[adamsb6]

It is a bit chilling to watch these astronaut profiles having just read yesterday about the heat shield issues observed on the prior mission, and that this will be the first time we can test the heat shield in the actual pressures and temperatures that it will have to endure.

Godspeed crew of Artemis II.

[mikkupikku]

It'll probably turn out fine (in the same way that you'll probably survive one round of Russian roulette.) I am quite nervous about this though.

[dguest]

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

[ge96]

10 days? Hope they brought snacks

Seriously though I hope they're able to get up and walk around

I don't know if I could handle that 10 days in that small room

[MarsIronPI]

I've heard it feels a lot bigger once you're in freefall. Imagine if you could use all of your room's surfaces as floor space. I would think your room would feel a lot bigger.

[vibe42]

They can move around after they switch from launch to spaceflight config. Apparently they also have some exercise gear for the journey.

[ge96]

It is just the capsule though? There's no stage under them/another cylinder? Module

Trying to imagine how big the thing is like 10x10 feet room

[NetMageSCW]

Just the capsule - there is a module but it can’t be reached and is for more engines that they will leave behind.

[NetMageSCW]

ABC News says 330 habitable cubic feet or about the interior space of two minivans.

[robotnikman]

Seems like its at least bigger than the Apollo Lunar Module from the 70's

And with modern forms of entertainment to make the trip less boring.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> And with modern forms of entertainment

"We're sorry, your Prime subscription appears to have cancelled. Would you like to renew it? We can send you a text message to get this started ..."

[V99]

This capsule isn't part of your Netflix Household. Create an account to enjoy your own Netflix today.

[XorNot]

I wonder if Starlink works if the dish is above the satellites. Technically GPS can work from the moon.

[BurningFrog]

I don't think I would be bored in this trip!

[physicles]

Astronauts are made of different stuff. Truly the best of the best.

[the_af]

Forget about the snacks, I wonder about the toilet in 10 days in such cramped living conditions.

[pseudohadamard]

Toilet fan has already jammed. Not sure if this means the shit has, or hasn't, hit the fan.

[Tempest1981]

They fixed it, fortunately:

https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/theres-a-bit...

[smnplk]

I hope they will be able to stretch their legs on the moon.

[d0gsg0w00f]

They're not getting off at the moon, it's just a fly by.

[krapp]

... it's an orbital mission. They're orbiting the moon, not landing.

[hypeatei]

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

Is that with or without spinning the chamber between rounds? The odds are worse if you spin each time. They get worse as the game goes on if you don't spin.

[zorobo]

> The odds are worse if you spin each time.

How do they get worse if you spin? It’s still 1/6 odds of dying,iid events.

[lukan]

Erm no. If it goes a round and gets passed without spinning, the chances change of course. It is 1/6, 1/5, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, .. 1

[mikkupikku]

I didn't think of the gun getting passed around. To me, "one round" is pulling the trigger once after spinning the cylinder with one bullet. 1-in-6 chance of dying, you'll probably live. That's how I feel about this mission, I think they'll probably live, but man I'm nervous.

[cosmicgadget]

... 1/0

[hypeatei]

It's 6/11 overall chance of dying if spinning, no?

From a quick search, this page explains it: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/RussianRoulette.html

[Teever]

Dude, it's a nerd-snipe conversation derailing attempt. Don't take the bait.

Talk about space stuff here, not the statistical nature of Russian roulette.

[pc86]

How about don't tell other people what they can and can't talk about, and just ignore side threads you don't care about?

There are about 500 different HN browser extensions that let you collapse threads, btw.

[encrypted_bird]

Not parent, but I am genuinely curious: is there a Hacker News browser extension you'd recommend? The text is so small by default that even though I'd like to read on my desktop, I typically only browse it via the Hacki android app.

[ck2]

I had to watch "go at throttle up" on replay on the news in 1986 for the entire year, like almost every newscast

I was only a teenager and it burned into my brain badly

To this day cannot watch any launch with people onboard live

[TeMPOraL]

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

[DrBazza]

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

In the UK as a kid, when Challenger happened, our children's news programme reported it before the mainstream TV.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/sci_tech/newsid_2701000/27...

[xnx]

Truly. I'm not sure why anyone needs to be on the rocket at all, let alone our best and brightest.

[areoform]

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

Yes, a robot car that drives on its own will be a better driver than most humans who text and drive, or have 400ms reaction times.

