit atop a million pounds of explosives. There’s a very valid critique that NASA has become far too risk averse - we owe it to the astronauts to give them the best possible chance to complete the mission and make it back safely, but every single person who signs up for a space mission wants to take that risk, and we don’t do anyone any favors by pretending that space can be safe, that accidents are avoidable, or that the astronauts themselves don’t know what they’re signing up for. A mission that fails should not be considered a failure unless it fails because we didn’t try hard enough.
My father, who flew combat missions for the Navy in Vietnam and then became a test pilot, told me after the loss of Columbia that if he had had a chance to make that flight and spend 7 days in Earth orbit, even knowing that he'd burn up on reentry, he'd have done it.
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Highly recommend The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe about the Gemini astronauts. They mostly were test pilots prior.
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> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30.
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?)
> but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle.
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.
> The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle.
I think they did think of it as risky and acknowledge that it was risky, they just had a different tolerance for risk.
The Artemis mission is "more difficult" - you're firing folk way out into space and hoping you hit a fairly narrow channel where they swing around the Moon back towards you, and not just keep going straight on out beyond any hope of rescue, or biff it in hard becoming a new lunar crater. You've got to carry a lot more fuel, and a lot more technology. You're going to have them up there in a much smaller space than the Shuttle for a lot longer.
The Shuttle by contrast was kind of "proven technology" by the end of its life, and we really should have developed some new stuff off it. Columbia first flew in 1981 but "the keel was laid" as it were in 1975! Think about the massive shifts in technology between 1975 and 1981, and then maybe 1981 and 1987.
I remember someone saying in 1981 that their new car had more computer power controlling the engine than took man to the Moon (the first time round!), and my late 90s car has more computer power than took man to the Moon in the instrument cluster. Your car is probably a lot newer, and has about as much computer power as NASA had on the ground for the Apollo missions just to operate the buttons on the steering wheel that turn the radio up and down, in a chip the size of your fingernail, that costs the price of a not very good coffee.
The main failure modes of space travel have always been "we can't get the astronauts back down", "we can't get the astronauts back down at less than several times the speed of sound", or "the astronauts are now a rapidly expanding cloud of hot fried mince". What's changed is the extent to which we accept that, I guess.
Glad that you are glad that they are safe and sound
> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30.
So with 4 crew members, chance of one dying was 13%! Very lucky they all survived.
I’d bet a million dollars that Orion will win every safety metric compared to the shuttle once it is retired. NASA deluded itself in thinking the Shuttle was safe. The reality is that the Shuttle was the most dangerous spaceship anyone ever built.
It’s statistically unsound to compare results of low probability events like this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
That's physically not possible 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 (8 NASA, 2 sister MIL programs), 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.
Shameless plug, wrote a bit about the Apollo hagiography, Artemis and risk here – https://1517.substack.com/p/1-in-30-artemis-greatness-and-ri...
How could a comparison between such dissimilar programs ever be meaningful? NASA flew 135 Shuttle missions over the course of 30 years; Orion will be doing well to approach a tenth of that number.
Artemis rides on extended versions of the same SRBs that made the Shuttle ascent so dangerous.
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Space flight safety is a function of culture and I don’t have any confidence that the culture has improved.
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An error in any of the orbital math may have seen them flung out into space with no chance of recovery.
Orbits do not work that way
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I mean it's the first space crew on an anti-science mission, right?
The point of them being there isn't discovery, it's to try to discourage anyone who wants try to understand and protect the planet that we all rely on for life
As an American I feel like I've been going through a bit of an identity crisis from what I remember growing up.
Probably the rose tinted glasses of being a child but being from Florida I always had a sense of amazement and wonder as I heard the sonic boom of the shuttle returning to earth.
Really felt like I was coexisting in this incredible scientific powerhouse of a country full of bright and enabled peoples that knew how to prioritize curiosity and innovation.
