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

The HN hivemind will remember, he's a well known user with a well known site.

Let's hope there is no accident, but after the landing there will be reports anyway. We will take a look at the report of the shield and see if it shows a problem in spite it didn't explode, and compare with the prediction in the article. He may even write another article after the fly.

For comparison, I remember the Feynman appendix. One important detail was that Nasa said the the probability of accidents was 1/100000, but he concluded that it was closer to 1/100. Nobody expect to fly a hundred Artemis missions to get a good statistic. Even if the current version explosion rate is super high like 1/10, then you can probably fry a few missions without problems if you cross your fingers hard enough.

I'm not super happy with the pattern of thinking in these numbers; arguing 1/100000 vs 1/100 for "accidents" is again a boolean thing. They probably had a very specific definition, which does make this viable, but we don't have that definition here. So the numbers are meaningless to us. And not having that definition, "accidents" is a sliding scale… e.g. I'm pretty sure astronauts injured themselves banging various bodyparts against various parts of the spaceship. That's technically an accident.

And in this concrete example — the heat shield isn't boolean either. I don't know how steep the gradient between pass and fail is, but it certainly exists, and it's possible they come back successfully but with it singed significantly outside expected parameters. (Even "less than expected" would indicate a problem here IMHO.) That does mean it's not necessarily a question of having enough boolean datapoints.