But making a machine that can beat a 110ms reaction time human with 2SD+ IQ, and the ability to override the ground controllers with human curiosity is much harder. Humans have high dexterity, are extremely capable of switching roles fast, are surprisingly efficient, and force us to return back home.

So in terms of total science return, one Apollo mission did more for lunar science and discovery than 53 years of robots on the surface and in orbit.

[teraflop]

How does any of that matter for this mission, which will not be landing on the moon?

[areoform]

Because many small steps are required before every giant leap.

I would like to point out that the current misadventure in the ME has cost at least $38,035,856,006 in 32 days. And that won't receive half of the "this is a waste of money" critiques this mission will. And there are a ton of people who are against that excursion.

Most people who will come across this will react with either extreme negativity or indifference. Very few people will react positively. This thread itself is evidence of that. This is a nerdy community filled with people who are deeply positive about space exploration and excluding my comments, the straw poll was,

    ~81 positive (48%), ~43 negative (25%), ~45 neutral (27%).

Only a plurality of comments were positive. 88 comments were neutral or negative.

[MarkusWandel]

When I see numbers like that ($38 billion) thrown around I always wonder: Where did that money go? In the best case, it stayed in the economy in the form of salaries and such. In the worst case, it goes directly into an offshore pile of mega-wealth where it won't benefit the economy and likely won't even be taxed. Is there any way to determine where on this continuum this program stands? I'm guessing the 1960s space program, while incredibly expensive, was firmly on the "money stays in the economy" side.

[chromacity]

That kind of money, even if it goes to a single person, doesn't get taken out of the economy. No one puts it under the mattress. It's invested, so it's basically given to other people in exchange for a promise of equity / future returns.

It might not be the allocation of capital we like, but it doesn't disappear.

[losvedir]

A lot of it is in between: it goes to building things that get unbuilt shortly after.

[JumpCrisscross]

> How does any of that matter for this mission

This is a fair question. The closest answer I can get is eyes and ears onboard complement sensors.

[TeMPOraL]

It's also rehearsing/testing/experience gathering for an eventual mission that will land people on the Moon again. Missions don't happen in isolation.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Missions don't happen in isolation

True. I wasn’t thinking about training the ground crews.

[tekla]

To test the stuff that will allow to land humans on the moon

[NetMageSCW]

More like to test the stuff that will take them to the ship(s) that will allow humans to land on the Moon.

[dekhn]

Are you referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troctolite_76535 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Schmitt#NASA_career)?

[areoform]

Yes, and more!

    > Apollo was over three orders of magnitude more efficient in producing scientific papers per day of fieldwork than are the MERs. This is essentially the same as Squyres’ (2005) intuitive estimate given above, and is consistent with the more quantitative analogue fieldwork tests reported by Snook et al. (2007).

Scientific papers are a pretty poor measure of productivity so here's another one. We know about the existence of He-3 thanks to samples brought back from astronauts on the moon. Astronauts setup fiddly UV telescope experiments on the moon, trying to set up a gravimeter to measure gravitational waves, digging into the soil to put explosive charges at different ranges for seismic measurement of the moon's subsurface... They were extremely productive. Most of what we know about the moon happened thanks to the 12 days spent on the lunar surface.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Ultraviolet_Camera/Spectro...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Surface_Gravimeter

[physicles]

I’ve wondered for years if this could be quantified. Three orders of magnitude totally justifies the cost, if you care about science.

[gammarator]

You’ve got to normalize by dollars spent, though.

[dotancohen]

If your goal is to save money, just ignore the moon. This is not the west indies to be exploited, at least not yet. These are scientific missions, not economic missions.

The philosopher Randall Munroe once wrote:

  > The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

[andbberger]

ok sure but are humans a full decade of NSF budget better than robots

[uwagar]

a bunch of robot cars broke down middle of wuhan highways today.

[kube-system]

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

This is the same way that all manned spaceflight programs are conducted. You iterate and learn a little bit at a time. "Move fast and break things" doesn't work here. :)

[InexSquirrel]

I suspect it's the optics of it.

If you can fly people around the moon, then landing people on the moon is a more reasonable next step.

I agree that it may not be entirely logical, but keeping public and funding opinion positive & invested _is_ important.

edit: I thought RocketLab flew their elecron rocket around the moon a few years ago? So it's definitely doable... so again I think it's about the optics.

