> This broken safety culture has been around since the beginning of the Shuttle program.

It's broken everywhere. I have worked in some dysfunctional shops and the problem I see time and time again is the people who make it into management are often egoists who don't care about anything other than the financial compensation and clout the job titles bestows upon them. That or they think management is the same as being a shotgun toting sheriff overseeing a chain gang working in the summer heat in the deep south.

I've worked with managers who would argue with you even if they knew they were wrong because they were incapable of accepting humiliation. I worked with managers who were wall flowers so afraid of confrontation or negative emotions that they covered up every issue they could in order to avoid any potential negative interaction with their superiors. That manager was also bullied by other managers and even some employees.

A lot of it is ego along with a heavy dose of machismo depending. I've seen managers let safety go right down the tubes because "don't be a such a pussy." It's a bad culture that has to go away.

What strikes is not the systemic failures. But the intense culture of secrecy.

Reports are heavily redacted. They aren't shared. Failures aren't acknowledged. Engineering models aren't released. That secrecy eventually causes what we see today.

The most frustrating part of the whole thing is that when you read Charles Camarda’s thoughts after his meeting with NASA in January, it could have been written in 1986 or in 2003.

https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDU...

It’s pretty clear at this point that the shuttle was already broken at design. But seeing the same powder keg of safety/budget/immovable time constraints applied to a totally different platform decades in the future feels like sitting through a bad movie for the third time.

``It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.''

It’s fundamentally a human coordination problem that cannot be solved

The more populated and complex an organization gets it becomes impossible to maintain a singular value vector (get these people around the moon safely)

Everyone finds meta vectors (keep my job, reduce my own accountability) that maintain their own individual stability, such that if the whole thing fails they won’t feel liable

Ok after looking into this in more detail, I am concerned with this mission, and the recommendation should be NOT to fly with Astronauts.

Looking at the people on the program, and specialty from the ones on this press conference [1] I see only, a bunch of check list fillers and government employees, that will cover their back with reports and third party recommendations, of the style, “I was told” or the “the technical reports said”. Its also commiserating the idiotic and irrelevant questions from most of the press present. How do these people get accredited there?

Here are some facts. When NASA flew Orion uncrewed around the Moon in 2022, the heat shield came back with deep gouges. Large chunks of Avcoat material had blown out, and three of four structural bolts had melted through. NASA own Inspector General identified three independently lethal failure modes:

- Heat shield spalling exposing the capsule to burn through

- Debris striking the parachute compartment

- Hot gas ingestion through the melted bolts

Noting the latter could cause the "breakup of the vehicle and loss of crew." Then...NASA found a credible root cause. The Avcoat was not porous enough, so pyrolysis gas built up underneath and blew pieces out, like steam cracking a lid.

Critically, areas of the Artemis I shield that were porous did not spall. But where it gets alarming is that the Artemis II heat shield was manufactured to be even less porous, a choice made before anyone knew porosity mattered.

Rather than replace it, NASA changed the reentry trajectory, instead of a skip reentry meaning dipping in, bouncing out, then re-entering, Orion will dive in steeper. The counterintuitive logic here is more intense, sustained heating actually allows the char layer to form properly and become porous enough for gas to escape, whereas the gentler intermittent heating of the skip paradoxically trapped gas. The physics reasoning is sound, but it has never been validated at full scale. As incredible as it may sound no one has flown this shield design, at this porosity, on this trajectory, at 25,000 mph lunar return speed, on a spacecraft twice the weight of Apollo.

The computer model certifying it as safe can predict crack initiation but cannot model crack propagation or the coupled multi physics material response, which is precisely what you need when your failure mode is cascading spalling that creates unpredictable hot spots and alters hypersonic airflow in ways that compound.

NASA also failed to recover the Artemis I parachutes, so there is literally zero data on whether debris impacted the system that slows the capsule from 300 mph to 15 mph for splashdown...

