[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 _____."

[klausa]

It's Maciej.

[russdill]

I would, except all Maceij is providing is "vibes" and much of the official report is redacted.

[glenstein]

That's not even remotely true. They talked in great detail about heat shield fragmentation Artemis I, it's failure modes, the prospect of it getting worse with new designs and a number of other things at much greater detail than you are. Your comments show a fraction of the effort and detail of the thing you're criticizing and you could have made your best argument five comments ago if you were ever actually going to instead of beating around the bush with these substance free drive bys.

Either theres a functional literacy issue here keeping you from understanding what it means to express a substantive thought or you overestimate other people's toleration for writing checks promising unmade arguments that never cash. You can't keep buying time with nothingburgers.

[randomNumber7]

You really have no argument except the appeal to authority.