It's worth pointing out that this is the first extremely public, widely acknowledged high risk mission NASA has done in over 50 years. The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle.
According to NASA's OIG, Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle. There genuinely is a world where they don't make it back home.
I am grateful that they did. And I'm grateful that we're going to go even further. I can't wait to see what Jared's cooking up (for those who don't know, he made his own version of the Gemini program in Polaris and funded it out of pocket).
This seems insane to me. That X decades later we accept, with all our advancements in tech, a weaker system than ever before. That if we send 30 people we _accept_ that one is possible to die.
That's the starting point? That's what we document as acceptable?
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.
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.)
note - I can't verify any of the following, it's more - for lack of a better term - aerospace nerd fan theory at this point.
Post-collapse, people think that the Buran justification was paranoia. But based on what I've read / seen (though this is getting hard to source, so I might be just good ol' hallucinating here), they weren't entirely wrong. The subtext around that large payload bay had to do with the Soviet pursuit of systems like Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment... that weaponized space.
Again, there's a reason for those ASAT tests. There's a reason for the weird specifications set in the early 1970s for the Shuttle. And I don't think deploying a spy satellite alone is it. But this is speculation. AFAICT, nothing was put on paper.
It would have been an incendiary WW3 starting act to capture a Soviet asset. But I think it is understandable if certain people within the American blob wanted that capability at hand.
I wish I was immortal. I'd drop everything for a decade and try to find people from the time who're still alive (and some still are!) and ask them these questions directly - on the record – for posterity's sake. I suspect, we came much closer to war via space than most people think. And because we didn't, we'll eventually repeat these mistakes.
---
Oh and then there was the documented attempt to capture Salyut-7 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2554/1
Somehow all the numbers just happened to line right up. :)
This isn’t true. The same article even explains that.
From that article: “It takes only some basic fact checking to debunk all the preposterous allegations…”
For me, it's a fun conspiracy theory to engage with. I'm only doing this for the love of the game as it were. Please don't take it that seriously.
But you have to admit, it is a fun theory. A lot of the claims made by the Russians / Roscosmos are most likely false, but if you notice the article says,
> The only concrete document referred to is an intelligence memo that Defense Minister Sokolov supposedly received on February 24 about the assignment of the French astronauts. Whether such a memo really landed on his desk that day is questionable (after all, Baudry’s assignment to 51E had been publicly announced by NASA in August 1984), but the idea that the assignment raised some suspicions in Soviet circles about the objectives of the Challenger mission may not be so far-fetched. There had always been a high level of paranoia in the Soviet Union about the military potential of the Space Shuttle. Misconceptions about the military applications of the shuttle, such as the belief that it was capable of diving into the atmosphere to drop bombs over Moscow, had been a key factor in the Soviet decision to develop Buran in 1976. The Buran orbiter was a virtual carbon copy of its US counterpart in shape and dimensions, exactly to counter the perceived military threat of the Shuttle. Furthermore, a couple of developments in the Shuttle program in early 1985 may have fueled the Soviet paranoia. The Shuttle had flown its first dedicated Defense Department mission (STS-51C) in January 1985 and a controversial laser experiment in the framework of SDI was planned for the STS-51G mission in June.
> The least one can say is that Salyut-7, which was 13.5 meters long and had a maximum diameter of 4.15 meters, would have fit inside the Shuttle’s cargo bay, whose dimensions were 4.6 by 18 meters. In fact, after the final crewed mission to Salyut-7 in 1986, the Russians significantly raised its orbit in hopes that one day it could be retrieved by Buran, which had the same dimensions as the American shuttle.
and this is one of my favorite missions, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-A (with my favorite space selfie)
Fun fact, the original deorbit plan for the Hubble was for the Shuttle to bring it back and then put it inside the Smithsonian, https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/orbitaldebris2019/orbital2...
(the Smithsonian part is IRL lore, and isn't mentioned online, AFAICT)
Read Payne Harrison's 1989 novel Storming Intrepid, followed by NASA publication SP-4221, "The Space Shuttle Decision," from 1999. [1] The first is a pretty good depiction of what you're imagining, and the second explains why the imagination of a technothriller author is where that idea went to die. Then maybe give your head a shake. If Reagan had violated the Outer Space Treaty - via NASA of all agencies! - how do you imagine it'd have stayed secret over these forty years just past?
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20241229052235/https://ntrs.nasa...
While I have no reason to believe this particular escapade, I do expect that there are a thousand such wild stories that have remained secret. Watergate seems obvious and explosive to moderns, but at the time it could easily have gone undiscovered or unremarked. How many other similar scale plots, domestic and international, succeeded or failed without ever being surfaced into the history books? A few? Dozens? Hundreds? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> 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...
> Was funding really secure?
The Saturn V's existed. Saturn V serial numbers were designated as S-5## where # is an increment from 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#Launch_history <--- see the Saturn V numbering scheme here.
SA-513 was repurposed from Apollo 18 to Skylab. SA-514 was meant for Apollo 19. They put it on display. SA-515 was also chopped up and put on display. Some parts were used in Skylab. https://www.space.com/nasa-extra-apollo-moon-saturn-v-rocket...
So there were 3 Saturn V already assembled and in existence.
Did the CSMs and LEMs exist? CSMs had a similar serial number scheme. And they designated "Block 1" and "Block 2" (iterations of the spacecraft design based on testing) CSM-0## and CSM-1##
The CSM used in Apollo 17 was CSM-114. On wikipedia it says that CSM-115 and CSM-115a were never fully assembled and cancelled, but if you look past that, you can also see that Skylab used, CSM-116, CSM-117 and CSM-118. These were Apollo CSMs, fresh off the same assembly line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_command_and_service_mod...
So there were 3 CSMs.