Perhaps most tellingly, NASA has announced its switching to an entirely new heat shield design! starting with Artemis III, simultaneously certifying this shield as safe to fly while deciding never to fly it again!

The strongest argument against crewing this flight is the simplest. NASA recently added an extra Artemis mission to its manifest, removing any programmatic need for astronauts on Artemis II.

Flying it uncrewed on the new trajectory would validate or invalidate the models at zero risk to human life, produce full-scale flight data on the actual shield at the actual porosity on the actual trajectory, and let NASA recover the parachutes to close the debris impact gap.

Then crew the next mission with data instead of models. As Camarda, a former NASA astronaut and heat shield expert has warned, this is the same organizational pattern, meaning schedule pressure, simplified models substituted for physical understanding of the system, motivated reasoning to reach a predetermined conclusion that preceded both Challenger and Columbia.

Lets say a SpaceX Dragon or Boeing Starliner came back with this level of damage, would NASA certify it for crew without an uncrewed validation flight?

NASA is risking four lives, when a straightforward, safe alternative, exists.

[1] - https://youtu.be/TQH21XCsp5U

As an aside, do you have any suggestions for "state of the art" reading on safety culture?

It is bound to happen again and again considering humans are so oblivious to safety.

> Challenger: no gasses were supposed to make it past the o-rings no matter what,

> but when it became clear that gasses were escaping and the o-rings were being

> damaged, there was a push to suggest that it's an acceptable level.

Interestingly, the article<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...> by heat shield expert and Shuttle astronaut Charles Camarda, the former Director of Engineering at Johnson Space Center, asserts that it was *not* the O-rings:

"The Challenger accident was not caused by O-rings or temperature on the day of launch; it was caused by a deviant joint design which opened instead of closed when loaded. It was caused by mistaking analytical adequacy of a simplified test for physical understanding of the system. The solution, post Challenger, was the structural redesign of the SRB field joint and the use of the exact same O-rings."

I find that highly surprising, because "it was the O-rings" explanation seems universally believed and sanctified by no lesser authority than the Nobel prize laureate Richard Feynman.

Yes and the reversal of safety calculations really surprised me. "The orbiter has a total fail rate of one in 1000 so this individual part is higher than 1 in 10000", something like that. Where neither premise was actually tested or verified. Just specified on paper as a requirement and then used for actual safety calculations.

I don't know how a big organisation can think like that. But I guess these calculations were ones out of millions of ones made for the project.

About the last point:

At this point in time, manned space exploration should come out of our entertainment budget. The same budget we use for football or olympic games.

Normalization of deviance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance

> test the new heat shield which will replace the Artemis II design in an unmanned re-entry as well.

NASA desperately needs more options. They shouldn't need to expend an SLS to launch an uncrewed Orion with a test heatshield on a trajectory equivalent to a moon return. They should be able to launch that on top of a Falcon Heavy. A Falcon Heavy can launch 63 tons to LEO and a fueled Orion plus service module weights slightly north of 20 tons. An Orion mass simulator with enough attitude control mated with a FH second stage would leave a lot of delta-v to accelerate the capsule back into the atmosphere.

>both cases some models were used to justify the decision, with wild extrapolations

Happens often. Just look at the climate change discussion.

I really don't understand the point of manned space exploration though?

Landing on the moon in 1969 was an extraordinary achievement, perhaps the most beautiful thing ever done by mankind. But now? What's the point exactly?

We know we can't go much further than the moon anyway (as this very same blog has demonstrated many times); what do we expect to achieve with astronauts that robots can't do?

I don't know any astronauts that push for manned space exploration. Just a few billionaires and dementia patients.

If you play a single round of Russian roulette with a revolver, it is likely you will not die, but it is also not safe to do that. The same idea applies here.

The foam shedding/impact problem was heavily analyzed throughout the Shuttle program, and recognized as a significant risk. Read the CAIB report for a good history.

