NASA once again gambling on the lives of its astronauts for political reasons
Damage to Orion heat shield caused during re-entry in 2022,
including “cavities resulting from the loss of large chunks”
NASA this week began the stacking one of the two strap-on solid-fueled boosters that will help power SLS on the Artemis-3 mission, still officially scheduled for September 2025 and aiming to send four astronauts around the Moon.
A NASA spokesperson told Ars it should take around four months to fully stack the SLS rocket for Artemis II. First, teams will stack the two solid-fueled boosters piece by piece, then place the core stage in between the boosters. Then, technicians will install a cone-shaped adapter on top of the core stage and finally hoist the interim cryogenic propulsion stage, or upper stage, to complete the assembly.
At that point the rocket will be ready for the integration of the manned Orion capsule on top.
The article at the link sees this stacking as a good sign that NASA’s has solved the Orion capsule’s heat shield issue that occurred during the unmanned return from the Moon on the second Artemis mission. The image to the right shows that heat shield afterward, with large chunks missing. Though it landed safely, the damage was much much worse than expected. At the moment NASA officials have said it has found the root cause, but those officials also refuse to say what that root cause is, nor how the agency or Orion’s contractor Lockheed Martin has fixed it.
I don’t see it that way. What I see is evidence that NASA management is pushing forward on preparing for this mission in order to make it more difficult for the new Trump administration to cancel it. For one thing, once it stacks the solid rocket boosters, it is supposed to use them within one year, because there is a concern the vertical orientation might warp the solid-fuel and cause the boosters to burn incorrectly during launch. On the second unmanned flight, NASA waived this rule, launching two years after stacking with no problems.
That however was an unmanned mission. The risk was less. Nor did NASA know about at serious heat shield issue. Furthermore, this first manned Artemis mission will be the first time Orion’s environmental system, designed to make the capsule habitable for humans, will be installed and used. And it will be doing that on the first test flight with four humans on board.
It seems to me that political reasons NASA is moving forward to fly humans on a very risky mission, with a rocket that has only flown once with questionable solid-fueled boosters, with a capsule with an untested environmental system and a questionable heat shield.
This decision seems to be a repeat of the NASA culture that killed astronauts on two different shuttle missions: “Let’s ignore the obvious and serious engineering issues so we can keep flying so that no one will cancel our program!” (That NASA’s safety panel has had nothing to say about all this only proves my assertion for years that this panel is corrupt and useless.)
The decision by NASA to push forward should instead be the precise reason the Trump administration should consider cancelling SLS and Orion entirely. Trump needs to bite the bullet, to accept the delays such a decision would cause to the entire program, and to rethink things so it can fly its astronauts to the Moon in a safe and proper manner, using privately built hardware that is designed better, tested more thoroughly, and can actually do the job cheaper and faster.
Whether Trump will do so is unclear. And even if he attempts it we know from past history — when Obama tried to do the same thing back in 2010 — that Congress might push back and reinstate SLS regardless.
To cancel SLS/Orion is going to take a major political effort. It might be the right thing to do, but who knows if anyone in Washington really has the courage to do it.
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Typo: They are “stacking” the booster segments, not “staking” them.
My definition of gambling with people’s lives is riding on something that doesn’t have an escape system.
MDN: Thank you. Typo fixed.
I suppose ATVs, motorcycles, and bicycles have an escape system: One can just jump off. Cars and trucks much less so, although it is possible. Airplanes don’t have escape systems. Last time I flew, I got a rock-hard seat cushion that I was assured would float, but no parachute. Interesting exception: Single person planes (i.e. fighter jets) do have an escape system – mainly because they expect other people to be shooting at them, although it does come in handy at other times.
All things considered, I would rather ride in a vehicle unlikely to start on fire – either due to its own construction or other people shooting at it – than one with an escape system in the event that it does start on fire. Just saying.
On a vaguely related note: Why are school busses required to stop at railroad tracks? If the “there’s a train coming” signal is not good enough for a bus full of kids, it’s not good enough for anyone.
Mark Sizer asked “Why are school busses required to stop at railroad tracks?”
Yes, it’s annoying, and can cause some difficulties if an intersection is close, but, on the other hand, a disturbingly high number of school busses have been hit by trains. I think the rule is there to ensure the driver is, in fact, paying attention, and not just blithely rolling across a railroad track.
Of course they are stacking them. Then they will destack when there’s enough pressure based on what NASA will release. This is just a tease to buy time.
Mark Sizer, Blair Ivey
School Buses at RR crossings.
Because of some horrific accidents in the past authorities had to do “something”. They took the less expensive route and required school bus drivers to stop, open the door, look and listen prior to proceeding. The alternative was to spend untold millions on gated crossings. The public was happy because their elected representatives did “something”. The politicians were happy because the voters were happy. Everyone was happy.
Now a new issue reared its ugly head. Once the driver is done doing his due diligence he steps on the gas and lets out the clutch as he crosses the tracks which are often quite uneven. This is a classic situation where axles and drive shafts break leaving the bus immobile on the tracks. It’s only a matter of time that a train will come flying through.
