Bob Zimmerman thinks that NASA is rushing Artemis II to fend of cancellation.
It is very strange that they are not being forthcoming about the heat shield.
Bob Zimmerman thinks that NASA is rushing Artemis II to fend of cancellation.
It is very strange that they are not being forthcoming about the heat shield.
What I find intolerable is that NASA is refusing to say what the root cause of the heat shield problem is. Unless the reason is ITAR, there’s no possible excuse for this. My guess? They don’t know how to fix it yet.
The life support system issue, IMHO, is even worse, and it’s one that I’ve been pointing out for many years. It’s never flown in space before. The original excuse was that it couldn’t be ready in time for Artemis 1, and then Artemis 1 slipped a few years (thus rendering the excuse false). So, no space test (unlike what was required for Dragon and Starliner) was ever done. On a lunar mission, unlike LEO, a failed life support system will be lethal.
It will take over four months to fully integrate the stack, made up of pre-built parts?
How many Starships and boosters can be built in that same amount of time, and for how much less money?
In an organization that had to wait until Sally Ride passed away for anyone to admit she steered Richard Feynman toward the rubber o-rings on Challenger, this is hardly a surprise. I heard the problem is lack of freon. And since our employees will not say anything, I welcome Elon and Vivek and may they wreak havoc on this bunch at NASA.
“In an organization that had to wait until Sally Ride passed away for anyone to admit she steered Richard Feynman toward the rubber o-rings on Challenger”
Ouch. Never heard that before.
I had not either so I asked Grk what the scoop was…
Sally Ride, Richard Feynman, and the rubber O-rings on the Space Shuttle Challenger are connected through the investigation of the Challenger disaster in 1986. Here’s how:
Sally Ride: As the first American woman astronaut, Sally Ride was a member of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, commonly known as the Rogers Commission. During the investigation, Sally Ride played a critical role by providing key information about the O-rings. She discreetly passed a NASA document to General Donald Kutyna, another commission member, which showed that the resilience of the O-rings decreased at low temperatures. This information was crucial for understanding the failure that led to the disaster. Ride’s involvement was kept secret for many years due to the risk it posed to her career at NASA.
Richard Feynman: A renowned physicist, Feynman was also part of the Rogers Commission. He independently reached conclusions about the role of the O-rings in the disaster. Feynman conducted a famous demonstration during a televised hearing where he showed how the O-ring material lost its elasticity when exposed to cold temperatures, by using a piece of an O-ring submerged in ice water. This demonstration highlighted the vulnerability of the O-rings when the temperature dropped below freezing, which was the case on the day of the Challenger’s last launch. Feynman’s work exposed significant flaws in NASA’s management and their understanding of the shuttle’s safety, particularly regarding the O-rings.
O-rings: The rubber O-rings were part of the field joints on the solid rocket boosters of the Space Shuttle Challenger. These O-rings were supposed to seal the joints, preventing hot gases from escaping during ignition. However, on January 28, 1986, when the Challenger launched, the unusually cold temperatures caused the O-rings to stiffen, failing to seal properly. This failure allowed hot gas to escape, leading to the explosion of the booster, which ultimately caused the shuttle’s destruction. The investigation led by the Rogers Commission, with significant contributions from both Ride and Feynman, pinpointed the O-ring failure as the primary cause of the disaster due to this temperature effect and mismanagement of known risks.
The connection between these three entities underscores a pivotal moment in space exploration history where engineering oversight, management decisions, and the physical properties of materials converged to reveal critical lessons about safety and risk assessment in space travel.
Very, very interesting.
This does, however, raise the glaring question: Why did Ride have to do this? And why were there fears for her career if it came out?
My take: NASA was not cooperating with the investigation. And that’s literally criminal.
The peeling insulation had the same cause as the infamous “Mopar rash” of failing paint jobs on new cars in the same time frame. The best degreaser, Trichloroethylene (TERC) was banned to make Dupont a few billion dollars, er, save the ozone layer, and the half-assed aqueous cleaning methods didn’t work worth a damn.
Why should the managers at NASA care? They’re not riding that death trap. And a massive failure? Decades of more funding without any need to progress.
Yep, sure enough, per General Kutyna, Sally Ride provided the data the o-rings were the problem:
https://emptysqua.re/blog/who-broke-the-challenger-investigation/
The Ride-Kutyna-Feynman connection was reported several years ago. Wish I could remember the media source but I do remember it being revealed by Kutyna not long after Ride passed on. From Feynman’s days with the Manhattan Project and helping to set up the enrichment processes at Oak Ridge he knew how to work with the military and government bureaucracy in general. His genius was revealed in the manner in which he revealed this information via a concocted experiment. His addendum to the Rodgers Commission Report should be required reading at all STEM institutions. Well done.
I wouldn’t call it a concocted experiment. Part of Feynman being a great scientist at a university is being a great teacher, and the dunking the rubber material in the ice water was as much as a classroom demonstration to leave an impression.