That report also describes the groupthink dynamic at NASA that made skeptical engineers "come around" for the good of the program in the past. Calling Camarda an outlier is just a different way of stating this problem.

That “balanced take” severely mischaracterizes dissenting expert Camarda’s attitude, so it’s not balanced at all. Its answer to “Could the NASA engineers convince Olivas and Camarda?” is a “maybe” for Camarda, which couldn’t be further from what Camarda had to say himself, which is he was more concerned after the meeting than before.

From Camarda’s own account after the meeting:

> Hold a “transparent” meeting with invited press to “vet” the Artemis II decision with one of the most public technical dissenters, me, in attendance (Jan 8th, 2026).

> Control the one-sided narrative and bombard the attendees with the Artemis Program view

> Do not allow dissenting voices to present at the meeting

> Do not even allow the IRT or the NESC to present their findings

> Rely on the attending journalists to regurgitate the party line and witness the overwhelming consensus of knowledgeable people

The whole thing is a good read https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...

Characterizing someone being (slightly?) more diplomatic as “maybe convinced” is shameful.

"It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" and "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly" are both compatible with the probability of a disaster on reentry being 10%.

> In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem.

Being pedantic, NASA management "ignored" engineers - because money.

That said, I 100% agree with you assuming:

> “We have full confidence in the Orion spacecraft and its heat shield, grounded in rigorous analysis and the work of exceptional engineers who followed the data throughout the process,” Isaacman said Thursday.

I only say assuming not that I don't believe Isaacman, but historically NASA managers have said publicly everything's fine when it wasn't and tried to throw the blame onto engineers.

With Challenger, engineers said no-go.

With Columbia, engineers had to explicitly state/sign "this is unsafe", which pushes the incentivisation the wrong direction.

So, I want to believe him, but historically it hasn't been so great to do so.

> In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem.

Problems with the O-Rings had been known and on the morning before the challenger launched the engineers begged management to delay the launch.

>unless maybe getting clicks is involved.

Reminder that during COVID, idlewords mused that Belarus was doing something right without masks nor lockdown because their casualty numbers were low, and when challenged that maaaayyyybe the Belarusian dictatorship wasn't giving honest numbers, he ignored it.

And when I showed him statistical analysis showing the numbers were indeed very likely fake, he blocked me. I didn't spam him, I was only moderately snarky (the way he is all the time) and that was his behaviour.

Absolutely not. I will not even consider the word of an organization that has repeatedly failed to learn from its past mistakes. They need to demonstrate an ability to learn first, and to do so they need to take these concerns seriously. That means no astronauts on Artemis II.

TFA is ridiculous with its stance. Yeah, there's this aspect of the design they can't test in their labs. It might even be an important aspect. But safety isn't a boolean "safe"/"not safe", it's a risk assessment, and I'm quite sure there are 100 (or 10000) other things they didn't test for. As long as they're taking all of this into their risk calculations… it's fine.

And if it doesn't blow up due to heat shield failure, TFA (and its references) will be forgotten.

And if it does blow up due to heat shield failure, TFA (and its references) can suddenly claim prescience, all the while this is one of thousands of factors that went into the risk assessment. If one really wanted to claim prescience, it'd need to be a ranking of a sufficient number of failure modes.

To illustrate the problem: I hereby claim they will have a "toilet failure". Now if they actually have one, I'll claim `m4d ch0pz` in rocket engineering.

(P.S.: it's a joke but toilet failures on spacecraft are actually a serious problem, if it really happens… shit needs to go somewhere…)

In the space shuttle disasters the hardware had at least been used more than once. A huge lot of this one is only tried and tested on paper.

And the idea that 'if we throw this much money at it, it really must be fine' I don't buy either. Look at how that worked out for Boeing.

For all my feelings about Musk I would much rather step into a rocket that has exploded in all kinds of imaginable situations before so they know how the materials and design actually behave in real world scenarios. I do really think that is the way to go.