Feeling like a bit of a "vibe" post which is everything wrong lately but I can't help but feel some satisfaction that we're still able to accomplish something like this in our space endeavors.
I think especially online there's a lot of emphasis on "everything is wrong". A mission like this is hard to ignore and highlights the bias. On the whole, despite setbacks, we continue.
If you want to dispel a bit more of the ever-pervasive online pessimism bias, read up on global rates of hunger the last time we flew to the moon (1972) vs now. The reality is, for all the problems we face today, there's no sane answer other than today to the question "when would you prefer to be born as a random person on earth"
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There's a lot of money/hay/political power/etc to be made from "everything is wrong" - it's hard for "good news" to really get into your bones.
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.
Many of those who saw the first moon landing as a child are still alive and remember what it felt like.
The nice thing about a public space program is everyone can share in its success!
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The Moon doesn’t pay money
I had to explain to my wife and kids (not that I'm in this field, but I also have to remind myself) that we are able to pinpoint where the craft will land, when it will land down to the minute, because of ... just ... math. And we're able to get them there and back because of science.
It all boils down to equations that describe the world accurately, and a way of experimentation, iteration, thinking that gets us all the way to do something this unbelievably complex.
I'd add a caveat to this.
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
The analogies for these things like "hitting a golf ball into a hole in one 5,000 miles away" are always fun.
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.
I feel like it’s “easier” with space math because there’s so little to interfere with the course. With a golf ball, the basic math is easy, but the slightest bit of wind throws it off way beyond the acceptable error, and you can’t model all the wind perfectly.
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I always feel like these analogies don't really fit the real space flight as you quite often have a lot of time to correct the trajectory if you get it roughly right during launch and even that takes a couple minutes. You also have closed circuit guidance and external radar stations to verify the trajectory.
You really don't have anything like that when playing golf, so I don't thin it is a good analogy.
But for the old Sprint anti balistic missile - that was spot on. :D Hitting ICBM warheads kilometers abobe ground, second before detonation - yeah, that fits. It also dispelled the myth that you can't communicate to compact craft due to re-entry plasma. Of course you can, just use a 30 MW radar beam & it will get through just fine! Not to mention the Sprint missile was protected by an ablative heatshield and covered by plasma going up during launch. :D
Wild that they manage to fly to the moon but still seem to be having those comms problems. Asking the astronauts if they’re really pressing the PTT button is wild.
My friends and I have been deriving much amusement from the comms issues. We can fly people around the moon, talk with them, send back high res video, but talk to the boat that’s close enough to swim to? Forget about it!
Note: next time, pack a walkie talkie. ;-)
No joke, VHF has been saving sailors' lives for a long time now.
They missed the chance to reply "Main screen turn on."
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Just like in the year 3000, we will still ask "Can you hear me?" in video meetings.
I can see your comment, can you see mine?
And the printer will be perpetually broken
"Can you see my screen?"
grrr
i was thinking maybe astronauts can be disoriented when splashing down and that's why they figured they should ask if the right buttons were being pushed?
Cellphone coverage notoriously flaky in the Pacific.
Umm it's a satellite phone.
...and informing them which button was the PTT button. She had to say it, but it'd be hard not to react to that.
I give you Apollo 16:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uuv6TVv0r44
Good thing they have redundant systems.
This whole mission was amazing, and the most positive and hopeful thing I have seen as a global event in the last 5 years at least. Bravo and cheers to everyone involved :)
Impressive mission but I feel it's not capturing the public attention because it's actually a step back from the mission 50 years ago when they actually landed men on the moon with tech that was orders or magnitude simpler and less powerful.
I think it you ask the average person they're more surprised that people haven't been going to the moon for the past 50 years. In people's minds it's a solved problem and it's been boring for decades now. If supersonic air travel came back it would only interest people because of reduced journey times. But this doesn't even have anything that directly benefits people so they don't care.
Apparently there's more work than just clicking "Recover Vessel" after splashdown!