What about LEM? Similar number scheme, LM-## which is incremented with each one made. So first one was LM-1 and the last one used on Apollo 17 was LM-12. LM-13 is on display in a museum. LM-14 was on the production line (along with LM-15??) and a "stop work" order was issued and they were scrapped. Yes, they were literally broken down and turned into scrap. https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-lunar-modules-lm14-lm15...
So NASA had 1 LEM and 2 were on the way. I think, we can charitably say that there were 3 LEMs available at the time. I think it's fair to say that...
There were 3 LEMs.
Did they have 3 crews? Funnily enough, they did have 3 crews already assigned! What a coincidence. https://web.archive.org/web/20181224161154/https://nssdc.gsf... :)
So the Saturn Vs existed and had been paid for. The CSMs existed and had been paid for. The LMs existed / were on the line and had been paid for. The crews existed (and had been partially paid for).
So what is the "funding shortfall" that caused America to stop going to the moon?
The "funding shortfall" here is the money required to pay for the ground crews and personnel for carrying out the mission. And that amount was $42.1 million out of $956 million for Apollo. The total NASA budget was, $3.27 billion that year.
> NASA was canceling Apollo missions 15 and 19 because of congressional cuts in FY 1971 NASA appropriations, Administrator Thomas O. Paine announced in a Washington news conference. Remaining missions would be designated Apollo 14 through 17. The Apollo budget would be reduced by $42.1 million, to $914.4 million - within total NASA $3.27 billion.
It's probably a coincidence that this happened right after Apollo 13. The decision was announced on September 2nd, 1970. Apollo 13 happened in April, 1970.
----
So yes, the funding was there. I suspect the "funding cut" argument was an attempt to save face; after the US Government (and I mean the Government, it's clear both the White House and Congress were involved) decided to cut the cord post-Apollo 13.
I also suspect this is one of the many "open secrets" lost to time. It might have been known by "everyone" in the know at the time, but those who knew died off, and history crystallized around the written page.
I will point out however that the budget was congressionally-mandated, and no funds were allocated for moon landings as they were in previous years; it would have been illegal to use funds dedicated to other areas for moon landings. Maybe I'm being overly pedantic here, but to say the 'funding was secured' as in the article implies the decision to cancel the remaining programs lay with NASA leadership; it would be more accurate to say that funding for the remaining programs, though possible, was not secured, most likely as an attempt to save face by congress/govt.
Apollo 18, 19 and 20 were cancelled in 1970. 3+ years ahead of Apollo 18. Apollo 17 didn't happen until December 1972.
The US couldn't plug this funding "shortfall" in 3+ years out of the many, many parts of NASA?
It's pretty clear that the decision to kill Apollo had been made. The money is just how they chose to do it so that the POTUS didn't have to go on record cancelling Apollo. There was no room for negotiation. POTUS and Congress had decided that Apollo needed to die and so it died. How it died was relevant only so far as to serve as a mechanism to save face.
> the 'funding was secured' as in the article implies the decision to cancel the remaining programs lay with NASA leadership
How could they have eliminated that risk?
- They replaced the specific foam insulation that struck Columbia with external heaters, and redesigned other areas where foam was necessary to ensure greater structural stability + minimize damage to the shuttle in case of breakage. They also began more thorough inspection of any heat shield panels that would be reused between missions
- They added various cameras, both on the shuttle and on the ground, to monitor the heat shield throughout launch, plus accelerometers and temperature sensors. Also, the heat shield was checked manually on every mission once in orbit for damage, both with an extension to the Canadarm, and with ISS cameras when possible (a funky maneuver [0] where they would do a backflip to flash the shuttle's belly at the ISS for it to take high res pictures)
- Every mission from then on had a backup plan in case the shuttle wasn't in a state to return to Earth (this wasn't really the case before then, which is kinda wild). Another shuttle was always ready to launch, with a new configuration of seats to allow for sufficient crew space
- They sent up equipment and materials for repairs in space with every launch, though admittedly the usefulness of that was dubious and the repair kits were never used
Perhaps 'eliminate' was too strong a word, but there's no reason these precautions couldn't or shouldn't have been taken before it resulted in deaths and the loss of a spacecraft. (well, other than the aforementioned funding/politics/organizational failure)
Actually the backup plan almost every time was to just stay on the ISS until another Shuttle could be prepared. They only had another Shuttle on standby a couple times, during missions where they weren’t going to the ISS.
>They sent up equipment and materials for repairs in space with every launch, though admittedly the usefulness of that was dubious and the repair kits were never used
Yeah it wasn’t even useful for a situation like Columbia. It didn’t lose a few tiles or something, it had a giant hole punched into its wing.
There’s no fixing that in space. So I personally think they focused on situations they could theoretically fix, even though those situations weren’t what happened to Columbia.
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.
I agree entirely that it's much easier to imagine a successful moon program built around repeatable missions at high cadence, so I'm not disagreeing on that point. I would just push back on the idea that this has little or no value.
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.
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.
There was also Nautilus-X which never made it beyond the concept stage.
If you feel constrained by the size of the Falcon Heavy fairing the now defunct Bigelow Aerospace launched several prototype inflatable habitats that apparently tested well in LEO.
Combine this with a lunar cycler[0] orbit and you could keep reusing the same craft over and over and expanding to it if you want to ferry the astronauts to the moon.
You'll note that everything I'm describing requires existing technology and very proven techniques (except maybe the inflatable stuff) but the thing it doesn't require is a giant rocket like SLS or Starship. I'm not saying that we shouldn't build machines like that, it's just that they really aren't needed for a mission like this and I question why something like SLS was built in the first place.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20171208090538/http://www.tested...
> 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.
compared to what? We're the most advanced species we know of.
It might even hold true over the entire universe. All species might top out at where we are. We don't know.