All of the controversy over the heat shield is obscuring the much bigger safety issue: Artemis has had only a single unmanned test flight. By contrast, the Saturn launch system had seven successful unmanned tests before being trusted with a crew, including two unmanned flights of the complete Saturn V stack. And even then, three astronauts were lost during ground testing of the crew capsule due to a critical design flaw. Artemis's closest modern counterpart, the SpaceX Starship, has had 11 test flights, several of which resulted in loss of the vehicle. There is no reason to believe that Artemis has a significantly higher reliability rate than Starship or Saturn V. Even without the heat shield controversy, this is the most dangerous mission NASA has launched since the first flight of the Space Shuttle.

>The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry.

> What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.

Indeed, this is a much more balanced take. And it turns out that the OP armchair expert is assuming NASA doesn't know what they are doing or is negligent.

> In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem.

False on both counts. Both the SRB joint design issue and the foam shedding were known, researched and dismissed very early in the shuttle program. They suspected it after STS-1 and confirmed it within a few flights.

for human spaceflight we want a lot more than "likely" (>50%). The standard is usually "extremely likely" (~1/100 to 1/1000 chance of failure)

It is easy to reconcile these two statements.

The "likely" in "likely ...to land safely" and "likely to work fine" is not nearly good enough.

Camarda isnt an outlier. Lots of people left that project after the Experimental Flight Test, which was done with the honeycomb (making Avcoat truly Avcoat) in 2014. Without Avcoat, spalling was inevitable and breakoff, oh yeah.

The design change by LM, not commentedkn by Textron is like. a beehive with no honeycomb-a crystallized block of honey.

i'll take the structural support of honeycomb any day.

It's a normalization of deviance. That is what Charlie is bringing voice to. Many of us fear reprisals and even when talking to heads of, like with Columbia, we are ignored.

So, Charlie is a voice of many people, not an outlier.

Minor nitpick: OP didn't say "maybe very likely". He said "hopefully very likely". They are, in my mind, different things.

> The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe.

This take completely ignores Camarda's observations that there is a culture of fear spreading at NASA which punishes whistleblowers. I'm not saying he's 100% correct, but how can you claim such a take is truly balanced if there's a possibility one of the parties is engaging in a cover-up?

The engineers at NASA & astronauts aboard Columbia & Challenger also believed the programs were safe.

> It's hard for me to reconcile "It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" with "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly", unless maybe getting clicks is involved.

Look up the term "expected value". If pressing a button has a 10% chance of destroying Earth, it is both 1) likely that pressing it will do nothing AND 2) the case that pressing it is extremely unsafe.

>The engineers at NASA believe it is safe.

it doesn't matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_II

"It will be the second flight of the Space Launch System (SLS), the first crewed mission of the Orion spacecraft, and the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972."

such "second/first" were ok 60 years ago. Today the only reason for that is that the SLS isn't reusable while the cost is hyper-astronomical.

Today's tech complexity, engineering culture and overall managerial processes don't allow the first/second to succeed as a rule. Even the best - Space X - has got several failed launches back then for Falcon and now for Starship.

Of course we wish success, and it will probably succeed - just like the Russian roulette so aptly mentioned in the sibling comment.

As a former NASA guy I would trust Eric Bergers measured and detailed reporting here over that blog post that says they are all going to die

As he shows that Olivas changed his mind:

“ Olivas told me he had changed his mind, expressing appreciation and admiration for the in-depth engineering work done by the NASA team. He would now fly on Orion”

Anyway we live in an age of armchair experts in youtube (who are often very smart but quick to rush to judgment without enough context)

The article explains the situation in a more balanced and fair light

I think if that were the rule, all the program managers would just quit and there would be no manned spaceflight anymore.

In this document (thats also linked in the main article) you find a great explanation to your question.

The original design used a honeycomb structure, because problems with cracking and gas permeability had been known (in the 1960s).

On the other hand it would be more labor intensive to build it in that way.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...

