alt Hacker NewsI’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.
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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.
Space flight safety is a function of culture and I don’t have any confidence that the culture has improved.
It’s statistically unsound to compare results of low probability events like this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy