NASA Confident, But Some Critics Wonder if Its Orion Spacecraft is Safe to Fly (cnn.com) 46
"NASA remains confident it has a handle on the problem and the vehicle can bring the crew home safely," reports CNN.
But "When four astronauts begin a historic trip around the moon as soon as February 6, they'll climb aboard NASA's 16.5-foot-wide Orion spacecraft with the understanding that it has a known flaw — one that has some experts urging the space agency not to fly the mission with humans on board..."
The issue relates to a special coating applied to the bottom part of the spacecraft, called the heat shield... This vital part of the Orion spacecraft is nearly identical to the heat shield flown on Artemis I, an uncrewed 2022 test flight. That prior mission's Orion vehicle returned from space with a heat shield pockmarked by unexpected damage — prompting NASA to investigate the issue. And while NASA is poised to clear the heat shield for flight, even those who believe the mission is safe acknowledge there is unknown risk involved. "This is a deviant heat shield," said Dr. Danny Olivas, a former NASA astronaut who served on a space agency-appointed independent review team that investigated the incident. "There's no doubt about it: This is not the heat shield that NASA would want to give its astronauts." Still, Olivas said he believes after spending years analyzing what went wrong with the heat shield, NASA "has its arms around the problem..."
"I think in my mind, there's no flight that ever takes off where you don't have a lingering doubt," Olivas said. "But NASA really does understand what they have. They know the importance of the heat shield to crew safety, and I do believe that they've done the job." Lakiesha Hawkins, the acting deputy associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, echoed that sentiment in September, saying, "from a risk perspective, we feel very confident." And Reid Wiseman, the astronaut set to command the Artemis II mission, has expressed his confidence. "The investigators discovered the root cause, which was the key" to understanding and solving the heat shield issue, Wiseman told reporters last July. "If we stick to the new reentry path that NASA has planned, then this heat shield will be safe to fly."
Others aren't so sure. "What they're talking about doing is crazy," said Dr. Charlie Camarda, a heat shield expert, research scientist and former NASA astronaut. Camarda — who was also a member of the first space shuttle crew to launch after the 2003 Columbia disaster — is among a group of former NASA employees who do not believe that the space agency should put astronauts on board the upcoming lunar excursion. He said he has spent months trying to get agency leadership to heed his warnings to no avail... Camarda also emphasized that his opposition to Artemis II isn't driven by a belief it will end with a catastrophic failure. He thinks it's likely the mission will return home safely. More than anything, Camarda told CNN, he fears that a safe flight for Artemis II will serve as validation for NASA leadership that its decision-making processes are sound. And that's bound to lull the agency into a false sense of security, Camarda warned.
CNN adds that Dr. Dan Rasky, an expert on advanced entry systems and thermal protection materials who worked at NASA for more than 30 years, also does not believe NASA should allow astronauts to fly on board the Artemis II Orion capsule.
And "a crucial milestone could be days away as Artemis program leaders gather for final risk assessments and the flight readiness review," when top NASA brass determine whether the Artemis II rocket and spacecraft are ready to take off with a human crew.
But "When four astronauts begin a historic trip around the moon as soon as February 6, they'll climb aboard NASA's 16.5-foot-wide Orion spacecraft with the understanding that it has a known flaw — one that has some experts urging the space agency not to fly the mission with humans on board..."
The issue relates to a special coating applied to the bottom part of the spacecraft, called the heat shield... This vital part of the Orion spacecraft is nearly identical to the heat shield flown on Artemis I, an uncrewed 2022 test flight. That prior mission's Orion vehicle returned from space with a heat shield pockmarked by unexpected damage — prompting NASA to investigate the issue. And while NASA is poised to clear the heat shield for flight, even those who believe the mission is safe acknowledge there is unknown risk involved. "This is a deviant heat shield," said Dr. Danny Olivas, a former NASA astronaut who served on a space agency-appointed independent review team that investigated the incident. "There's no doubt about it: This is not the heat shield that NASA would want to give its astronauts." Still, Olivas said he believes after spending years analyzing what went wrong with the heat shield, NASA "has its arms around the problem..."
"I think in my mind, there's no flight that ever takes off where you don't have a lingering doubt," Olivas said. "But NASA really does understand what they have. They know the importance of the heat shield to crew safety, and I do believe that they've done the job." Lakiesha Hawkins, the acting deputy associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, echoed that sentiment in September, saying, "from a risk perspective, we feel very confident." And Reid Wiseman, the astronaut set to command the Artemis II mission, has expressed his confidence. "The investigators discovered the root cause, which was the key" to understanding and solving the heat shield issue, Wiseman told reporters last July. "If we stick to the new reentry path that NASA has planned, then this heat shield will be safe to fly."
