Bob Zimmerman says to take them off the flight.
NASA would never allow SpaceX to do something like this.
But it’s a tremendous waste of money either way.
[Friday-afternoon update]
Eric Berger reports on a meeting at NASA to discuss the issue. Jared owns it now.
[Bumped]
[Midnight update]
Charlie Camarda responds.
I agree with Bob Z. To fly Artemis II with crew is a terrible idea. I will specifically not watch any of this on TV. Too stressful. I was spared witnessing the Columbia disaster because I was sick in bed with the flu at the time. But I watched Challenger in real time. Any number of things with SLS/Orion could make this worse or similar to either of those. It doesn’t appear to me NASA has learned a damned thing.
I’m not in any way wishing for something bad to happen to the crew, but that might be what it takes to end the SLS and Orion abominations.
Wishing one way or the other way is just personal superstition because wishing doesn’t change anything. If one believes in the teachings of the Bible, indulging in superstition is actively frowned upon, but if one is a believer, a person should start praying in earnest. One, that nothing bad happens to the crew and two, were something bad to happen to the crew, ending the program may not be outcome. This may induce people to “double down” on the program in memory of the crew.
As to Rand’s remark about a tremendous waste of money either way, the either being either to fly with a crew or without a crew, doesn’t all of this address a sunk-cost fallacy. That is, we have come this far and spent so much money, we may as well fly the mission.
Sometimes the money spent is just that, money spent because at the time you started spending it, you didn’t know any better, but the better course of action is sometimes to stop spending any more money to no effective purpose?
My hope is that, with access to the unredacted report, Isaacman will make a different choice than he publicly pledged when the report was still a PDF of black ink.
Or he will release the report to put others minds at ease.
Or something else prudent and shrewd, even in the face of political pressure.
What needs to be done is obvious and has been since Arty 1’s Orion came back with a heat shield looking like ten miles of bad road:
1. Fly Arty 2 on schedule without crew.
2. Reassign the crew to Arty 3.
3. Fix the Artemis heat shield and not play simulation games hoping to make it go away. After all it held together last time, right?
That should have said Orion. WP won’t let me go back and fix.
There’s a disconnect where Isaacman says he’s bringing back Crew-11 because safety is first and yet it seems he’s ok with flying astros on a ship whose life support system hasn’t been tested and whose heat shield solution is chancy at best.
I agree with everyone else that the crew should be removed from this next flight. If one or more of the crew is killed or injured Artemis is done (small loss), but more importantly, NASA and the administration will take a big hit:
They cannot avoid the fact that they were amply warned.
Don’t think for a second there won’t be blow-back on SpaceX and Blue Origin if Artemis II kills its crew.
SpaceX will likely also face Congressional hearings, because. Elon’s not popular with the Theater Kids (TK) these days and they just love putting on a show. There’s always a risk of SpaceX being regulated beyond feasibility. Esp. if the TKs take the WH next election cycle.
Blue Origin maybe less so. They are largely living off DoW contracts with no grandiose plans to go to Mars on their books.
Hey, there was an election in 2024. Biden is not the President anymore. Nancy is not Speaker. Chuck doesn’t run the Senate. The Theater Kids – and their great grandparents – aren’t in charge of anything anymore. If Arty 2 kills its crew, there’ll be Congressional hearings alright, but the only role Elon is likely to play is as a witness to testify about what he’s going to do to rectify the situation.
The TKs are busy running interference for foreign-born criminals literally raping and killing Americans and financially raping the American taxpayer. Oh yeah, and weaponizing SUVs in an effort to keep all of those criminals here so they can be the next big Democrat voting block. That’s going to lose them the ’26 midterms and keep them out of the WH for the foreseeable future.
Given his personal history, Isaacman seems to have a higher risk tolerance than most people.
This may be why he’s happy to fly Artemis 2 with crew.
I would suggest a different solution.
Jake Garn, Bill Nelson, and John Glenn were all congressmen who flew in space. I’m sure we could find four very problematic congressmen to send on this mission, and who would do it for the free PR it would provide to their campaigns. Jasmine Crocket is probably ruled out because she’s losing her seat to redistricting, but this does provide the chance to make Ilhan Omar the first Somali to go around the moon. Heck, MGT could go to verify that there aren’t any Jewish space lasers up there.
Unfortunately the limited crew size of Orion doesn’t allow an opportunity to really clean up DC, but future Starship test flights might, and everyone would see the logic in not adding an abort system to it.
Not sure if MGT refers to Marjorie T-G, but if so, she’s no longer in Congress.
Eric Berger reports on a meeting at NASA to discuss the issue. Jared owns it now.
Good input. Thank goodness for the insight EB provides. Otherwise I’d have no clue what NASA is up to. They’ve certainly been less than transparent with the public. I sincerely hope Jared fixes that.
The stakes are extremely high and not just for NASA.
Now what about the life support system?
Elephant? What elephant? In THIS room?
I read an article years ago about a plan to put rebreathers and blankets aboard Apollo in case the ECLSS failed. I bet the Apollo 13 crew would’ve enjoyed the blankets.
Rand, aren’t you on record saying we’re not killing enough astronauts? Didn’t you want to send a guy with nothing more than an oxygen mask on the very first cargo Dragon?
Artemis 2 with crew would seem like a cinch to get your enthusiastic approval.
Jim, have you read my book? Because I can only infer from your question that either you did not, or you completely missed the point of it.
Hint: It’s about risk versus reward.
I’d go. Probably better than the actual death I’ll face a few years down the road! Not to mention the possible reward of a moon flight, landing or no.