Absolutely it is, if NASA was not constrained by congress to use shuttle components to build the spacecraft, they could have had double the payload mass capability at least (the Saturn V was almost twice as capable, we should be able to do a little better now). This would provide tons of extra margin for safety, and allow a shorter and thus safer route to the moon as well.
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)
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.
[wiki link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...).-,During%20spaceflight,fatality%20rate%20at%202.4%20percent.)
Note that all the fatalities have been launch or landing related, not in space itself. Clawing out of this gravity well is tough. Make Earth a bit larger and you’d never get off it without something like NERVA or nuclear pulse Orion.
I wonder sometimes if that’s another thing to toss in the Fermi paradox bucket. Many rocky planets might be much more massive than Earth. On one with 3X our gravity a space program might never get going.
So no space program from a super Earth until they figure out not just fusion but compact high density fusion that could fly. You’d need stuff like in The Expanse, or at least in that rough ballpark.
Using fission is something they probably wouldn’t do unless they faced an existential reason forcing them to go to space, like deflecting an asteroid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop
Or potentially beamed power for launch, so you don't kug a power source. But in any case, indeed much harder. :)
I’m a little obsessed with Orion though. The fact that the math works on that lunacy. The good old devil’s pogo stick.
If you could make pure fusion bombs it would be maybe politically viable, especially if you also use superconducting magnets to make it less just brute force. You’d still induce a little radioactivity from neutrons but it would be short lived and not even close to fissile fallout bad.
To see that thing launch. From somewhere very remote though, probably Antarctica. And from many miles away, and probably with welders glass. But damn. That would be epic.
Life may not be that unusual but it might be mostly just goo: little extremophile type bacteria and maybe very tiny creepy crawlies living in deep seas, underground, in liquid mantles in ice moons, etc.
But to get stuff even as sophisticated as frogs and bunnies, let alone something that can try space flight, requires a place that is all of: big, stable, with abundant energy, with high enough metallicity, and in an environment well shielded from flares and impacts.
There may not be a lot of places like this.
Here we are, half a century after the first moon landing, doing a flyby of the moon in preparation for landing and supposedly for establishing a base there that makes no sense. We’re not even close to being able to send humans to the nearest planets, and even if we did send people to Mars, in one of the most pointlessly dangerous and expensive missions in history, it’d be extremely unlikely to lead even to a base, let alone a settlement.
Yet with all that, people still talk about the Fermi paradox as though it’s a mystery.
It makes me think we’re really dealing with a kind of religious belief. Religion backfills reality with comforting fantasies, like life after death. In this case, the fantasy that there are much more advanced, interstellar spacefaring civilizations than ours elsewhere in the galaxy. This implies that humans too could one day become an interstellar species (with enough grit and determination and pulling back on the control stick and yelling, I suppose!) But somehow, mysterious effects prevent us from ever observing any evidence of this belief.
And yes, space flight is brutally hard. Look up the history of sailing. Look up the Polynesian indigenous peoples and how long that took, through multiple waves of exploration, or the people who walked across a land bridge to North America during the ice age. Space flight is easier and safer than some of those feats, given the tech they did it with at the time.
If there is a fantasy it’s the idea that we’d have bases on the Moon and Mars by now. What we are doing today is the equivalent of early Polynesians hollowing out some logs and going fishing.
(Some would snidely say as long as they don't put seven people on the rocket they'll be fine.)
Apollo 13 was a very close call. If that had ended in failure the mortality rate would have been 1 in 6.
So 1 in 30 would be a pretty clear improvement from Apollo, and we are a lot better and more thorough at modeling those risks and testing systems than we were during the Apollo program.
The risk factor is calculated _per mission_ from what I understand. You can have three accidents in a row and nothing for decades but the risk itself can still be 1 in 30.
- Historical. Low N as you say. (Even though each mission and spacecraft is different and they're spread out over time, there's value in this)
- Bureaucrat number; absurdly low, but looks good to politicians etc
- Engineering estimateBut then, Apollo 1 was after all the first mission on the Saturn V. I think we should assess even its pre-launch risk much higher than the rest of them. Similarly Artemis II has a much higher risk than the subsequent ones will have.
Of course Apollo would have likely had a better average if it had continued, but the risk of the Apollo program, as executed, included things like the first flight of the Saturn V.
If the final empirical mortality result of the Artemis program is 1/30 or less, it will be better than Apollo in that statistic.
A comparison of acceptable mortality is where this discussion began. If Apollo was acceptable at 1/12 (We did it, it was apparently acceptable as the program was not cancelled due to mortality rate) then an acceptable mortality of 1/30 is stronger than Apollo, not weaker.
No, but it means that to ensure that I do better on my next set of coin tosses I need to beat 3 in 4, not 1 in 2.
That assumes a fair coin. The fact is you don't know what the odds were of getting heads or tails for that particular coin, all you know is that you got 3/4 heads. And in this analogy, a few hundred coins have every been made, in maybe a dozen styles, none of which have been fair, so you have no good reason to believe that this particular coin should have 50/50 odds of landing heads up.
If you want a historical comparison, over 200 men left with Magellan on his voyage around the globe and only 40 returned.
"Death, from disease or excess, was a commonplace, and two-thirds of the Company servants who came out never made it back – fewer still in the Company’s army, where 25 per cent of European soldiers died each year."
Indeed, it's rather amazing to think about just how recently things changed. The generation that first went to the moon had a much lower infant mortality rate than in the 1500s, but it was still about 20 times higher than today, and critically they were all raised by parents and lead by people who had grown up around normalized high infant mortality rates. Boomers are the first generation where infant mortality was continually below 5%, and millennials are the first generation to be raised by parents who considered their children's survival to adulthood a given. And of course that's for the developed world; global infant mortality only fell below 5% in 2010. Right now is the first time in human history that you can say with 95% confidence that a random human newborn will survive to adulthood. We should be much more risk averse than our ancestors, we are on average anteing up many more happy, healthy years than they were.