Others aren't so sure. "What they're talking about doing is crazy," said Dr. Charlie Camarda, a heat shield expert, research scientist and former NASA astronaut. Camarda — who was also a member of the first space shuttle crew to launch after the 2003 Columbia disaster — is among a group of former NASA employees who do not believe that the space agency should put astronauts on board the upcoming lunar excursion. He said he has spent months trying to get agency leadership to heed his warnings to no avail... Camarda also emphasized that his opposition to Artemis II isn't driven by a belief it will end with a catastrophic failure. He thinks it's likely the mission will return home safely. More than anything, Camarda told CNN, he fears that a safe flight for Artemis II will serve as validation for NASA leadership that its decision-making processes are sound. And that's bound to lull the agency into a false sense of security, Camarda warned.
CNN adds that Dr. Dan Rasky, an expert on advanced entry systems and thermal protection materials who worked at NASA for more than 30 years, also does not believe NASA should allow astronauts to fly on board the Artemis II Orion capsule.
And "a crucial milestone could be days away as Artemis program leaders gather for final risk assessments and the flight readiness review," when top NASA brass determine whether the Artemis II rocket and spacecraft are ready to take off with a human crew.
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History shows again and again
How nature points out the folly of men
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Gojira desu!
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Re: history (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure they brought in some retired experts that were calling them out, brought them through the investigation, the findings, their analysis, and their thoughts for Artimis Ii, and they agreed that, yes, the decision made was sound.
Many others saying there's a problem haven't seen all the data, I wager.
Re:history (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, but also, shielding something that comes into the atmosphere at 11km/s is very different from shielding something that comes in at 8km/s. There's a reason that the shuttle used a reusable heat shield, and this uses an ablative one - because the shuttle's reusable shield is no where near as capable as this one.
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It's not just NASA. SpaceX has also had problems with their heat shields. My guess is that manufacturing and installation and the exact angle and speed of attack on reentry have extremely small margins for error.
This is rocket science (Score:5, Insightful)
Space is hard. Aside from the heat shield, there are a million things that could go the wrong with loss of life as the result.
With the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, by the time Apollo 11 launched, they had done a pretty good shakedown of the systems, and lost three astronauts during that shakedown. If this were SpaceX, there would have been at least two, maybe more, unmanned flights testing all of the changes between iterations. Here there was no iterations. Artemis I flew just over 3 years ago. There were anomalies noted in the heat shield, they did root cause analysis, came up with a fix, and that fix is now flying with humans on board. In SpaceX's world, there would have been one or two (or more) flights in-between Artemis I and Artemis II to validate the fix, rinse and repeat.
The whole Artemis stack is a one-off rocket using 1970's technology (Shuttle type engines, tank, solid boosters) and it takes a very long time to put one Artemis stack together. This will be the second flight for the Artemis stack. Granted it is based off of old technology that has been mostly proven from the Shuttle era, but it isn't a stack that has been a workhorse like Falcon 9 has been. So there are lots of things that can go wrong with things that are not in the forefront of anyone's thinking.
Space is hard. This is rocket science.
The real concern here is if anything does happen that either leads to an Apollo-13 like situation where the crew barely makes it back alive or the crew not coming back alive at all, it could lead to the US not being the next nation to land people on the moon. It would take years to recover from a catastrophic failure, which will leave the US far behind China in the race to put a new set of boots on the moon. Apollo 1 and Apollo 13 incidents happened due to causes that no one was really thinking about, until the incident actually happened.
At the end of the day the risk will never be 0. The astronauts and NASA both know this. We can reduce the risks we know about to a point where people are willing to take the risk. But its more the unseen risks that, IMHO, pose the greater risk for failure.
Re:This is rocket science (Score:5, Interesting)
Normalization of Deviance is what destroyed both Challenger and Columbia. The o-rings weren't meant to leak but NASA decided it was OK to leak a bit. The heat shield wasn't supposed to be damaged in the launch, but NASA decided a bit of damage was OK.
Odds are the heat-shield will protect them on the way back, but this damage isn't meant to happen. Fly enough times and it may well kill a crew if it's not fixed.
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The best you can do is to actually listen to the engineers who understand the technology.
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Maybe I'm misinterpreting your post, but the engineers who designed these spacecraft said the o-rings shouldn't leak and the heat-shields shouldn't be damaged.
It's the managers who said 'hey, that's fine, what could possibly go wrong?' and killed the crews.
Re: This is rocket science (Score:2)
The engineers said that the O-Rings were never tested down to those low temperatures, and didn't want the launch to do ahead.
They were overruled (effectively "by management").
After that disaster things changed drastically, basically putting everyone in a position to abort a flight.
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After that disaster things changed drastically, basically putting everyone in a position to abort a flight.
