Comment by irjustin
13 hours ago
> 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.
[delayed]
That was a great article.
Adding to it - Apollo 13 was a mission where 3 men should have died, but somehow didn't. If it had happened while the LM was on the moon, you would have had the CSM lose power, and then two men on the moon would have had no way to return home.
(And for the shuttle design mission - my understanding is it was likely the ability to do a HEXAGON-style film return mission in a single orbit, before the Soviets knew what was happeneing.)
Thanks!
note - I can't verify any of the following, it's more - for lack of a better term - aerospace nerd fan theory at this point.
Post-collapse, people think that the Buran justification was paranoia. But based on what I've read / seen (though this is getting hard to source, so I might be just good ol' hallucinating here), they weren't entirely wrong. The subtext around that large payload bay had to do with the Soviet pursuit of systems like Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment... that weaponized space.
Again, there's a reason for those ASAT tests. There's a reason for the weird specifications set in the early 1970s for the Shuttle. And I don't think deploying a spy satellite alone is it. But this is speculation. AFAICT, nothing was put on paper.
It would have been an incendiary WW3 starting act to capture a Soviet asset. But I think it is understandable if certain people within the American blob wanted that capability at hand.
I wish I was immortal. I'd drop everything for a decade and try to find people from the time who're still alive (and some still are!) and ask them these questions directly - on the record – for posterity's sake. I suspect, we came much closer to war via space than most people think. And because we didn't, we'll eventually repeat these mistakes.
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Oh and then there was the documented attempt to capture Salyut-7 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2554/1
Somehow all the numbers just happened to line right up. :)
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Nice article, although I'm not so sure about this part:
> There’s a reason why there wasn’t an Apollo 18, or 19 and 20. Even though funding had been secured, an executive decision was made to kill the program early, because LoC was inevitable.
Was funding really secure? I believe that was the main sticking point; a quick search [0] seems to confirm this, and the John Young quote below backs it up: "Even if they’d had the money..." Not to say the risk wasn't a factor too of course, but it doesn't look like funding was otherwise guaranteed.
Anyway, I think what sets the risk of the Shuttle apart from Apollo is summed up nicely in one of the quotes (in reference to the Apollo program): "The awareness of risk led to intense focus on reducing risk." In the Apollo program, there was a pattern of rigorously hunting down and eliminating any possible known risks, leaving unknowns as the primary source of risk; on the other hand, the Shuttle program let known risks accumulate continuously until crews paid the price for a bad draw.
When debris hit Atlantis on STS-27 [1] and the shuttle only survived on a one in a million stroke of luck -- the completely broken tile happened to be over an aluminum mounting plate -- it should have been taken as a free lesson on one more known source of risk to eliminate. Instead, it led to seven people dying completely preventable and unnecessary deaths a few years later.
Spaceflight is inherently risky, it's true. That's why things like the Orion heat shield are so worrisome; because it is physically possible at our current level of technology to make it safer, and yet for political / funding / etc. reasons we're not doing the best we can.
[0] https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/why-did-we-stop...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-27
It's worth breaking down what the "funding" means over here. As this is a depressing topic for me, I'm going to be a bit playful. :)
The Saturn V's existed. Saturn V serial numbers were designated as S-5## where # is an increment from 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#Launch_history <--- see the Saturn V numbering scheme here.
SA-513 was repurposed from Apollo 18 to Skylab. SA-514 was meant for Apollo 19. They put it on display. SA-515 was also chopped up and put on display. Some parts were used in Skylab. https://www.space.com/nasa-extra-apollo-moon-saturn-v-rocket...
So there were 3 Saturn V already assembled and in existence.
Did the CSMs and LEMs exist? CSMs had a similar serial number scheme. And they designated "Block 1" and "Block 2" (iterations of the spacecraft design based on testing) CSM-0## and CSM-1##
The CSM used in Apollo 17 was CSM-114. On wikipedia it says that CSM-115 and CSM-115a were never fully assembled and cancelled, but if you look past that, you can also see that Skylab used, CSM-116, CSM-117 and CSM-118. These were Apollo CSMs, fresh off the same assembly line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_command_and_service_mod...
So there were 3 CSMs.