Were Magellan’s men volunteers? For example, in the incident with The Wager, 1,980 men left on 6 ships, and only 188 survived. Men of the original men were press-ganged (kidnapped to crew these ships), and a lot of them were even taken from an infirmary and not in great health. And, of course, conditions were pretty terrible.
So yeah, we’re more risk adverse… and also a lot better at keeping people alive. I think most people would not have signed up for some of these really risky endeavors if they knew the true risk.
There are reasons to think Artemis is safer. It has a launch abort system that the shuttle lacked. Reentry should also be much safer under Artemis; the capsule is a much simpler object to protect.
And the atmospheric entry is still the same as 1969. Physics doesn’t change.
I’d say we’re doing better!
how do you keep past performance while stop performing it for XY decades?
This mission is not about sending stuff out to deep space. Its about sending out new generation of humans to deep space.
Even if you could guarantee that these new humans have exact same experience of past humans, can we guarantee that past decades simulations or theoretical knowledge acquired - while NOT actually doing something - will effectively reduce the chances of mortality?
Better to document risk, than lie to brave volunteers. And they knew the risk, and wanted to go. So I see zero issues here.
I waited until splashdown to permit my emotions to get involved, and I'm glad I did. It was really something earlier, to hear my whole neighborhood bar set up a cheer for an American mission to the Moon.
From a social perspective, I would recommend to think of the average death per capita of an effort, which is effectively nil for Artemis (very few astronauts vs us population) compared to generating electricity with coal, which kills many annually.
1) Eventually you will die, no matter what. It can be the most mundane thing. Slipping on a ketchup splatter can cause great damage for example.
2) It's a profession where you intentionally kill people, so, that changes the calculation for your own risk.
3) It's a unique opportunity.
4) Gives a sense of living / be in history books for his family.
Not being an astronaut (or being a test pilot, for that matter). That's the context in which he was speaking.
Gordo! Who's the best pilot you ever saw? -- You're lookin' at him!
Loan me a stick of Beemans.
Light this candle!
It just blew!
No bucks, no Buck Rogers.
Do you have a link? I’m asking because it is very easy to make mistakes when comparing risks. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47725961 translates that into “That if we send 30 people we _accept_ that one is possible to die.” If that interpretation is correct, given Artemis has a crew of four, that looks more like a 1:120 chance of a mortality of 4. I think that would make it an improvement over the space shuttle.
If it means that, on average, a team member dies every 30 flights, with a crew of four, it’s likely there are fatalities in ‘only’ one in every 120 flights.
For space shuttle, that number was about one in every 60 flights. So, with that interpretation, Artemis would be about twice as safe as the Space Shuttle.
If, on the other hand, it means that, if you step aboard Artemis, your chance of dying during the flight is about one in 30, the Space Shuttle would be about twice as safe as Artemis.
How did they arrive at that number?
(Eg. Did they arbitrily establish the target at the outset? Or did it evolve by gauging the projected failure rate of their core mechanical etc. systems as those began to take shape, then establishing a universal minimum in line with that, to achieve some level of uniformity and avoid drastically under/over-engineering subsequent systems?)
They understood it to be extremely risky immediately. They understood the ice issue early on as evidenced by the fact that they completely changed the coating on the external fuel tank to try to compensate for it. They also added ice bridges and other features to the launch pad to try to diminish the risk. They also planned for in orbit heat shield tile repair. They specifically chose the glue to be compatible with total vacuum conditions so they could actually detach and rebond a whole tile if necessary. They developed a complicated and, unfortunately wrong, computer model to estimate the damage potential of ice strikes to the heat shield tiles. What they _finally_ came to understand was that you just have to swing the arm out on orbit and take high resolution pictures of the vehicle to properly assess it's condition.
NASA was and always is very bad at calculating systemic risk. They have the right people developing risk profiles for individual components but they've never had the understanding at the management level of how to assess them as a complete vehicle in the context of any given mission.
> Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle.
The huge advantage they now have is a capable launch escape system which can possibly jettison them away from the rocket should any issues arise during ascent. That was the one thing the shuttle could not possibly integrate.
On the other hand they could take a far larger crew to orbit and maintain them comfortably for several weeks during the mission. The "space bus" generated a healthy 21kW from it's fuel cells and created so much water that you had to periodically dump it overboard. This was a blessing for the ISS because you could bag up all that excess water and transfer it for long term use.
Anyways.. as you can tell.. I just really loved the shuttle. It was a great vehicle that was ultimately too exceedingly tricky to manage safely.
I think you're being a pedant, if your point is a grazing entry causing rebound skip ultimately returns to some orbital path downward.
They certainly could've gotten the return wrong but with a perigee of 119 miles they arent even in a stable orbit and likely could deorbit themselves using only rcs thrusters at apogee, or by just waiting a few orbits.
In fact, the trajectory they chose for this mission exploited the opposite effect to yield a free return without propellant expense.
In the modern day, the chance of a math error being the root cause behind this failure mode are vanishingly small, but minor burn execution mistakes that do not require hundreds of extra pounds of propellant are definitely plausible. They were extremely common in the early days of spaceflight and plagued most of the very first moon exploration attempts. Again, with modern RCS this is unlikely. But reentry is still incredibly tight and dangerous. Apollo famously had a +-1° safe entry corridor, and Orion is way heavier and coming in even faster. If their perigee was off they could’ve easily burned up or doubled their mission time, which they may not have been able to survive.