That’s the scenario we normally see when school buses and gasoline tankers (also under the same mandate) get hit by trains today. School bus drivers are instructed to immediately get the children off the bus and away from the crossing. Gasoline tanker drivers know to run away.
There is no way in hell any politician will ever vote to rescind that law.
It isn’t just schoolbuses; there are public transportation bus systems that do it, too. Here in DC, it is a formal procedure for WMATA buses: stop at tracks. open front door, look. It’s an overkill solution, but the number of buses hit by trains has certainly gone down.
If we get to the point of having self-driving buses, I assume this won’t be necessary, but so long as humans are at the wheel, well…
1. The lack of transparency by NASA is troubling, and it’s not just limited to Orion’s heat shield. And it’s been called out by a lot of space journalists of late. Right now the NASA line is: “We figured it out, but we are not going to tell you what it is, but we promise to do so at a later time.” Never mind that no one outside the agency learned of the issue until the NASA OIG put those photos in their report last May. It was shocking to a lot of people that this was the first they’d heard of it, despite the fact that NASA had identified it almost 18 months before.
2. The very hardware poor nature of the SLS/Orion program never ceases to amaze me, not least because we know full well it’s primarily driven by financial limitations. (We could add to Bob’s list of alarming “firsts” that a NASA crew will be on the very first launch of a Block IB SLS launch – the first use of the Exploration Upper Stage.)
Contrast with how even Apollo, on its insanely tight 1970 deadline, worked. I looked this up: There were no less than 16 test launches of Saturn family rockets (all successful save for the partial failure of Apollo 6) before a human ever climbed on board, spread between Saturn I, Saturn IB, and Saturn V launch vehicles; likewise, excluding ground test and checkout units and the tragically burned Apollo 1 capsule, there were five (5) Apollo command modules employed on flight tests to orbit between 1966 and 1968. SLS seems to be more a continuation of the Shuttle program in this regard, where humans were stuck on board the very first all-up Shuttle launch (STS-1) – a mission that came darned close to failure in multiple respects.
Whereas when Bob and Doug climbed into their Crew Dragon Demo-2 vehicle in May 2020, they knew they were launching on a Falcon 9 rocket which, in multiple variations, had gone to orbit 84 times, and more specifically on the Block 5 version that had a flawless record over three dozen launches. Likewise, when that first HLS is sitting ready in lunar orbit for Artemis II (or IV?), the NASA crew will know they are climbing aboard a Starship that has seen over a hundred variants actually launched to space, and one that’s actually landed and lifted off from the Moon – which is more than you can say for even the Apollo LM!
“”NASA management is pushing forward on preparing for this mission in order to make it more difficult for the new Trump administration to cancel it.””
Well, two can play at this game. Perhaps DOGE can begin an investigation/review. During the review, the project needs to ‘pause’ to make sure. During the ‘pause’ other, private (Capitalism in space!) companies will continue to innovate. When asked just how long the ‘pause’ will be, they can use the tried and true “we cannot comment on ongoing investigations.”
Yes, I abhor Big Gov getting in the way, but the money pit, the NASA jobs program must end. Perhaps by the end of President Trump’s second term, more established and new rocket startups will be flourishing so much, NASA will be forced to get with the program.
Ronaldus Magnus: While I think your suggestion would be a smart maneuver, I have never seen any Republican president except Reagan do such a thing (think air traffic controllers). And I have doubts whether Trump really has the guts to challenge the administrative state and NASA that bluntly. He shows a willingness to push back, but his appointments so far suggest he is still seeking a middle ground somehow.
It is amazing to me that anyone entertains NASA as a credible entity of any kind. There are literally hundreds of instances of NASA lying and publishing fraudulent videos and false information. You’ll say “Oh Bryan, you’re a conspiracy theorist.”, but the problem is that I don’t publish those frauds and falsities, NASA does. Why does no one force NASA to account for the obvious fraud and fakery they publish? From fake earthrise “photos”, to bumbling ISS greenscreen failures, to fake “moonrocks” given away to foreign dignitaries, to lost telemetry data, to staged “hallway to the moon” Apollo tapes, to the use of miniature models to depict reality. Where is the accountability? I can provide actual data, from NASA for everything I said. In fact, anyone can go to NASA’s image and video archives and find them.
Why is there never an explanation and accountability? $70 million a day for endless fraud.
To all: Commenter Byran above illustrates the consequences of lying. Despite actually achieving some magnificent things in the past, such as putting humans on the Moon and flying some really spectacular planetary missions, NASA’s credibility has been badly damaged by its dishonesty in connection with SLS and Orion. Ordinary people like Bryan see this lying, and now assume it applies to everything NASA has claimed in the past.
The health industry now faces the same consequences, having lied about numerous things repeatedly during the COVID panic. People don’t trust them, on anything, even those things where they might be right.
Jeff Wright,
SLS-Orion has an “escape system” that is so massive it must be discarded only part way through ascent or the vehicle stack would never be able to get even the Orion and service module sub-stack to a point anywhere in cis-lunar space. It is there pretty much only to allow escape from a Challenger-esque SRB failure. But, of course, the SRBs are only part of the SLS’s design because of political, not engineering, considerations.