I am pretty sure that was basically the rule before, it was just that management overruled them anyway because there's proper procedure and then there's "shut up or I'll fire you and you know that if I can't fire you, I can still make your life hell".
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After that disaster things changed drastically, basically putting everyone in a position to abort a flight.
I am pretty sure that was basically the rule before,
Before Challenger there wasn't any way for an engineer to elevate their safety concerns past their first level of management. This changed as a result of the reviews of what went wrong after the Challenger and Columbia disasters.
https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.... [aiaa.org]
The culture changed.
The root-cause analysis now done by NASA (overseen by the NASA Engineering and Safety Center) is now pretty thorough. Their failure review boards don't just identify the failure but going down the chain of "why" to ultimately
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The culture changed.
From what I can tell, the changes were superficial and the culture didn't really change that much. While not specifically about stopping the launch, because it had already launched, you could ask Rodney Rocha if the culture of management ignoring safety concerns from engineers had actually changed by the time of the Columbia disaster. Could anything have been done? It seems probably not, but the approach was still basically hear no evil, see no evil. The review after Columbia showed that OSMA, which was the
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The culture changed.
From what I can tell... t
What does the phrase "from what I can tell" mean here? Do you have any knowledge of the NASA safety culture?
..While not specifically about stopping the launch, because it had already launched, you could ask Rodney Rocha if the culture of management ignoring safety concerns from engineers had actually changed by the time of the Columbia disaster.
23 years ago. The assertion is that the NASA safety protocols changed as a result of the Challenger and Columbia accidents.
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What does the phrase "from what I can tell" mean here?
It means pretty much the usual. That, from the sources available to me and that I have read, I have formed an opinion on the matter, but I am disclaiming any special knowledge of it and clarifying that this is only my opinion. If you need specifics, that includes the Rogers Commission report (Feynman's bits are a must read) and the Columbia Accident Investigation Report. Those by themselves are really sufficient, but I have also read all sorts of news articles, wikipedia pages, as well as watched news repor
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Your comment mostly summarizes as saying you don't know anything in particular about NASA processes or how they were changed (or not) as a result of the reports, but you know other organizat
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Too long a post to address point by point, except that I will point out that you can't cite the Rogers Commission Report and Columbia Accident Investigation Report as sources to show that NASA has not changed as a result of the changes suggested in the Rogers Commission Report and Columbia Accident Investigation Report.
Uh, yes you can. How would you even go about discussing whether the changes were made without looking at the source of the suggested changes? Also, mentioning both incidents and the similarities in how they were handled establishes a pattern. They make a mistake, swear to correct it, but fail to meaningfully do so and make another mistake, then swear to correct it. The pattern is demonstrated and it serves to explain my doubts. Then, you follow an inductive process to try to predict future patterns. In this
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Too long a post to address point by point, except that I will point out that you can't cite the Rogers Commission Report and Columbia Accident Investigation Report as sources to show that NASA has not changed as a result of the changes suggested in the Rogers Commission Report and Columbia Accident Investigation Report.
Uh, yes you can. How would you even go about discussing whether the changes were made without looking at the source of the suggested changes?
You can't decide whether changes were or weren't implemented on the basis of a document that was issued before any changes were implemented. Are you even thinking here?
...
Since your response is basically TLDR, I don't think you really get to make a dismissive summary.
You apparently missed the sentence where I said "Too long a post to address point by point."
Sorry. It was too long a post to address point by point. TL;DRPBP.
[long hypothetical questions]
You're seriously asking whether, in a completely hypothetical situation, I'd follow safety protocols or just say "screw it, my job is more important than the safety of a bunch of peopl
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You can't decide whether changes were or weren't implemented on the basis of a document that was issued before any changes were implemented. Are you even thinking here?
I am not sure how many ways I have to say it. I am referencing those documents and the mistakes of the past to demonstrate that the same issues that seem to have been identified in the past. Specifically "normalization of deviance". That appears to be exactly what is going on in TFA with regards to the heat shield that is experience unexpected damage. Are you even thinking here?
You apparently missed the sentence where I said "Too long a post to address point by point."
Sorry. It was too long a post to address point by point. TL;DRPBP.
I quite clearly did not miss that sentence.
You're seriously asking whether, in a completely hypothetical situation, I'd follow safety protocols or just say "screw it, my job is more important than the safety of a bunch of people I don't even know"?
Wow. You didn't even read that either? TL;DRPBP again? If you had, I would have thought
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I don't believe that this conversation has any content. You don't seem to have any particular knowledge about NASA. Bye.
Well, going through the whole thread, the only "content" I can find from you is a brief mention of the NASA Engineering and Safety Center and root cause analysis. So, you could have contributed more. So I wonder why you didn't. I certainly don't think I have written anything that isn't factual. Ultimately, it comes down to a matter of opinion. With the same evidence at hand, we seem to have come to different opinions. You think NASA has made a major turnaround in safety culture, I think it is mostly just wi
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Did NASA accept o ring leakage?