I feel like the original claim paints the whole thing as on a knife edge and barely achieved by virtue of not making a single mistake. In today's age with so many moon landing deniers and worse I feel like we should be specific about where the actual dangers challenges and unknowns there were here. In reality, the orbital mechanics are one of the simplest parts of the entire problem, at least when we're talking about a moon flyby
Artemis II never escaped Earth’s pull.
That video that NASA put out where the craft did a sling shop around the moon is extremely deceptive. The pull of the moon had very little effect.
If they had missed, they would have eventually crashed back to earth in the worst case, and best case just re-adjusted and returned a little bummed.
No, it had a very significant effect: it's what made possible the free return trajectory while observing the far side of the moon.
Like I said, the gif you saw makes it look that way.
Here is a link that explains it very well. https://youtu.be/MF8IbYbVIA0?t=269
I’ll agree, it seems crazy that it left earth, made it to the moon, and never really left earth orbit at all. That the furthest we’ve been away is still destined to return on its own.
Makes it look what way?
Watch the NASA video carefully. It's clear that, even before the "loop" begins, Artemis is slowed down and is soon going to reverse direction relative to Earth. Which of course it would anyway, as you say--because, as the video you linked to points out, it doesn't have Earth escape velocity. The TLI burn gave it just enough velocity to reach the Moon's orbit with a little extra speed left over to get it about 4000 miles further.
But what would not happen without the Moon there is the "backwards" part of the loop--the part that took Artemis around the far side of the Moon. The Moon's gravity is what did that. In the Moon-centered frame in the video, yes, it looks like just a slight deflection--because that frame is moving with the Moon, whereas Artemis was moving backwards--in the opposite direction from the Moon in the Earth-centered frame.
Without the Moon there, Artemis would never have moved backwards, relative to the Moon's orbit, at all. Its trajectory in the Earth centered frame would have been a simple ellipse, with a maximum altitude from Earth a little higher than what it actually achieved (since the Moon's gravity did pull it back a little bit).
No, it's not. You aren't responding to what I actually said. See below.
> the “free return” would have happened if they launched entirely in the wrong direction.
But it would not have been a free return that let them see the far side of the moon, which is what I said. The Moon's gravity is what made that possible. And that was very significant.
The whole idea of the shuttle program was to make space travel routine and less-risky. Like air travel.
It obviously failed at that goal.
So with 4 crew members, chance of one dying was 13%! Very lucky they all survived.
I think they did think of it as risky and acknowledge that it was risky, they just had a different tolerance for risk.
The Artemis mission is "more difficult" - you're firing folk way out into space and hoping you hit a fairly narrow channel where they swing around the Moon back towards you, and not just keep going straight on out beyond any hope of rescue, or biff it in hard becoming a new lunar crater. You've got to carry a lot more fuel, and a lot more technology. You're going to have them up there in a much smaller space than the Shuttle for a lot longer.
The Shuttle by contrast was kind of "proven technology" by the end of its life, and we really should have developed some new stuff off it. Columbia first flew in 1981 but "the keel was laid" as it were in 1975! Think about the massive shifts in technology between 1975 and 1981, and then maybe 1981 and 1987.
I remember someone saying in 1981 that their new car had more computer power controlling the engine than took man to the Moon (the first time round!), and my late 90s car has more computer power than took man to the Moon in the instrument cluster. Your car is probably a lot newer, and has about as much computer power as NASA had on the ground for the Apollo missions just to operate the buttons on the steering wheel that turn the radio up and down, in a chip the size of your fingernail, that costs the price of a not very good coffee.
The main failure modes of space travel have always been "we can't get the astronauts back down", "we can't get the astronauts back down at less than several times the speed of sound", or "the astronauts are now a rapidly expanding cloud of hot fried mince". What's changed is the extent to which we accept that, I guess.
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...
Unless you happen to have some deep links into NASA, in which case please elucidate us all, then why not celebrate a happy and safe return from a sodding dangerous mission that involved things like >25,000 mph relative velocity and some remarkable navigation.
When you depart earth (close quarters gravity, air resistance, things in the way), everything moves really fast, really fast and any acceleration becomes an issue really ... fast!
The moon moves, the earth moves: both famously in some sort of weird dance around each other and both orbit around the sun. Obviously the moon affects the earth way less than vice versa but it still complicates things.
I think that NASA did a remarkable job of making Artemis II look almost routine and I don't think that was down to behaving as they did in the past.
I have been excited for Artemis--yes it's big and expensive and late, but look how it has brought out the best of what humans can be--but, despite all that, the heat shield situation was textbook "normalization of deviance." Just as the O-rings were not designed to have any damage but they retroactively justified it was okay, just as there was not supposed to be any foam or tile damage but they retroactively justified it was okay, so too was the Artemis I heat shield not supposed to come back with damage, but they...
I'm not trying to be negative, and risks are inevitable, but the resemblance to me was uncanny. The lesson with normalization of deviance is that a successful result does not inherently mean a safe decision. After all, most of the time that you play Russian Roulette you will escape unharmed.
The heat shield failure was a test and the result was a working heat shield, when it counted. That's the point of tests. NASA already had several working heat shields from the old missions but the new one needed testing - for the shape of the craft etc. They already had a lot of data from the old efforts (that worked).
I think that exit and re-entry are almost routine now, provided your rocket doesn't explode. The tricky bit is out there in space and trying to make the moon a resource of some sort.
The mere fact that the outcome was successful does not inherently indicate that the decision-making was safe: the O-rings "worked" for 24 missions and the foam/tiles "worked" for 111. Nevertheless there were ample warnings and close calls.
Reentry from the Moon is not routine. Re-entry speed was about 40% faster than from low earth orbit, and kinetic energy goes up by the square, so about double.
As with any aerospace mishap, it's a chain of events, not just one cause.