The Apollo command module used Avcoat, the same material as Orion. But there are two key differences:

1. The application method is different. Apollo applied it to a metal honeycomb structure with very small cells, while Orion uses blocks of the material. (NASA tried the honeycomb approach for Orion, but it was too labor-intensive).

2. Orion is much bigger and heavier than the Apollo command module. The informal consensus is that Apollo may have been at the upper size limit for using Avcoat.

Related - what does SpaceX Dragon use for heat shield material and can it be used on Orion?

The very first Apollo attempt killed three astronauts. We would need something different now because the cold-war-crazy days are behind us, and we don't push ahead with missions that might end up in casualties.

Or Apollo development was a massive boondoggle that would never work and a small subset of those involved faked it to avoid being fired or going to prison. I know that directors of multibillion dollar projects lying to save their own skin is unheard of, but hear me out.

Artemis, launching on April Fools Day, seems like a joke waiting to happen.

The Orion heat shield is sixteen feet across. NASA's test facilities can only test small material samples in these facilities, not capture how the entire heat shield will behave.

I understand why NASA might be a little antsy but 100B over 25 years doesn't seem like a lot for America for a long horizon project.

I'm sure the other astronauts are really looking forward to fly with a person showing signs of suicidal ideation.

This is an interesting comment -- your life is precious brother, you might have something in store down the road :)

My theory is that this is something I’d say/do aged 20, and laugh at aged 60. I’m slightly closer to 60 and am into the ‘No’ zone.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

HN generally skews towards the life-affirming/death-fearing quadrant so I don't think many will relate to you here. It still seems safer than being in an active warzone which hundreds of millions of people somehow manage to tolerate.

You would probably not IRL and if you would anyway it would just mean you're not qualified for the flight. Nasa needs smart people who wants to live and succeed their mission, not people who are ok to die because muh space exploration

> I am very not brave but I'd volunteer.

>> Artemis II could fly just as easily without astronauts on board

Have you considered that would do nothing to solve Donald Trump's political problem that he promised to make boomers feel like they were reliving their halcyon days one last time?

Starship explodes

The threat of a Chinese moon landing keeps the Artemis program alive. As long as Artemis is slowly working towards the goal of eventually landing Americans on the surface of the moon and eventually building a habitat they can be injected with money and manpower whenever geopolitical or ideological demands arise. If it was canceled outright it would be much harder to react to any Chinese success

I understand the point you’re making, but if this is a programme doomed to achieve nothing, that makes the risk even less acceptable.

I think you mean Artemis IV (the moon landing)? Artemis III is now a near Earth orbit mission to dock with whatever mockup lander SpaceX or Blue Origin can throw up in time.

You're saying that as if Artemis III is going to be the first time Artemis eats delays.

What I'm seeing from Artemis recently is "good signs of life" rather than the opposite.

They acknowledged that Artemis III is "system tests" rather than "a full landing", which gives it far better chances of happening before 2030. They're trimming the fat deposits from the program by removing things like Gateway or NRHO. They're pushing for a more aggressive launch cadence. They're actually seriously bringing up "a persistent Moon base" and "manned flights every 6 months" as Artemis program goals.

This is more focus and ambition than what NASA had in actual literal decades.

The point of the blog post is that those concerns have not been adequately addressed.

I'm sorry it bugs you!

There’s been plenty of coverage of this issue, and this article discusses some of the changed they made: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/the-artemis-...

The only thing the author of this blog piece has to offer that’s new is his very strong personal intuition that the new design hasn’t been properly validated, without any engineering explanation about why the testing the performed won’t adequately simulate real world performance.

https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2026/03/30/nasas-artemis...

"countdown clock started ticking down" "to a targeted launch time of 6:24 p.m. on Wednesday, April 1."

I’m fairly confident NASA doesn’t read Maciej’s blog. However I’m confident that many people there read the Google doc he linked to. I suggest you do too.

