NASA: an agency that still avoids reality

Our bankrupt new media continues to fail us. NASA is about to send four astronauts on a ten-day mission around the Moon in a capsule with questionable engineering, and that media continues to ignore the problem. Mainstream news outlets continue to describe the mission in glowing terms, consistently ignoring that questionable engineering. In some cases the stories even make believe NASA has fixed the problem, when it has not.

The most ridiculous example is an article yesterday from an Orlando outlet, Spectrum New 13: “How the lessons learned from the Challenger disaster apply to Artemis rockets”. It focuses entirely on the O-ring problem that destroyed Challenger, noting repeatedly that NASA has fixed this issue in its SLS rocket.

Of course it has. That’s the last war, long over. Engineers fixed this issue almost four decades ago. The article however dismisses entirely the new engineering concern of today, Orion’s heat shield, which did not work as expected during its own test flight in space in 2022. It covers this issue with this single two-sentence paragraph:

However, during re-entry, it broke up into chunks instead of burning away. This issue pushed back the Artemis II and III missions, but NASA has stated it has resolved the problem.

NASA however has not resolved the problem. It is using the same heat shield now on this manned mission, and really has no reason to assume it will work any better, even if the agency has changed the re-entry flight path in an effort to mitigate the heat shield’s questionable design.

You see, NASA with Artemis-2 is doing the exact same thing it did prior to both the Challenger and Columbia accidents. After Challenger, fixing the O-ring issue was important but that wasn’t real mistake NASA made. After Columbia fixing the foam issue was important, that also wasn’t NASA’s real error. What both investigations of the accidents concluded was that NASA’s management culture had the wrong priorities, that it ignored basic problems so that it could continue to fly missions on schedule. With Challenger it was the O-rings in cold weather. Despite engineers outlining the problem repeatedly, NASA’s management pushed them aside because the agency had to keep up its launch pace.

With Columbia it was foam falling from the external tank, damaging the shuttle’s tiles. For literally years NASA engineers and managers had evidence that foam pieces were damaging shuttle tiles, and did nothing, dismissing the problem as inconsequential. Never once did anyone at the agency ask some very basic questions, because to do so would threaten the launch schedule.

Four typical pages from NASA’s Orion heat shield report,
as released to the public, with everything redacted.

Today, with Artemis-2, NASA has continued with this failed approach. It hasn’t fixed the heat shield, because to do so would cause a delay in the launch schedule. It instead has improvised a new flight trajectory upon return, in the hope this will reduce the stress on the shield so it won’t fail.

And when others demanded some answers about its own investigation into the heat shield, NASA only reluctantly released its investigation report, but redacted practically every word, as shown to the right. The agency continues to want to close its eyes to engineering failures that are right before its eyes.

Sadly, too many reporters in our propaganda press appear willing to do the same.

There is a good chance Artemis-2 will succeed, and the astronauts will come home safely. And that success will prove nothing. NASA’s space effort will continue to be dominated by the same wrong priorities that killed the astronauts on Challenger and Columbia, and is thus certain to eventually kill astronauts on a later Artemis mission. It continues to put schedule above engineering, to a level that ignores clear engineering failures that should never be ignored.