alt Hacker NewsYes, 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.
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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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)