What about LEM? Similar number scheme, LM-## which is incremented with each one made. So first one was LM-1 and the last one used on Apollo 17 was LM-12. LM-13 is on display in a museum. LM-14 was on the production line (along with LM-15??) and a "stop work" order was issued and they were scrapped. Yes, they were literally broken down and turned into scrap. https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-lunar-modules-lm14-lm15...
So NASA had 1 LEM and 2 were on the way. I think, we can charitably say that there were 3 LEMs available at the time. I think it's fair to say that...
There were 3 LEMs.
Did they have 3 crews? Funnily enough, they did have 3 crews already assigned! What a coincidence. https://web.archive.org/web/20181224161154/https://nssdc.gsf... :)
So the Saturn Vs existed and had been paid for. The CSMs existed and had been paid for. The LMs existed / were on the line and had been paid for. The crews existed (and had been partially paid for).
So what is the "funding shortfall" that caused America to stop going to the moon?
The "funding shortfall" here is the money required to pay for the ground crews and personnel for carrying out the mission. And that amount was $42.1 million out of $956 million for Apollo. The total NASA budget was, $3.27 billion that year.
$42.1 million. NASA admin just couldn't find $42.1 million of ground staff salaries etc out of the remaining $2.3 Billion budget.
It's probably a coincidence that this happened right after Apollo 13. The decision was announced on September 2nd, 1970. Apollo 13 happened in April, 1970.
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So yes, the funding was there. I suspect the "funding cut" argument was an attempt to save face; after the US Government (and I mean the Government, it's clear both the White House and Congress were involved) decided to cut the cord post-Apollo 13.
I also suspect this is one of the many "open secrets" lost to time. It might have been known by "everyone" in the know at the time, but those who knew died off, and history crystallized around the written page.
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> one more known source of risk to eliminate.
How could they have eliminated that risk?
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Im not really convinced SLS and Artemis are best effort projects; we improve through refinement, and the only way to get there is cadence. More launches with the same general mission requirements.
One launch a year is not even close to what we can manage with our current technology, to the point where the scope is too small to be legitimately worth doing.
Its not solely a matter of energy; its about opportunity for learning. The current scale is too small to be worth doing at all.
If it was a program of something like >50 payloads over a decade, that gives enough opportunity for refinement, in cost, safety, and scale manufacture methods to actually see something new.
The value of a mission like this isn't only in the narrow technical data it returns. Its value is also institutional. Once you have an actual crewed mission orbiting the Moon, the program becomes concrete rather than aspirational. That creates momentum inside NASA and among contractors, strengthens the credibility of follow-on lunar missions, and accelerates work on the many parallel systems a sustained lunar program actually requires.
I agree entirely that it's much easier to imagine a successful moon program built around repeatable missions at high cadence, so I'm not disagreeing on that point. I would just push back on the idea that this has little or no value.
If I may be allowed one nitpick. Without fully understanding the FAA doc you link to in the article, I think it would be better to say something like loss of a plane is a 1 in a billion event for commercial airplanes. Many types of parts used in airplanes and jet engines break at much higher rates though, they just don't necessarily cause a plane loss when they do.
Wouldn’t the soviets or any other adversary prepare against letting NASA capture their satellites? You need a very small amount of C4 in the satellite to destroy the shuttle in the event of capture. Tampering with other entity‘s satellites can best be done with satellites. That also frees resources needed for bringing life support systems to orbit.
But at that point if you're building in a self-destruct for a weapon that can be so dangerous it's worth sending a shuttle to take it away from you, surely it's better to adversarially trigger the self-destruct and not bother sending the shuttle. So the C4 option might simply be a bad idea: make it more difficult and costly to remove your weapon, rather than triggering your own self-destruct.
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Artemis certainly seems safer at least in launch. It has an escape system that could be triggered throughout launch. In comparison shuttle could not abort at all until srb separation and after that could have needed risk aerodynamic manoeuvres.
Thanks for sharing your article - very well written.
I am stunned to see that LoC risk assessment.
I kept wondering to myself over the past week, “will this be the last USA-supported human space travel if these astronauts don’t survive?”