[Animats]

> I suspect it's the optics of it.

That's probably the justification for sending four people. First test flight probably could have been done with one or two pilots.

[techteach00]

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

[palata]

I understand why they want to fly. I don't understand why the people is fine paying taxes for that.

[Teever]

Why does Rice play Texas?

"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

https://www.rice.edu/jfk-speech

[TeMPOraL]

Some are.

Money being fungible and all, the rest can pretend their tax money is going exclusively to their favorite programs, whether that's healthcare or environment or building roads or starting wars or funding more startups or whatever.

[hn_acc1]

The space program has created some great technology we use every day now.

[palata]

That we probably could have developed without the space program for a fraction of the cost, if we're being honest.

[JumpCrisscross]

> That we probably could have developed without the space program for a fraction of the cost, if we're being honest

I don't think so. Some people are good at small tasks and stewardship. Some people want to ambitiouslyl build. If there isn't a space program, the engineers who were inspired to join NASA cannot be assumed to have gone into semiconductors or material science. They probably wound up, in the alternate timeline, bureaucrats or financiers.

[tayo42]

The current one is?

[buzzerbetrayed]

The current one will

[discardable_dan]

Bro, of all the stupid shit we spend taxes on ($50 billion on corn subsidies), you're mad about space exploration?

[palata]

I will guess that farm subsidies go to... well, farming. Doesn't sound completely ridiculous at first sight.

> you're mad about space exploration?

Exploration? It's not exploration at all: it's sending 4 humans for a 10 days trip around the Moon. I wish they used the money for actual space exploration, though.

[JumpCrisscross]

> will guess that farm subsidies go to... well, farming

Or not farming. Lots of CRE. Also constant bail-outs because e.g. the soybean farmers got tariffed. Also ethanol.

[anon291]

Independent of how scientifically awesome this is, this is probably the most cost effective long term propaganda. Why waste money on posters when you can orbit the moon.

[kelnos]

The amount of my taxes that went toward people flying on this trip is so small to be not worth considering.

I'm much more concerned about my tax dollars going toward the US military, especially with Trump wanting another $200B so he can murder more people in Iran while making the world and the US measurably less safe.

[buzzerbetrayed]

Because of all the bullshit that the government wastes our tax funds on, this is the least bullshit.

[sandworm101]

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

[cogman10]

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

Even with a goal of eventually putting humans on the moon, it'd be better to do an automated run, measure everything in the cockpit, and put in sandbags and/or something to consume O2 to make sure the CO2 scrubbers are working correctly. It's maybe cruel, but a few dogs would work fine for that sort of thing. A flame would be better, but it's pretty dangerous.

The first mission in decades doesn't need to have humans in it.

[dannyfreeman]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_I

[cogman10]

Thanks. I should have looked this up before posting.

[russdill]

I mean, that's how these heat shields work. They aren't reusable, you can't test them and then use them again. Or do you mean the design? We already did Artemis I.

[palata]

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

It says that it is not safe to fly. They are sending humans without having tested in real conditions that their design was sound, GIVEN that the first time they did that (without humans), it turned out that their design was unsafe.

[russdill]

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

[gus_massa]

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

The takeaway, is that the software was fine, but other systems like the main engine used too much cutting edge technology and have a lot of unexpected failure modes and too many problems like partialy broken parts that should no get partialy broken. [For a weird coincidence, Artemis II uses the same engines.] He concluded that when you consider all the possible problems the failure rate was closer to 1/100, but management was underestimating them and the official value that was 1/100000. [Anyway, the engines didn't fail in Columbia, it was one of the other possible problems.]

The articles explain that the shield has problems but management is underestimating them again. Let's hope the mission goes fine, but in case of a explosion it would be like a deja vu.

[Silamoth]

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

[ActorNightly]

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

Much different than predicting future.

[gus_massa]

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

If you have 2 or 3 spare hours, it's worth reading.

The guy got a lot of first hand information about the Challenger disaster. He analyzed not only what went wrong, that is in the 20-20 category, but also what could have gone wrong, that is in the speculation category.

But if you read that report after the Columbia disaster, it's almost a premonition. He didn't identify the exact problem that caused the explosion, but the decisions that made that posible were quite similar.

[glenstein]

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

[russdill]

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

Statements like this:

"Put more simply, NASA is going to fly Artemis II based on vibes, hoping that whatever happened to the heat shield on Artemis I won’t get bad enough to harm the crew on Artemis II."