My understanding was that the o ring performance (failure) surprised engineers, and was determined to be a result of the exceptional (cold) launch conditions.... Or?
To be clear, the fact the o rings even existed was a result of congressional pork barrelling in the first place. The booster construction was originally designed to be one piece but by contracting it to some favored inland congressional district, it needed to be in 2 parts to fit rail transport.
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For columbia, they knew a piece of ice hit the wing, not that it had damaged the wing. What everybody tries to ignore is that during the two weeks in space, there was talk about an unplanned spacewalk to "have a look". They decided "not to have a look" and paid with 7 lives.
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It's one thing to man-rate a *technology*; but the *production processes* and supply chain need to be equally robust. The Apollo Command Module was flown a half dozen times before any manned mission.
Apollo was a project that had economic scale. Many test objects were created and many beta units produced of critical components like the Command Module. While managing larger scale processes has its own challenges, the fact that the processes are *repeated* make them easier to debug.
The low pace of manned mi
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1970s technology does not work so great in the absence of 1970s technicians and engineers.
NASA was "confident" on Columbia and Challenger (Score:5, Insightful)
Being "confident" means nothing unless the actual engineers are confident with no outside pressure whatsoever applied. I really doubt that is the situation here.
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They say they "fixed the problem", but it's too often the case that the change introduces new problems.
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They made changes? Well. I guess they need some practical feedback to show them (again) how little they actually know.
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They made changes to the re-entry path, it will hit a steeper angle, but it hasn't been tested an angle that steep.
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Cool.
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Only in theory.
Just who is taking the risk? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is always an acceptable risk if no one you really care about is on board. Remember some of the early debates about the amount of shielding for nuclear reactors... amazing how the calculus changed when the execs were told that one of their kids might be working in the compartment... Not like the shuttle disasters... or the Apollo capsule fire. It is said that the Romans would have the designer stand under an arch when the forms were taken down -- solved two problems if the structure was not sound. We seem to have learned nothing.
Re: Just who is taking the risk? (Score:2)
I'm not sure it's fair to judge the designer on the ability of the builders to implement the design...
But, yes.
Historic? (Score:2)
Why does everything seems to be "historic" these days...? Especially so the stuff that's already been done before.
It's a great mission and I'm looking forward to it and I really hope it all goes well. I'm delighted that man is finally going back to the Moon.
But it's hardly a "historic" thing again. It's been done already. Several times.
Win-Win for the Trump administration (Score:2)
If it succeeds, it's a big boost to the country's pride and this administration.
If it fails, it's an excuse to cancel the entire program, which they really want to do, and should have been done a decade ago.
Some critics... (Score:2)
> some critics... safe to fly.
That includes me. A random internet nerd.
NASA has changed (Score:3)
This is not the NASA of old, say, the Apollo days. Things have changed. There were good changes (just watch "Hiidden Figures"), and not so good ones. The shuttle losses had all sorts of impacts.
Overall, NASA is still kept afloat by many inspired and invested people who go above and beyond to make the mission happen. But NASA is also a lot more sclerotic and bureaucratic than it used to be. There are a lot of one-hatters. A lot of people who ride their hobby horse but nothing else. Not enough real (!) accountability, paired with an unreasonable amount of paperwork. Risk management sometimes going haywire (in either direction, too much or too little). DOGE did not help, a lot of good people left, and some (if not even too many) of the wrong people stayed.
With all that on the menu, its no surprise that NASA is somewhat of a shadow of its former self. One of the early reasons for people to join SpaceX was recapturing that old NASA engineering spirit. I get it - not that SpaceX seems like a healthy place to work at.
Throw into the mix that "space" has become even more political (always has been), NASA management is trying to play a weird game of pleasing everybody and offending nobody while having not nearly enough money to do this, adding all the things politicians want it to do (without funding it properly), and often an apparent disregard inside NASA HQ as to what is going on in the real world (including NASA itself and other agencies) - and you get strange outcomes.
I am not surprised that NASA goes ahead with this launch. I am pretty sure that they feel "we must beat China" at all cost, and whether that is really wise or not will not be considered, in the end. I suppose others are correct. It will likely be going well (defining success as the absence of failure?), we will declare victory - and the fact that this was primarily riding on fumes and a prayer will bite (and potentially kill) some other crew later. Not my kind of risk mitigation ....
I wish them luck. The astronauts know what they are getting themselves into, at least. It will be plenty cool. If risky ...
The mission will be exciting. (Score:2)
Best wishes for all involved. We expect to follow it closely.
Of course a nuclear gun isn't safe! (Score:2)