[tclancy]

Hang on, without a dog in this fight, have I asked the people who trained their whole lives to drive cool cars if this particular cool car, which they were not involved in designing or building, is safe to drive? Is that what you are asking?

[ethmarks]

They asked if the astronauts "want to risk it", not if it was actually safe. Those are very different questions. The astronauts are, in fact, the world's leading experts on whether or not they personally want to risk it, so it's not entirely unreasonable to think that they could answer that question.

It just depends on whether you think that the fact that they accept the risks is reason enough to let them fly a potentially-dangerous spacecraft.

[palata]

I know we all have a lot of respect for astronauts, but the fact is that they blindly trust whoever tells them "it's safe enough" that it is, actually, safe enough.

Artemis II doesn't need astronauts to do its flights. Astronauts are trained to survive in a spaceship that does not need them to do anything at all. That it is their dream to survive in such a spaceship does not say at all that they have any valid idea of how much risk they are taking.

We can say "maybe the astronauts would accept to fly knowing that they have a probability of 1/30 of dying" all we want, but that doesn't answer the question here, which is: what is the probability that they die?

The article says "we don't really know: the first test flight was very concerning, and we used the exact same methods to prepare the second flight, so we won't really know how unsafe it is until we try it".

Sure, they have made tests on the ground. But the first flight proves that those tests are not enough, otherwise Artemis I wouldn't have had those issues in the first place.

[trothamel]

This is a perfect way to put it.

Artemis II is not safe, at least by the standards we apply to things. It's the third flight of a capsule, on the second flight of the rocket, and the first flight of things like the life support system.

At the end of the day, one of the reasons astronauts are respected is they understand those risks, and go into space anyway. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to minimize risks - but at some point the risk becomes acceptable, and the cost of reducing it too great.

To paraphrase a quote from Star Trek - risk is their business.

[falcor84]

Taking a related quote from Dollhouse: "That is their business, but that is not their purpose."