I’d have a hard time imagining the general public would support any future missions if they hadn’t survived.
These astronauts are some elite humans. My respect for them is even greater now that I’ve seen the risk quantified.
The Smithsonian article on John Young that you linked to is a good one. The only John Young quote they didn't include that I wish they had was his response to the proposal to make STS-1 an on purpose RTLS abort: "Let's not practice Russian roulette."
> It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" due to the distances and energies involved.
That's not true at all.
It is entirely within current technical and fiscal means to launch a much more robust and powerful craft that is capable of goign to the moon and returning with lower velocity by sending it up in pieces with Falcon 9 (Heavy) and assembling it in LEO before launching to the moon.
This mission architecture is intrinsically compromised by social constraints in the form of pork barrel spending dsfunctional decision making process.
Given current levels of technology, this would require docking with a series of space tugs. Not impossible, but Blue Origin is the only organisation working on this at a meaningful scale.
There was also Nautilus-X which never made it beyond the concept stage.
Well said.
> We're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new.
It's absolutely wild to me that we went from inventing flying machines to putting people on the freaking moon in the span of a human lifetime. What we've accomplished with technology in the last 500 years, let alone in the last century, is nothing short of remarkable.
But, yes, in the grand scheme of things, we're still highly primitive. What's holding us back isn't our ingenuity, but our primitive instincts and propensity towards tribalism and violence. In many ways, we're not ready for the technology we invent, which should really concern us all. At the very least our leaders should have the insight to understand this, and guide humanity on a more conservative and safe path of interacting with technology. And yet we're not collectively smart enough to put those people in charge. Bonkers.
>It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer"
Absolutely it is, if NASA was not constrained by congress to use shuttle components to build the spacecraft, they could have had double the payload mass capability at least (the Saturn V was almost twice as capable, we should be able to do a little better now). This would provide tons of extra margin for safety, and allow a shorter and thus safer route to the moon as well.
Shuttle was awesome and the people who love to hate it can personally fight me.
NASA certainly took many risks back then. People remember Apollo 11 for the landing, but for example on Apollo 8, with a fire roughly 2 years earlier that killed 3 astronauts, they had one manned mission (Apollo 7) and then immediately sent Apollo 8 around the moon with ONE rocket nozzle that had to work (and no LM to escape into, as the Apollo 13 astronauts had to do), basing their faith in trajectory mechanics which hadn't been tested that far out
The ejection seats on Gemini were a joke, and there's an anecdote Gene Kranz tells in his book about Gemini 9 where he thought it was too risky for them to cut away the shroud on the thing they were going to dock with (the Agena having blown up on launch) but NASA was this close to overriding him and doing it anyway (they were saved by the astronauts vetoing it, which was good because the EVA, separately, that Gene Cernan did was incredibly harrowing. he was sweating, way overworked, could barely see)
I often think about the shuttle program in relation to all these crazy complicated, wildly expensive, and incredibly fragile space telescopes we're sending to LEO or the Earth-Sun L2. Would be damn useful to be able to repair/upgrade these things like with Hubble.
Obviously I realise the shuttle program was pretty far away from being able to head out to the Earth-Sun L2(AB, and wasn't even working towards it. But man, it would be nice to have that ability.
Really? Seems like it would be cheaper to build extra telescopes (economy of scale). When one of them breaks, just launch another.
"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.)
2.4% is not bad given how new this still is and how extreme the speeds and energies are.
Note that all the fatalities have been launch or landing related, not in space itself. Clawing out of this gravity well is tough. Make Earth a bit larger and you’d never get off it without something like NERVA or nuclear pulse Orion.
I wonder sometimes if that’s another thing to toss in the Fermi paradox bucket. Many rocky planets might be much more massive than Earth. On one with 3X our gravity a space program might never get going.
NERVA as envisioned had terrible thrust to weight ratio, not really usable to launch from a Super Earth. Nuclear lightbulb, orion or heck NSWR would likely work though. And bonus points for not having to think about landing systems for the return trip. ;-)
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The lack of plate tectonics is a much bigger obstacle on Super-Earths, then g.
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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.)
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.
Is 12 enough of a sample size to make a statistical judgement? What if there were 20 more which didn’t have a loss of life? Is it then 1/30? What if there were 20 more?