I had heard that Feynman was told about the O-ring problem. There is a parallel to the Einstein letter to Roosevelt, where Einstein was “put up to it” by Leo Szilard. Einstein was as a scientist a minor celebrity whereas to people outside of physics research, Szilard was some random guy.
Feynman didn’t think up the O-ring problem, but he did think of the “ice-water experiment” as a way of dramatizing the concern to the broader public. Explanations of Young’s modulus vs temperature would go “woosh” over everyone’s head, but actually seeing an O-ring dunked in cold water getting less flexible made an impression.
I don’t think of concoctions or concocted experiments as being derogatory. It’s an awesome word.* Usually applied to describe an unconventional approach. But if you need newspeak: s/concocted/innovative/g
*concoct
/kən-kŏkt′/
transitive verb
1. To prepare by mixing ingredients, as in cooking.
2. To devise, using skill and intelligence; contrive.
“concoct a plan.”
3. To digest; to convert into nourishment by the organs of nutrition.
Similar: concocted
American Heritage Dictionary On-Line
Did they ever get the Artemis Toilet working? My recollection is, the one aboard ISS failed. I forget which Apollo astronaut “held it” for his entire trip to the Moon rather than poop in a Glad Bag. And, of course, there were the mysterious “space sharks.”
I think that was Wally Schirra on Apollo 7.
Borman did Gemini 7 and held it for two weeks, then did so again on Apollo 8. I think that broke him and he retired from NASA to become CEO at Eastern Airlines where the pilots could fairly state that he was full of…
The slingatron toilet aboard the Space Shuttle was infamous for losing nuggets of freeze-dried waste, so nobody trusted the brown M&Ms after the first day in orbit.
The Russians make do with a vacuum camp toilet. The working US space toilet was bought from Russia. No bowl cam to help you locate your anus, either.
Oh puuuleaseee… Let’s not ideate another streaming service… I can see Greg Gutfeld funding this idea and disseminating it via a podcast… Help us all…
Of course, if funded by subscribers, what could that buy us in space hardware/programs?
They should just fly Artemis II as an unmanned repeat of Artemis I. Test the heat shield “fix” and the ECLSS system. If it fails you’ve saved four lives. Even if it succeeds Starship development will be a year further down the road and it will be easier to propose replacing SLS/Orion with a pure Starship architecture. You might even go ahead and fly Artemis III as the first lunar landing. Just cancel everything beyond that and go with Starship. Don’t build anymore SLS rockets beyond Artemis III and cancel SLS 1B.
In the big scheme of things the Artemis budget is small potatoes and the next Trump administration should not be burning political capital on that when there are bigger fish to fry. I know we’re all space enthusiasts, but honestly, fixing the Federal Government is the more important goal.
Every passing day, the spending problems at NASA become ever more trifling. Getting rid of SLS is only important in freeing up NASA to spend that money on something else, should congress permit it.
I suspect they have an answer and not a final report.
Still, after watching many of my former colleagues brag and being part of “The Resistance” against Trump (tough talk until they got a late paycheck when the government shutdown and they squealed like stuck pigs), I have no idea their motivations. They were happy to slow roll if it meant Trump wasn’t in office for a lunar mission. Oops, I guess they had another failure of imagination and Trump is coming back. Engineering by politics is a hell of a way to run a program. I wish them well at it.
I never heard the expression “go fever”, but there is a YouTube video explaining the circumstances of Amelia Earhart’s “disappearance” in those terms.
I certainly did not know of, for its day, the Artemis-project level of infrastructure supporting Earhart’s fateful flight.
The Pacific Ocean is really, really big that Ferdinand Magellan learned to his chagrin on his trans-Pacific voyage. Earhart’s Lockheed Electra (not the Electra II, the four-engine turboprop that came much later) didn’t have enough range, so the trip was an exercise in creative thinking to come up with a “mission architecture.”
She settled on refueling on Howland’s Island, midway between New Guinea and Hawaii, and she relied on political connections to get President Roosevelt to respond favorably to her letter to him asking that a runway be constructed there. Her flight was also supported by having US Navy ships positioned along the route to serve as navigation waypoints.
Earhart had the insulation stripped from her plane as an effort to remove every ounce of “unnecessary weight” to get as much range as possible, making the cockpit so noisy that she had to pass notes with her navigator Fred Noonan. This may have contributed to not hearing radio voice transmissions from those ships that the headwinds were stronger than forecast, affecting both the prediction of when whe would arrive at this tiny island as well as eating into the plane’s fuel reserves.
The story is that she took off without getting an updated weather briefing of the stronger headwinds, either. “Go fever” pretty much explains how “the holes in the Swiss cheese lined up” on her flight, that stretched both the capabilities of the plane, weather forecasting an reporting as well as the navigation (radio direction-finding) and radio communication (Morse and voice on multiple bands) available to this flight, with the eagerness to “go” along with a decision of strip the plane of insulation that would have allowed hearing radio voice communications, all of this using up any available margin in those capabilities.