Isaacman is a space tourist, not an astronaut. He is the CEO of Shift4 Payments, which processes payments for SpaceX. Musk, who spent hundreds of millions on Trump's campaign, got him installed as NASA administrator. That's not meritocracy, it's transactional politics. If you or I had billions, we could also buy seats on rockets.
"His own version of Gemini" is wild spin. Polaris was Isaacman paying SpaceX to fly him on SpaceX hardware. He had no engineering role, no mission design input. Calling it "his Gemini program" is like calling a chartered yacht trip "your naval program." Naming something after a historic NASA program doesn't make it one.
The risk decision process was theater. Isaacman reportedly had already decided Artemis II would proceed, then invited Dr. Charlie Camarda and others to a "transparent review" that was anything but.
When the conclusion is predetermined and dissenting experts are brought in for optics, that's not risk management, it's liability laundering.
On the 1-in-30 mortality figure, framing astronauts making it home as something to be "grateful" for, rather than questioning why we're accepting odds 3x worse than the Shuttle (which killed 14 people), is a strange way to celebrate progress...
We should be glad the crew is safe. We should also be honest that the person running NASA got there through financial entanglements with SpaceX, not aerospace credentials
The point of them being there isn't discovery, it's to try to discourage anyone who wants try to understand and protect the planet that we all rely on for life
Probably the rose tinted glasses of being a child but being from Florida I always had a sense of amazement and wonder as I heard the sonic boom of the shuttle returning to earth.
Really felt like I was coexisting in this incredible scientific powerhouse of a country full of bright and enabled peoples that knew how to prioritize curiosity and innovation.
Feeling like a bit of a "vibe" post which is everything wrong lately but I can't help but feel some satisfaction that we're still able to accomplish something like this in our space endeavors.
I definitely don’t envy kids that are born nowadays.
The time correctly delimited by you was the time of the greatest false political hopes, when everybody around the World believed that we got rid of the communist blood-sucking parasites and now the World would become that which had been described for decades in the propaganda of the Voice of America, where the political elites are held accountable for their actions, so if they are bad they are replaced through democratic elections, and the bad commercial companies are eliminated by competition in the free market.
Instead of this happening, already a couple of years before 9/11 a wave of destructuring many important historical companies happened, followed by a huge wave of mergers and acquisitions that has continued until today and which has eliminated competition from most markets, so that they are now dominated by quasi monopolies. Then the democratic elections have brought to power worse and worse human beings, all of whom have been much worse than some citizens that would have been randomly selected for those positions.
Nowadays, the economies of USA and of the other "Western" countries, and also their political institutions, resemble much more those of the socialist countries that they mocked during the seventies, than those of USA and W. Europe of that time.
So all the hopes of the nineties were naive and none of them was realized.
Moreover, even in the US, the seventies were the greatest time for the electronics and computers industries, when the greatest amount of innovations have been made.
After 1980, there have been huge advances, but all of them were completely predictable, i.e. the electronics and computing industries settled on an evolution path that was well defined for a few decades, with very few surprises.
The seventies were much wilder, when much more diverse things have been tried (and many of those have failed) and they were surely hopeful, especially in their second half.
During the seventies, there were a lot of US companies that I liked and I was convinced that if I bought something from them that was mutually beneficial, because they really tried to make products that fulfilled as well as possible the needs of their customers, while ensuring a decent and reasonable profit for the vendor.
Nowadays there exists no big company in the entire world from which I can buy a product without feeling that this is an adversarial transaction, where they try as hard as they can to fool me into paying as much as possible for something that is worth as less as possible.
Civil Rights Activists protested against Apollo 11 at the Kennedy Space Center in 1969, and "Whitey on the Moon" was released in 1970.
But what about comparing the same country/region? After all that's a better sense of how things are progressing locally to you, and when people are asked "are things better or worse" they probably compare the way they live with the way their parents lived.
Would you rather be born in 1980 or 2020 in China? In Poland? No question. Same question but in the USA? In the UK? The West in general? I'm really not so sure.
Not to say it's the best of times, nor to say it's the worst of times, mind you. Just that it's really hard to objectively compare.
Wild stuff really. There is a book about it, using an Abe Lincoln quote he said hoping that the civil war wouldn’t happen, “better angels of our nature”.
"1968 and the country was on fire. Vietnam. Assassinations. Civil unrest. Protests.
Apollo 8 was the one bright event of a terrible year.
2026 and the country is on fire. Iran. Corruption. Fascists. Civil unrest. No Kings.
I hope Artemis II will stand out as a bright spot for our country."
Some more background on her: https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2026/04/01/chicagoan-amy-l...
It all boils down to equations that describe the world accurately, and a way of experimentation, iteration, thinking that gets us all the way to do something this unbelievably complex.
I like starting from the fact that Ptolemy was able to get the accuracy of the "motions of the heavens" down so well that it took more than a thousand years to get observations that showed discrepancies. The math, it maths.
You really don't have anything like that when playing golf, so I don't thin it is a good analogy.
But for the old Sprint anti balistic missile - that was spot on. :D Hitting ICBM warheads kilometers abobe ground, second before detonation - yeah, that fits. It also dispelled the myth that you can't communicate to compact craft due to re-entry plasma. Of course you can, just use a 30 MW radar beam & it will get through just fine! Not to mention the Sprint missile was protected by an ablative heatshield and covered by plasma going up during launch. :D
It’s all in fun, really, like the old analogies involving hard drive heads and jet planes.
All of these factors and more have to be taken into account if you want your predictions to be accurate. Aside from telemetry processing, most of the computing power on the ground during a space mission is used for churning out navigation solutions.
Fun info: The NASA orbital codes include things like photon pressure... from sunlight reflected off of other planets in the solar system. At some point, I think they are just showing off :)
We can do this because of war.