1 hour 29 minutes seems excessive to extract the astronauts; if any of them _did_ have a medical issue they'd be in for a long wait.
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 imagine if there was a medical emergency they'd worry less about capsule recovery and safe shutdown. IIRC because the sat phone wasn't working, they had to wait an extra 15 mins to power down the capsule (I guess so they could use its radios?). In an emergency I imagine they'd just leave it as-is
I also like how they waffled on about how winching them up to a helicopter was the fastest option, when they obviously could have shaved an hour off the recovery time by simply having them step out onto the waiting boats!
Having worked for various government agencies for a while I've learned to recognise the signs of the "We're following the procedure whether it makes sense or not, dammit!" attitude you get with large bureaucracies.
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It’s been amazing - and inspirational - watching the live stream of Mission Control and the capsule over the last ten days. Or at least having it as background audio. I’m going to miss all these folks I’ve grown to know.
Bring on Artemis III and IV!
Watching this, I can only describe it as holy. An incredible reminder of what humanity can do, and the beauty of our curiosity and the universe around us. I grew up learning that my great uncle was in Mission Control for Apollo; missions like this are what inspired me to pursue engineering in the first place.
"NASA reporting four green crew members. That is not their complexion, it is that they are in good condition. That's what that means." LOL
also astronauts: "the moon is quite a bit smaller than it was yesterday"
control: "i guess we'll have to go back".
(paraphrased from memory)
The humor was what really made my day today. Or in my case my night here in Germany.
I guess they're not Kerbals :)
That speaker voice was a bit odd. Everything was perfect! At least one superlative every 5 seconds or so.
I think that audio stream was designed to be POTUS safe.
If we're going to have a surveillance state, let's use it for superlative control - one dollar in taxes for every superlative you use in personal life; $0.01/viewer for each one you use in any live televised event.
It's becoming a public hazard, we must act!
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Held my breath the whole time after all the heat shield warnings. Very glad it all worked, or that there was enough margin!
Yes it was worrisome, but how could it not be even with the best tech we'll ever have - I feel relief still on every plane touchdown.
Bravo, Artemis team for an exceptional return to extra-orbital space travel.
The LOS was also more than 6 minutes as predicted (I measured a bit over 7 minutes). What a tension.
I wasn't clear, was the LOS just comms or a full loss of telemetry from the craft? Either way, terrifying.
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I was wondering about that, so I looked up the heat shield issues. It seems like their solution was very defensible and there was every reason to believe it would work out just fine. The plan that did not work as they wanted had a new idea, a double re-entry, and when the results were concerning they backed off to using a traditional single re-entry. That seems like a legitimate fix?
Scott Manley went into the details in a recent video.
The reason the heat shield failed was due to gas buildup inside the ablative material. This was due to the skip reentry profile they used, where the craft does a single skip (as in skipping stones) during reentry. The high bounce caused the shield to be heated enough that the heat penetrated the material causing gas release but not enough that the material ablated. Thus gas would build up deep inside up until it caused large chunks to break off. They could reproduce this in tests.
The fix was two-fold. First they lowered the bounce height, so a much less pronounced skip, avoiding the lowered heating of the shield. And they tweaked the material formula a bit so it was more porous, allowing subsurface gas to escape rather than build up.
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Yes, but it was the biggest opening for propagandists to latch on to for demoralizing and spreading fear/uncertainty/doubt about the mission.
Same! Glad everyone made it safe.
Watching that capsule fall out of the sky at high speed from the teaching cameras was nerve wracking! Awesome footage, exciting to watch it live in such detail.
So the new heat shield works just fine, and NASA still knows things better than arm-chair aerospace engineers? Safety third.
It's hard to know who was right. All of these things can be true: it made it back ok; it had a high chance of making it back ok; it should've had a much higher chance of making it back ok. Most of the concerned people were stressing this last point, that it should've been safer than it was. They still thought it had a quite high chance of making it back ok. It took a lot of shuttle missions before Columbia failed.