Are just so intellectually dishonest and completely ignore the extensive research and testing that's gone into qualifying this flight.

[glenstein]

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

What would would help is if you said something like "Maceij says modeling a different entry approach on computers is no substitute for a bona fide re-entry testing a new design, but that's incorrect because _____."

[randomNumber7]

You really have no argument except the appeal to authority.

[adamsb6]

I mean the design.

They've changed the AVCOAT to be less permeable and altered the re-entry profile.

One of the findings of Artemis I is that lack of permeability led to trapped gas pockets which expanded and blew out pieces of heat shield. The reason for the change to be less permeable is to make it easier to perform ultrasonic testing, not to improve performance.

They altered the re-entry profile on the theory that the skip period contributed to spalling, but Charles Camarda disagrees in this doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...

> Another chart which the Artemis Tiger Team did not intend to show on Jan. 8th, was the figure showing the spallation events as a function of time during the skip entry heating profiles (Figure 6.0-4 of NESC Report TI-23-0189 Vol. 1). In this figure, it was quite clear that the Program narrative they were feeding to the press, that it was the dwell time during the skip which allowed the gases generated to build up and cause the delta pressures which caused most of the spallation was, again, patently false. In fact, during the first heat pulse (t ≈ 0 to 240 sec), approximately 40-45% of all the medium to large chunks of ablator spalled off the Artemis I heatshield.

> Hence, varying the trajectory would do little to prevent spallation during Artemis II. I was never shown the new, modified trajectory at the Jan. 8th meeting.

[functional_dev]

your point about gas pockets making the shield blow out made me curious

I found this visual schematic of the spalling helpful - https://vectree.io/c/the-physics-of-ablative-spalling-in-ori...

It finally makes sense why the gas needs to leak out... if it gets trapped behind the burnt outer crust, the pressure just blows pieces of the shield off like a tiny bomb

[wat10000]

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

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

[NetMageSCW]

Also the fixes weren’t made on this capsule, since it was already built with the old design.

So that means this capsule will fly a different re-entry profile to attempt to avoid the issue and Artemis IV will fly with untested fixes for lunar return.

[randomNumber7]

And the different re-entry profile has more velocity and temperature stress. So if their reasoning is wrong (that the failure was due to do lower pressure during the skip) it will very likely fail.

[4khilles]

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

[russdill]

I suppose "this will be the first time we can test this slightly modified heat shield in the slightly different pressures and temperatures that it will have to endure." isn't quite as eye catching.

[randomNumber7]

With humans on board? Even if they are not necessary for the actual mission?

[andrewflnr]

Yeah, that's what "untested" means in spaceflight.

[JumpCrisscross]

> that's what "untested" means in spaceflight

Sort of. At a certain threshold, everything is untested. I’d put this closer to modified than untested—the general config was tested in Artemis I and the specific configuration in a variety of ground tests.

[wat10000]

I'd say it's tested. It failed. Then they're flying it anyway. Wonderful stuff.

[groby_b]

I mean, sure. But that's like equipping a sub with a screen door and claiming that in the grand scheme of things, it's a slightly different door with slightly different permeability characteristics.

[willis936]

That was the intent of the piece. It is impossible to assess the true intent of such a piece when it so blatantly is asking for attention.

[propagandist]

Some people are great at self promotion.

[magicalist]

> Some people are great at self promotion.

We're commenting on NASA's live stream that exists to get us pumped up about the tens of billions of dollars we overpaid for this launch.

I'm probably much more happy than the next guy about getting to see a flyby of the moon this week even if I really wish we'd gotten here another way, but the accusation is a bit funny in this thread in particular.

[blks]

What’s the another way?

[bregma]

You could just re-use the studio where they faked the Apollo 11 landing except it was in 7 WTC which was destroyed in a controlled demolition to hide the evidence.

[lukan]

https://xkcd.com/1074/

[hluska]

Are you actually surprised that a livestream paid for my NASA would promote NASA? Geez, that’s innocent.

[propagandist]

No, we're referring to the piece that was posted here on the previous day. You can search for Artemis on this site and read that piece.

[Betelbuddy]

This is a NASA cover up:

https://youtu.be/pzZWs7CexYI?t=78

https://youtu.be/Wuao1LgO66w?t=218