We know where it will land accurately because that maths and physics has been sharpened with butt loads of data. Even the reentry blackout has links to war in Plasma Stealth[0].
That data was mostly obtained because we want to know where our ICBM warheads will land. And where the enemies ICBM warheads will land so we can work on the problem of shooting them down.
The Russian Kinzhal missile can hit targets at mach-10, with a plasma aura making it's terminal phase hard to track on Radar. But after some data was collected Patriot missile systems were able to intercept about 1 in 3 air launched Kinzhal missiles. Then minor terminal adjustments were introduced and interception fell to about 1 in 20. Now there's a constant cat and mouse game going on in Ukraine.
On the one hand that's a good thing, our combative efforts being sublimated into curiosity of the world.
On the other hand, we still put far more effort into furthering our ability to destroy the world.
But the interception rate for the Kh-32 is basically nonexistence (<1%).
The Kh-22/32 is why mach-5 + maneuverability is the current goal of offensive missile systems.
The plasma has complex interaction with radar, it's not stealth as in entirely invisible just chaotic scattering and reflections. The result is a jamming effect preventing a definite intercept solution.
On the other hand the plasma shows up on satilite based IR tracking systems.
Note: next time, pack a walkie talkie. ;-)
The commentary said that the initial problems with the boats approaching Integrity was due to an unexpected swell. Unexpected, in the Pacific?
Edit: all of the Apollo missions, except 8, had their stabilization collars inflated in under 20 minutes. With Integrity today it took nearly an hour more.
Having worked for various government agencies for a while I've learned to recognise the signs of the "We're following the procedure whether it makes sense or not, dammit!" attitude you get with large bureaucracies.
What was the real reason? Tradition? Lack of imagination? Photo opportunities?
The rest was great tho.
I would assume spending 10 days in zero G is orders of magnitude more chaotic for your motor skills.
Bring on Artemis III and IV!
You can't just start from zero and fly to Mars. You need to build an entire workforce able to produce and operate fantastically complicated machines. And you need to fly regular missions, each more ambitious than the last, until finally we can land people on the Red Planet.
Artemis II is the beginning.
I don’t see how anything as substantive like this can be seen as “vanity” (unless you mean to count that as a bonus).
It’s amazing to see NASA doing newer great things (Webb, Mars probes, all have been incredibly cool too, but manned stuff always hits a different note). Yes they’re way more expensive than SpaceX, I get all that. But it’s nice to see something so overwhelmingly positive and a true example of human ingenuity, collaboration, and bravery, that we need a lot more of that to remind us these days of the positive times we live in.
And the fact that we did this 50 years ago, at least to me, means I appreciate even more how we got it done with that age’s technology and knowledge the first time.
control: "i guess we'll have to go back".
(paraphrased from memory)
I think that audio stream was designed to be POTUS safe.
It's becoming a public hazard, we must act!
This current administration has made sure these things never happen again, Artemis is very much the swan song of an America that has died. I am not interested in watching our corpse twitch and calling it life.
Bravo, Artemis team for an exceptional return to extra-orbital space travel.
What IIRC was actually done was that some antennas were placed on the back of the shuttle & its size was big enough that the plasma bubble would not fully envelope it - it would be open up to space. And that antenna on the back would communicate with TDRS satellites through this gap, enabling contact through the whole re-entry.
Starship does basically the same, just with Starlink satellites instead of TDRS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)
"Sprint accelerated at 100 g, reaching a speed of Mach 10 (12,000 km/h; 7,600 mph) in 5 seconds. Such a high velocity at relatively low altitudes created skin temperatures up to 6,200 °F (3,400 °C), requiring an ablative shield to dissipate the heat. The high temperature caused a plasma to form around the missile, requiring extremely powerful radio signals to reach it for guidance. The missile glowed bright white as it flew."
Also Orion and other capsules fall like a rock (steep reentry profile ) compared to shuttle/starship, which intentionally slow down the reentry and kinda glide (ballpark 10min with capsules compared to 30min with shuttle/starship).
tl;dr: capsules get fully enveloped in plasma due to their shape, size and reentry profile
The reason the heat shield failed was due to gas buildup inside the ablative material. This was due to the skip reentry profile they used, where the craft does a single skip (as in skipping stones) during reentry. The high bounce caused the shield to be heated enough that the heat penetrated the material causing gas release but not enough that the material ablated. Thus gas would build up deep inside up until it caused large chunks to break off. They could reproduce this in tests.
The fix was two-fold. First they lowered the bounce height, so a much less pronounced skip, avoiding the lowered heating of the shield. And they tweaked the material formula a bit so it was more porous, allowing subsurface gas to escape rather than build up.
I am very curious about what they're seeing, and how well the get-it-over-with solution worked.
It was a bold move and the results will be fascinating.
And from an older NASA explanation: https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-shares-orion-heat-shi...
> Engineers already are assembling and integrating the Orion spacecraft for Artemis III based on lessons learned from Artemis I and implementing enhancements to how heat shields for crewed returns from lunar landing missions are manufactured to achieve uniformity and consistent permeability.
For reference the shuttle generally reentered at ~17.5K mph, and today's was 24K-25K mph.
It's not clear that we could build a craft with wings that could survive that. So then you're looking at adding fuel just to slow down, plus fuel for the weight of the wings themselves, plus fuel to carry all this extra fuel to the right place, etc.
Splashdown-style landings are the simplest and safest, parachutes are always good but adding water makes for another layer of safety (and of risk, to be fair, it could sink).
With lunar landing flights they would still have to choose 4 days before, as long as they do direct return.
Eventually you want to break to Earth orbit (propulsively or aerodynamically) and board a dedidacted craft for landing. But till then water landing capsules work.