While I agree with your main point (it's hard to know who was right), the people who agreed to proceed were NASA engineers/astronauts who had actual numbers to analyze, while the doubters (even Camarda) only had theories.
We'll need a post mortem to know what the margin of failure was. This said they had made changes since the first flight so we'd expect less to no damage this time.
What is coming into view from the top center at 08:26:25 [0], right after the commentator says, "the weather conditions remain go"? It stays visible for more than seven minutes before disappearing behind the horizon.
[0] https://youtu.be/X9Miy8ngusQ?t=30382
The Moon.
Interesting.
I had this in the back of my mind today https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....
Glad they got home safe and sound!
Not for the same reason as you, the whole time I was thinking "I'm pretty sure NASA can assess the risk of their mission better than an Internet famous blogger", despite the sentiment on HN at the time being very negative after reading these words [1].
These days the only qualification required for people believing anything you say is to have a blog and strong critical opinions about $AUTHORITY. Software engineers somehow believe they are knowledgeable in any topic just because they spend a lot of time reading on the Internet.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582043
Can somebody help me understand why this does a water landing, like the old Apollo missions, instead of like the space shuttle that lands like a plane?
A big part of the reason is that Orion (and Apollo) reentry speeds are way higher due to the orbital mechanics involved in going to the moon and back. Today's was actually the fastest manned reentry ever attempted.
For reference the shuttle generally reentered at ~17.5K mph, and today's was 24K-25K mph.
It's not clear that we could build a craft with wings that could survive that. So then you're looking at adding fuel just to slow down, plus fuel for the weight of the wings themselves, plus fuel to carry all this extra fuel to the right place, etc.
The space shuttle landed like something resembling a plane, but it is more accurate to say it landed like a concrete brick traveling faster than the speed of sound.
Splashdown-style landings are the simplest and safest, parachutes are always good but adding water makes for another layer of safety (and of risk, to be fair, it could sink).
Lot of the world is ocean & they basically decided the landing point the moment they entered the free return trajectory, 9 days prior - easier to shift the landing point a little to a different place in the ocean place with better weather tha. to switch to a backup airport.
With lunar landing flights they would still have to choose 4 days before, as long as they do direct return.
Eventually you want to break to Earth orbit (propulsively or aerodynamically) and board a dedidacted craft for landing. But till then water landing capsules work.
A Space Planes is needed to land at a runway like a plane.
Space Planes are not only much more dangerous, but are not ideal for this type of mission. They carry a lot of extra weight (wings) that would affect how much fuel is needed to launch them to the Moon.
Capsules are safer and more lean in terms of weight.
The Shuttle was not ideal in many ways. It was used so long not because it was the best option, but because Congress wanted it to keep it going for jobs.
Buoyancy is an easier equation to solve than lift.
So why do they need to use helicopters and a risky airlift to return the astronauts to the main vessel? Why not just use the speedboats to take them back? Seems really odd and I can’t find any reasonable explanation.
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>Buoyancy is an easier equation to solve than lift.
That's a snappy one-liner but it doesn't address the real concerns.
First of all, subsonic lift is well understood and has been for decades. The answer is much more mundane: The Artemis mission profile does not require payload doors that open, no Canadarm, no requirement to service, launch, and/or capture satellites in orbit, and so like good engineers they designed the minimum vehicle that satisfies the requirements.
Also, the Shuttle was actually much more expensive to reuse than originally predicted.
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Wings and rudders and landing gear are very heavy. Then there's the flight control system in all its complexity, along with redundant hydraulic systems and so on.
Aerospace engineer here: The simple answer is that the Shuttle form factor is unnecessarily complex for this mission.
A small Apollo-style capsule that parachutes into the ocean has a simpler mission profile, which allows for simpler technical and operational requirements, which in turn reduces program cost.