One of the more interesting things in the article is the assertion Orion as-is could make it through reentry even if the heat shield fell off. Which suggests the heat shield is there to make it “reusable.”
I would guess that it can survive the loss of isolated tiles, as the Shuttle and Starship could, but losing adjacent ones gets more and more troublesome.
One thing to keep in mind: Artemis II will be the ONLY flight with the heat shield in its present configuration. On Artemis III, the shield is being reworked to be more permeable, to prevent the outgassing problems.
So, what would be the point in flying this Orion, with its heat shield as is, on an uncrewed test flight? The data you get out of it will be of limited utility. This shield configuration is never flying again!
The sensible thing, therefore, would seem to be to pull the stack, take off the Orion, and either rebuild its heat shield to the new configuration for use in an uncrewed test flight, or switch in the Artemis III Orion, and fly THAT as the uncrewed test flight, and see how it holds up on reentry.
All of that would take time, and push back the next crewed Artemis mission at least 2-3 years, of course. But if you want flight data to prove out your modeling so you can feel some assurance putting human beings on it, this is the minimum I think you need to do.
Richard,
There would be some value to fly Artemis II without crew as a test of the new and untested life support system. The data could be collected even if the Orion capsule’s heat shield failed upon reentry. The stack is already complete. The data could be collected with the existing hardware without risking crew and without the lost cost of throwing out this hardware.
I do agree it would be prudent to launch Artemis III without crew as well. But again this points out the weakness of SLS/Orion. Unlike Starship/SuperHeavy SLS stacks are expensive to construct and few and far between. Thus the heavy reliance on modeling and simulation. IMO not an optimal solution when dealing with novel hardware configurations.
Plus you’d get more data back on the effects of the new re-entry profile on the old heat shield as a means of validating the models used to predict its effects.
As a final note, I take little comfort in the idea that the Orion capsule could withstand a heat shield penetration. That seems to assume a lot to me. Like maybe another system gets overheated (like a pressure vessel of some kind, just as a for instance) causing a secondary failure that could prove just as catastrophic. Prove to me why this thinking is any better than the idea of blow-by in a primary o-ring seal is acceptable if the secondary o-ring holds its seal?
What David Spain said.
There is particular value in testing the extant heat shield formula against the revised entry profile without risking crew. But that, sadly, is not going to happen. Instead, Arty 2 will test the extant heat shield formula against the revised entry profile with a crew at risk. There are four possible outcomes:
1. The heat shield performs better than it did on Arty 1.
2. The heat shield performs about the same as it did on Arty 1.
3. The heat shield performs worse than it did on Arty 1, but the vehicle still makes it back in one piece and the crew survives.
4. The heat shield performs worse than it did on Arty 1 and the vehicle breaks up on re-entry, killing the crew.
Only if the first possible outcome eventuates would it make sense to proceed with a crewed Artemis mission without an additional uncrewed test of the new-formula heat shield. Said new-formula heat shield is based on the simulations by the same folks who did the simulations that guided the design of the new entry profile. A better-than-Arty 1 performance by an uncrewed Arty 2 would suggest that reasonable confidence could be placed on the new heat shield formulation actually performing still better than the extant formula on Arty 2.
For any of the 2 – 4 outcomes, no such assumption would be warranted and Artemis 3 should be an uncrewed test run prior to a crewed mission that should have no lower a number than 4.
Following such a course would delay any crewed Moon landing until at least 2030 – possibly later. That may not be sufficient to Beat the Chinese[tm]. In that case, the smart move would be to abandon both SLS and Orion after a problematical Arty 2 and count on SpaceX to provide an all-Starship solution by 2028.
In the event, I think this latter course of action would only be taken if alternative 4 eventuates and the Arty 2 crew is lost. Any other outcome will, I suspect, result in Arty 3 proceeding ASAP with a crew.
As Elon is now hot to industrialize the Moon to build AI data centers in space, the all-Starship lunar logistics capability, for both crew and cargo and at scale far larger than any notional Artemis mission beyond number 3, will exist and be in service before any SLS-EUS-Orion-based Arty 4 mission could be essayed. I think that means that, Ted Cruz and a few others notwithstanding, SLS-Orion goes away after Arty 3.
If this configuration is unique, then why put people on it to possibly die just to get data of limited use?
I think NASA wants to put people on it so that they can point to it and say “This is what all that money went to. Starship isn’t doing this.”
Which of course assumes that the capsule and the people survive.
I’ve seen it suggested in the comments in the link to Camarda’s response to Berger that Orion and its service module could be more rapidly tested if launched on a Falcon Heavy. This presumes it is possible to churn Orion capsules and its attendant service modules out faster than an SLS with core and SRBs. Has anyone here analyzed this possibility for feasibility? Or is this just more fantasy land thinking?
BTW the Camarda response is an excellent read.
Launched uncrewed I should have said.
Yeah, Camarda is not a happy camper. I don’t blame him. All we can do now is hope God once again protects drunks, fools and the United States of America.
–Reentry and splashdown
The spacecraft separated from its service module at around 17:00 UTC on December 11 and then reentered Earth’s atmosphere at 17:20 UTC travelling near 40,000 km/h (25,000 mph). It was the first United States use of a “skip entry”, a form of non-ballistic atmospheric entry into the atmosphere, pioneered by Zond 7, in which two phases of deceleration would expose human occupants to relatively less intense G-forces than would be experienced during an Apollo-style reentry–
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_I
It seems something could have been learned with this first attempt of “skip entry”.
Also with Starlink we can get telemetry while it’s going through reentry. And it seems human pilots could be piloting.