The risk factor is calculated _per mission_ from what I understand. You can have three accidents in a row and nothing for decades but the risk itself can still be 1 in 30.
Your point is fair and and important distinction. I think when estimating a risk factor though, this empirical data, while a low sample size, is a valuable statistic because it's empirical, and not that small of a sample size. Maybe going forward, we have 3 risk levels:
So the risk factor for Apollo could have actually been 1/1000 but they were just really unlucky?
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Space is hard. If we didn’t accept these parameters we wouldn’t go to space. Apollo lost one entire crew and almost two, the Space Shuttle lost two missions where the whole crew died. The risks are real.
Turns out riding on top of controlled explosions is a risky engagement.
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.
Agreed, but people were often forced into those conditions. Or were forced to make an impossible survival decision.
Were Magellan’s men volunteers? For example, in the incident with The Wager, 1,980 men left on 6 ships, and only 188 survived. Men of the original men were press-ganged (kidnapped to crew these ships), and a lot of them were even taken from an infirmary and not in great health. And, of course, conditions were pretty terrible.
So yeah, we’re more risk adverse… and also a lot better at keeping people alive. I think most people would not have signed up for some of these really risky endeavors if they knew the true risk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wager_Mutiny
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghaiing
Maybe we should be glad that afawct none of the people exposed to the risks of artemis ii mission were force on it against their will. I'd bet the even in The Wager you would have have some clear headed people who knew the risk and still chose it
Or the extreme casualty rates experienced by the (mostly very young) East India Company clerks in Calcutta. From Dalrymple's The Anarchy:
"Death, from disease or excess, was a commonplace, and two-thirds of the Company servants who came out never made it back – fewer still in the Company’s army, where 25 per cent of European soldiers died each year."
You're acting like if it fails they can just say "Well we said it was 1/3!" and then just get on with it. "Oops we lost a zillion taxpayer dollars and no one will mind and maybe they'll give us more money this time around!" That's just not how the world works.
Crazy indeed, glad that someone else has already mentioned Magellan, because that’s whom I also had in mind. Not sure there’s a solution for this because at this point the risk scare has been institutionalized among most if Western (and not only) society.
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.
Actual death rate for astronauts so far is 19/791, or 1 in 40.
You are comparing orbiting earth in a shuttle to a lunar flyby in a pod. Very different risk profiles.
First couple of crews to orbit the earth at 0’ AGL had mortality rate of 9 in 10.
I’d say we’re doing better!
> 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?
A lot of advancement is multipurpose. CNCs are more accurate than machinists, computers are faster. And we have a lot of the technical knowledge written down.
Machinist never stopped working even after advanced CNCs proliferated. Humans had records of how things were made and yet new generations had to relearn it - and fail in the process.
This mission is not about sending stuff out to deep space. Its about sending out new generation of humans to deep space.
Even if you could guarantee that these new humans have exact same experience of past humans, can we guarantee that past decades simulations or theoretical knowledge acquired - while NOT actually doing something - will effectively reduce the chances of mortality?
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.
Hopefully this time we can keep going for what we can do for engineering instead of what we can do for science.
If we got to a point where going to the Moon was significantly safer than that, we’d better start trying things even more ambitious and risky or we’ll stagnate as a species. The fatality rates for circumnavigating the globe or settling in North America or attempting to invent a working flying machine were much, much higher than that.
This was the farthest humans ever travelled from earth, even farther than apollo 13. Intuitively the farther you go the higher the risks are
Landing on the moon is enormously riskier than simply going further out.
I'm answering the claim about Artemis being more dangerous than the space shuttle. Obviously landing on the moon is a lot riskier.
They could go twice the same distance, the risk would be roughly the same at that point. It's mostly the complexity and changes that make it more risky once the initial trajectory is in place.
You need a lot more impulse and more fuel to go twice as far. Probably more correction burns. A longer final burn before entering the atmosphere. So the risk of loosing the engine is much higher and probably increasing more than linear with burn time/change of impulse.
You cannot really determine what the risks are before trying something new.
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.
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.
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%
There are over 8 billion people on earth.