Too fast. The space shuttle used to reenter sometimes over us in California. I remember in elementary school the entire building shook, and that was just one building! The amount of energy being dissipated is literally astronomical! If you've never experienced the sonic boom of reentry it is something to marvel at. It literally feels like an earthquake!
Amazing, congrats! Why where they hoisted by heli and not ‘just’ sail to the mother ship (and hoisted there)?
Announcer just said “we just reenacted” the last Apollo mission. So, yep. That’ll be used as proof-text that this was all staged.
I get that there are people who think the moon landing was staged, but are there really people who think rocket launches are staged? Because it's pretty easy to go witness one yourself.
The fools who would believe that wouldn't believe Apollo happened either. No need to dignify their existence.
Apropos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG6NNnoNC80
For All Mankind aired an episode today that movingly commemorated the fictional lead character Ed Baldwin's Apollo 10-like in-universe mission on the same day that the real world Artemis II mission which also strongly resembles Apollo 10 landed safely. A strange and moving coincidence.
Buzz Aldrin is reported to be watching this on TV.
Dealing with the typical Excel foot guns during the last few hours before re-entry felt like an unnecessary risk.
Missaved their version 2 Excel spreadsheet using the wrong file name causing confusion about this version was the latest.
Nearly missed a cell in their burn sheet had multiple lines of text until mission control reminded them to resize the cell.
Awesome! I can't wait to watch the moon landing whenever that happens.
Ad astra per aspera
This almost brought tears to my eyes. I can only imagine how people felt when the first astronauts got to the Moon, and then when they got back to Earth in one piece.
Woke up at 5:00 am to watch this live Regret no part of it
Cheers! Looking forward to future space travel!!
"Reid Wiesman reporting all crew members green; that's not their complexion, all crew members are in good shape."
Dammit. I hoped Jeb was on board for a second.
Best comment exchange from a thread on a different site:
OP: "I'm happy they didn't die."
Response: "You're going to be less happy when they turn into the Fantastic Four and Dr. Doom shows up."
Bravo Zulu, Integrity crew, NASA, and USA!
Been a long time since I've felt any amount of national pride like this. Welcome home.
With 1 in 30 chance of death can somebody help me understand why this had to be a manned mission?
Has anyone collated the best space based footage?
Amazing live video of the descent and splash down. Really awesome to watch!
Went out to the beach hoping to hear/see something, but sadly grey skies and no boom. Tons of other people out there doing the same thing too.
I noticed a delay between video and audio - the announcer on the NASA official live broadcast said splashdown before the the capsule splashed down on video. Was it intentional (in case something happened)?
Also, what were these puffs on thermal camera after the main chutes were deployed?
https://www.youtube.com/live/m3kR2KK8TEs
RCS (Reaction Control System) which you can see on Artemis I internal video as it falls down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QbYrs5SZ5M
My suspicion was they were burning excess propellant, rather than attitude adjustment while under the parachutes. Though who knows how much propellant remained. It could be quite a bit more than it appears was used.
Not just excess - excess and toxic. Hydrazine derivatives and nitrogen tetroxide, IIRC. They are hypergolic, too, so the easiest way to vent them is just to run the engines until empty. However, to prevent moving the craft too much, you do short bursts.
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In the post splashdown conference, they mentioned that these were indeed attitude control bursts to orient for favorable orientation for water impact.
It was for attitude adjustment.
I was wondering about that too, I assume maybe there was some additional adjustments needed to land in the right spot, but they didn't mention it on the stream.
Yeah, they looked intentional - there are no reaction wheels on the capsule.
good, But how did you build it?
Now this is actually for the benefit of humanity.
…and this is how the America I thought I knew growing up projected its influence upon the world.
Notwithstanding that this mission critically relied upon Canada, UK, EU, Japan, Taiwan, and contributions from many other countries.
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At least now there’s something to celebrate for America’s 250th this year
How? I struggle with this. It all seems like a fearful waste of money and resources. We can't live on the moon. We can't live on Mars. It is a fantasy. We have so many problems here on Earth that are more important to solve than sending a handful of men to the moon (again).
