It appears Artemis STILL has issues…
NASA’s acting inspector general, George A. Scott, released a report Wednesday that provided an assessment of NASA’s readiness to launch the Artemis II mission next year. This is an important flight for the space agency because, while the crew of four will not land on the Moon, it will be the first time humans have flown into deep space in more than half a century.
The report did not contain any huge surprises. In recent months the biggest hurdle for the Artemis II mission has been the performance of the heat shield that protects the Orion spacecraft during its fiery reentry at more than 25,000 mph from the Moon.
Although NASA downplayed the heat shield issue in the immediate aftermath of the uncrewed Artemis I flight in late 2022, it is clear that the unexpected damage and charring during that uncrewed mission is a significant concern. As recently as last week, Amit Kshatriya, who oversees development for the Artemis missions in NASA’s exploration division, said the agency is still looking for the root cause of the problem.
Full article, HERE from Ars Technica.
NASA has obviously become more ‘political’ than they were back in the day, and quite honestly that scares the hell out of me.
Also, the ‘brute force’ use of computing power to ‘fix’ issues rather than try/fail with actual hardware doesn’t bode well for the folks that will be flying in the can. Of course, the administrators et al WON’T be…
Gee, where have we seen ‘that’ mentality before???
The problem is that in the government agencies including NASA is that the safety issue has been compromised by the bean counters who will sacrifice safety to save pennies. This is what happened in industry in America and infected all government agencies. To these beancounters what do they care about Astronauts lives all they look at is how much they reduce the costs.
Pull quote from the article not even needed, just read the title: “NASA says Artemis II report by its inspector general is unhelpful and redundant.”
Scary stuff.
I’ve got seven very good reasons why management at NASA might want to pull its collective head out of its arse, and make the decision that until the heat shield issues are properly and fully solved, an Artemis manned mission will not proceed:
Rick D. Husband
William C. McCool
Michael P. Anderson
David M. Brown
Kalpana Chawla
Laurel Clark
Ilan Ramon
NASA no longer cares if they lose a crew. They lost two space shuttles due to bureaucratic incompetence and NO ONE paid for their bad decisions. They’re probably hoping for a failure here so they can cancel the manned missions and go back to just launching the unmanned probes that they love so much.
“Where have we seen ‘that’ mentality before?”
Let’s see: Politically appointed administrators overriding astronaut’s concerns over a pure oxygen environment, a hatch the could only be opened from the outside, and substandard assembly of the command module?
Politically appointed administrators overriding engineer’s concerns over O-Ring seals in cold weather, then trying to cover it up?
Reportedly, but not confirmed, political decision to use a more ‘eco-friendly’ adhesive on the external fuel tank that caused ice saturated insulation to fall of the tank and impact the heat shield on the wing’s leading edge. Another cold weather issue?
Boeing DEI managers telling us the 737 MAX is safe, while punishing whistle blowers?
And the beat goes on.
All- Thank you, and I see y’all feel much as I do. I’m just glad my friends are now ‘former’ astronauts, and not current…
Spam in a can. And watching the real Yeager’s face during the dialog is priceless.
The current administrator flew on the STS-61C mission, and probably knew the Challenger STS-58L crew. You would hope that would make a positive impact on safety attitudes. But he was also a Dem pol, and ther are also definite institutional issues.
Jim’s right.
Computer models are NOT evidence.
We’ve seen them consistently fail when it comes to predicting climate, weather, Covid, economics, and no doubt you good people are aware of other examples.
They can tell us where to look and what the outcomes might be, but until those predicted outcomes are confirmed by hard empirical evidence and experiment, they are NOT proof.
Just because they are the new, cool and sexy toy, does not make them the ideal hammer with which to extract screws.. especially when those advocating them will not pay the price for failure.
I had a problem with airflow that was moving contaminated air into places it shouldn’t be. Downtown engineering management wanted to do a computer analysis to model internal airflow. I convinced management to also do a tracer gas test, i.e. releasing benign gasses at likely source points and monitoring the paths and how long it took for the tracers to migrate to undesired areas. I sold it as validating the computer model, but none of us field guys believed the model would work, too many variables to account for. Our tracer testing showed what the problems were and what needed to be done to fix them. The computer model became an (expensive) afterthought.
“Challenger, go with throttle up.”
Let’s not do that again.
RHT- Yep…loved that one!
TOS- He was a congresscritter, just along for the ride. He didn’t actually spend the ‘time’ to do it right.
Peter/NRW- THAT is a perfect example!
GB- Agreed!
Not sure it makes much difference, now that I think more about it – Obama’s NASA administrator was the pilot of that mission, his top priority as NASA administrator was Muslim outreach.
Nobody asked me, but why not let SpaceX be the prime contractor? I’m sure Musk would say that if he rigged it, he’d ride it.
Anything that isn’t founded or created with the express purpose of being “conservative” and isn’t constantly corrected to keep it “conservative” will eventually and always become “liberal” with the associated failures and incompetence that always comes from liberalism. NASA is no exception to that rule.