Space Planes are not only much more dangerous, but are not ideal for this type of mission. They carry a lot of extra weight (wings) that would affect how much fuel is needed to launch them to the Moon.
Capsules are safer and more lean in terms of weight.
The Shuttle was not ideal in many ways. It was used so long not because it was the best option, but because Congress wanted it to keep it going for jobs.
They actually covered this in the broadcast: Helicopters are faster to get the astronauts to medical, smoother in rough seas, and there's less risk of being swamped by a rogue wave. Plus, since the astronauts might have fatigue/muscle atrophy/whatever, it complicates potential boat transfers.
From the broadcast, they made it sound like a big factor is the 2 hour program requirement to get the crew out of the capsule. Maybe they can't reliably hit that mark with a well deck recovery?
[1] https://www3.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/orion-recove...
That's a snappy one-liner but it doesn't address the real concerns.
First of all, subsonic lift is well understood and has been for decades. The answer is much more mundane: The Artemis mission profile does not require payload doors that open, no Canadarm, no requirement to service, launch, and/or capture satellites in orbit, and so like good engineers they designed the minimum vehicle that satisfies the requirements.
Also, the Shuttle was actually much more expensive to reuse than originally predicted.
I said easy. Not well understood. I can fly planes. It’s hard, and has limited room for fucking up. (It’s also hyperbole to suggest we understand lift. We don’t.)
Piloting a boat is easier and more forgiving. Hence, splashdown. You don’t need direction. You don’t need lift. Parachute physics is a backbreaker, but it’s symmetrical. Same for splash.
I'm also a pilot (CFI). My day job is space operations. And I can tell you've had too many hangar arguments about how wings work.
Pilots don't understand lift. Aero engineers understand it just fine.
At no point were the astronauts piloting a boat. The reasons they splash down into the ocean has nothing to do with buoyancy being easier to solve, and even less to do with the ease of piloting a boat.
>It’s also hyperbole to suggest we understand lift. We don’t.
Maybe you personally do not understand lift, but "we" do in fact understand it. Please educate yourself before continuing this discussion any further.
A small Apollo-style capsule that parachutes into the ocean has a simpler mission profile, which allows for simpler technical and operational requirements, which in turn reduces program cost.
Glad they got home safe and sound!
These days the only qualification required for people believing anything you say is to have a blog and strong critical opinions about $AUTHORITY. Software engineers somehow believe they are knowledgeable in any topic just because they spend a lot of time reading on the Internet.
Missaved their version 2 Excel spreadsheet using the wrong file name causing confusion about this version was the latest.
Nearly missed a cell in their burn sheet had multiple lines of text until mission control reminded them to resize the cell.
Also, what were these puffs on thermal camera after the main chutes were deployed?
Otherwise I would also just bet on RCS venting like in Apollo.
Heating likely plays a role as well.
I am not a rocket engineer, but I have read How Apollo Flew to the Moon and Ignition!: an informal history of liquid rocket propellants, both of which cover these issues. Highly recommended.
In countries like China, Russia, or even India, you won't find as many American products. The influence of Hollywood is much less. American styles of doing things are not necessarily the ones chosen for civic institutions. American agencies don't work as closely with their scientific enterprises as the American allies. On the other hand, they have strong armies that are not beholden to what America dictates, as evidenced by how often they end up in conflict.
As an example, the world sanctioned Russia and... nothing happened... because Russia is a real country able to build its own things. It has industrial capacity, mining capacity, and the organization to do that independently of what others think. It also has an army willing to defend it.
The countries you listed do not have these things. Their 'army' to defend the nation is a vague promise that they'll think about while they ask America to carry out their interests. American magnanimity usually means this is a safe bet.
Then we can talk
This is not sarcastic. This is very much meant. I love that America does this. We still get to evoke an awe which previous empires awesome as they may be, could never match. American superlatives are amazing. God bless America
They will have Nikon cameras, GoPros, and iPhones with them.
Very different from the videos taken with the Gameboy Camera.
Apollo was, IMO, not successful at changing the course of human history. A really cool footnote, sure, but everything else that was to follow, nope, just a bunch of neat, interesting but ultimately meh science missions.
An exciting change would be more like Delta-V/Critical Mass, but NASA is not going to deliver that, at least not in any form it has taken thus far.
I also don't expect benevolent billionaires to fill that either. I hope I would in their place, but I'll not likely get the chance.to find out.
To end on an optimistic note, tang and Velcro are pretty dope.
I recommend looking into the space flight plans from the pre Apollo - while tere were bonkers ideas like Project Horizon, most of the plans sounded quite sensible, with incremental building of space infrastructure and emphasis on cost and reusability (in the 1960s).
Of course when it became a race all the sustainability and infrastructure went out of the window and got sacrificed in the name of speed. :P
Because we stopped, we get to do everything over again with hardware from this century.
The first Orion (nuclear pulse) has a much more interesting story and would have made us an interplanetary species before we had the iPhone. But it was killed by Kennedy, became space wasn't what he was worried about.... And maybe hundreds of nukes in space might make some countries edgy.
It could easily have taken another decade or two to develop the modern computer if not for the resources spent in the space program at that time. It still would have happened, but Apollo and the space program was soaking up something like 90% of computer demand for a full decade. Computers went from room sized behemoths to the size of a file cabinet in that time.
Imagine if your employer wanted to start using a software system it retired in 1972. What would you do?
It's especially tragic with younger people who seem to have no experience with handling genuine sincerity. They laugh nervously at it, as if they're unfamiliar with how to handle someone saying what they actually think and feel.
I’d pay to see Shaq on broadway.
OP: "I'm happy they didn't die."
Response: "You're going to be less happy when they turn into the Fantastic Four and Dr. Doom shows up."