Same things said about a lot of things. Tech works. Human ingenuity works.
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And that is why no one will remember your name.
True, if I was introduced to Trump, the resulting scene would be memorable.
As I've said before. This is a huge achievement. And also is the most effective political propaganda ever. Bravo to everyone involved .
This is not sarcastic. This is very much meant. I love that America does this. We still get to evoke an awe which previous empires awesome as they may be, could never match. American superlatives are amazing. God bless America
I don't know how to describe the feeling but it feels like a bad movie remake. Maybe I am just a sucker for practical effects and not 2020s CGI to stick with the metaphor and conspiracy...
In 2028, so only 2 years from now. They will be able to bring 4K pictures and videos of the walk on the moon and they promised not to delete them this time.
They will have Nikon cameras, GoPros, and iPhones with them.
Very different from the videos taken with the Gameboy Camera.
As a long time space nerd, I'm not sure what this accomplishes by repeating the previous stunts that failed to usher in the promised space frontier.
Apollo was, IMO, not successful at changing the course of human history. A really cool footnote, sure, but everything else that was to follow, nope, just a bunch of neat, interesting but ultimately meh science missions.
An exciting change would be more like Delta-V/Critical Mass, but NASA is not going to deliver that, at least not in any form it has taken thus far.
The guidelines ask us to avoid being curmudgeonly. I'm sure you didn't mean to come across that way, but could you try not to make Hacker News the kind of place that responds with “meh” to a successful space mission?
My pessimism comes from a hindsight that the Apollo missions, while amazing failed to create the future they promised. Looking at how the missions were designed, the political focus, the academic infighting of NASA scientists trying to keep niche research funded. I fail to see how this time, the same strategy will produce a different result.
I also don't expect benevolent billionaires to fill that either. I hope I would in their place, but I'll not likely get the chance.to find out.
To end on an optimistic note, tang and Velcro are pretty dope.
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We can't build a TV from 50 years ago, much less a space rocket.
Because we stopped, we get to do everything over again with hardware from this century.
My point is this path doesn't lead to the future, it leads to the sad state of space between Apollo and this Shark Jump.
The first Orion (nuclear pulse) has a much more interesting story and would have made us an interplanetary species before we had the iPhone. But it was killed by Kennedy, became space wasn't what he was worried about.... And maybe hundreds of nukes in space might make some countries edgy.
They can't just build Apollo 18 and resume the program as if there weren't a 50 year hiatus.
Imagine if your employer wanted to start using a software system it retired in 1972. What would you do?
Just another monday in any big old company adjecent to finance or airline industry ? ;-)
What is delta v/critical mass?
Dear NASA. Please dial back the poetics and rhetoric. Be more like ATC than Shakspear.
I think we've all become to numb and jaded. This is the first moon mission in 50 years and the furthest any human has ever been from Earth.
Indeed, the world is so grim these days that I welcome even a little bit of relief, a little bit of hope for a better future.
More than that, people today seem to be saturated with sarcasm.
It's especially tragic with younger people who seem to have no experience with handling genuine sincerity. They laugh nervously at it, as if they're unfamiliar with how to handle someone saying what they actually think and feel.
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Hard disagree. Yes it is corny for us oldies but channel your 12yo self watching Cosmos.
I read "Shakspear" as a combination of Shaquille O'Neal and William Shakespeare.
To dunk or not to dunk.
I’d pay to see Shaq on broadway.
Someone hasn't stayed awake all night listening to YouTube ATC. I recommend Kennedy Steve.
Thanks for the tip!
What a curmudgeon. You must be great dinner company.
Why this was such a big deal? Haven't people reach the moon so many years ago? By this time we should have lunar bases, not cheer so much that we got past the moon at a few thousands miles away.
Because we haven’t had translunar manned flight in fifty years, and this is the precursor to start it up again