While I appreciate independent bloggers, I think that the HackerNews community should expect big claims, like a NASA cover up:

> NASA’s initial instinct was to cover up the problem.

to at least warrant a link.

I just read one blog post ("Musk on Mars") and it was indeed excellent. He seems to have quite a small readership though, judging from the Substack reactions.

> And it seems to happen more often to institutions run by governments.

I've snorted my coffee. I happens to any organization that's run by people who are only in it for power, not outcomes.

>I would like to understand why it happens so often to organizations that a currupted and dyfunctional behaviour takes over. And it seems to happen more often to institutions run by governments.

Most people want nothing more than to complete a job to the satisfaction of their supervisor and go home for the day. When you get large groups of people together, this will always be the majority. Mission driven folks will always be crowded out of a large organization, replaced by careerists who play the meta game.

I don't know anything about this program, so here's a basic question: why does manufacturing need to be easier? Are they intending to mass produce these craft?

It is one of those, "we're not lined up for any of this. It's basically impossible." things Completely different orbits, would need a ton of extra fuel, not at all possible for Artemis (or any other mission for that matter)

You’d need a load of additional propellant to insert yourself into the same orbit as the ISS on your return, which would have an exponential effect on the amount of propellant needed in the first place to get all this lot out to the moon. It would be a different vehicle.

> The most energetic voice of public dissent has been heat shield expert and Shuttle astronaut Charles Camarda, the former Director of Engineering at Johnson Space Center. [...] he ended up publishing a cri de coeur that I encourage everyone to read in full.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...

Looks like they did some reassuring testing for the worst case scenario:

  The Avcoat blocks, which are about 1.5 inches thick, are laminated onto a thick composite base of the Orion spacecraft. Inside this is a titanium framework that carries the load of the vehicle. The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry.


  What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.

This one is an ablative heat shield, but it’s supposed to flake off gracefully, not break off in large chunks.

Lots of people have bad feelings about things. If it all turns out okay, they generally forget about the premonitions. If it goes bad, then they believe that their gut instinct is reliably correct.

When I was small, I used to have bad feelings about my parents getting in a car accident every time they went out. It never happened, and they lived into their 90s.

But this mission does not have O.J. Simpson. Does it ?

This time the space Nazis are on Earth though.

NASA’s track record says otherwise, no? Challenger and Columbia come to mind.

The Artemis program has cost over $100 billion so far.

It doesn’t make any sense to spend that much money on something that’s still Russian roulette for the astronauts.

If the purpose of the human risk is to let the agency accomplish more, then it needs to be reflected in the cost as a drastic reduction (so you can actually spend the money on doing more). Now Artemis is the worst of both worlds.

It's really hard to parse that out over the backdrop of a fascist regime that thinks time ended in the 60s, and we should turn back the clock.

There aren't many people left who've been that close to the moon. Lots of people would love to be on that list.

Because even in the worst case what we are really talking about is just much higher risk than the government is claiming, but its still far more likely to succeed than fail. Plenty of people would take a 1 in 10 or 1 in 100 chance of dying if it meant they could walk on the moon.

To be honest I don't know how close to non-fiction "The Right Stuff" (book or film) was but if you watch it you'd maybe gain an understanding for why astronauts do these things. At least that part is believable.

> why are the astronauts willing to risk their lives

There are a lot of funerals in chapter 1 of Tom Wolfe's book, "The Right Stuff".

I suggest that some choice of profession come with a higher life-risk tolerance than others. "Accountants willing to risk their lives for the job" would be news. Firefighters, less so. Test pilots or astronauts, not much at all.

This degree of lifespan-maximization is something you might have but others don’t necessarily share. E.g. old people went to Fukushima to sort it out. “Was it really better to risk death than to risk getting fired?”

Neither of these are major risks compared to never being what you want to be.

Some people go to war for the thrill of it, others do base jumping, free solo climbing and whole lot of other activities that eventually kill many of them. It is in their genes.

If I recall correctly the Author worked at NASA.