SpaceX’s Super Heavy – a vehicle conspicuously not designed by career politicians – embodies the Musk-ian principle that the best part is no part and, thus, has neither gigantic SRBs nor any phony “escape system.”
For almost the entirety of any Moon mission – whether conducted by an SLS-Orion stack or a Super Heavy-Starship stack, a major vehicle malfunction will spell either instant or lingering death for the crew aboard. The latter vehicle stack can be produced quickly enough, in sufficient quantity and at low enough cost to allow it to be aggressively and repeatedly tested until crew safety is a matter of demonstrated reliability, not some Rube Goldbergian/Potemkin “escape system.” That is not, and never can be, true of the SLS-Orion stack.
Richard M,
As usual, you’ve got things nailed. Particularly your number 2 point about the still-current plan for Artemis IV to have a full crew aboard the first-ever flight of what NASA OIG reports have already identified as the highly problematical SLS Block 1B EUS. Compared to that bit of flagrant lunacy, the plan for Artemis II, bad as it is, looks almost sober and judicious by comparison.
Given that the entire SLS-Orion part of the current Artemis plan needs to be amputated and replaced before anyone gets killed, there is a good case to be made that this should be one of DOGE’s earliest recommendations. There would, of course, be an instant hue and cry raised by Republican Congresscritters from districts and states that have significant SLS-Orion-dependent employment bases. But there is value in putting one’s inevitable opponents on the back foot as early as possible. There will all-but-certainly need to be some political deal involving alternative tasking of affected contractors/centers but coming on strong out of the gate can limit the future degree to which such substitution will be as useless and wasteful as SLS-Orion is now.
Robert,
Bryan truly believed we would definitely say, “Oh Bryan, you’re a conspiracy theorist,” but then he forgot to theorize any conspiracies. Instead, he went on to enumerate “those frauds and falsities” that “NASA does.”
So, yes. That is exactly what happens when a government agency lies and deceives. Its reputation is damaged, and people truly believe in a conspiracy in which the only thing the agency produces is “endless fraud” at taxpayer expense.
Robert, It isn’t only the medical profession that has lost the trust of We the People. It is also the FBI, the entire set of national intelligence agencies, and frankly the whole of the U.S. Department of Injustice. The Department of Homeland Insecurity tells us that the border is secure, even as tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens are being flown into the U.S. on FEMA‘s funds (they denied it while their own report brags about it), and known terrorists are set free inside the U.S.
Lies about what is a woman has destroyed women’s rights, because when a man can claim to be a woman and can join women in all their own activities as one of their own, then those men get to replace the women who would have had the positions that they had fought so hard to obtain. The statistics will get to say that women have made inroads on traditionally male professions, yet many of those reported “women” will be men who claim to be women in order to get around the quotas (oops, I should have said “guidelines”) imposed on employers. Title IX has already turned into a joke, the privacy of women in their own restrooms, locker rooms, and showers has been lost, as men and boys are now allowed into those spaces and can ogle and drool over any naked bodies they may see there. Now that men get to set new world records in women’s sports, are women really going to let men get away with forever holding those records, preventing any woman from ever earning a record ever again? Where is the safety of women in those spaces and on the playing fields of women’s sports? It is so bad that several college women’s volleyball teams have refused to play against the San Jose State team for fear of injury from the man who plays on that team. What poor woman does not get to play because of him? Men now dominate both men’s sports, where they belong, and women’s sports, where they don’t belong.
Worse is a man who actually believes his own lies about his changed sex. If we have to go along with his belief so that he does not commit suicide, then he is in serious need of mental help, but instead of getting help, he gets mollycoddled. What is the disorder when someone has lost his sense of reality? Schizophrenia? Psychosis?
I now live in almost paralyzing fear that I will one day feel more feminine than masculine, will appropriately go into the women’s restroom, then while in the stall will suddenly feel more masculine than feminine. Rather than being a woman trapped in a man’s body, I will discover that I am actually a man trapped in a women’s lavatory. What a nightmare! I may never go to the bathroom again.
Our once trusted news media has lost a majority of its audience, because so few people believe what they tell us. They have lied through omission as well as telling us outright lies. Do we know what is actually happening in the world around us, or do we only think we do? They want us to believe them rather than our (lying) eyes. On the upside, we are chopping down fewer trees for newsprint.
The new fad for DIE, the belief that all people are exactly the same, has transformed our military from a fighting force to a way to get free “gender affirming surgery.” Does that surgery affirm gender or change it? When a change is claimed as an affirmation, then even the English language itself is being fundamentally transformed into Orwellian lies. Can we believe anything we hear or read? We are already being told to disbelieve what we see.
In the early 1980s, NASA had attempted to get us to believe that space travel was finally safe, with the Space Shuttle expected to fly hundreds of times without a major accident (air travel would have been considered suicidal at such a low safety rate), but the Shuttle turned out to be possibly the deadliest spacecraft ever flown (if you count the Apollo 1 crew in a ground-test accident, then Apollo was worse). Your skepticism, Robert, about the Orion heat shield alone is justified — they haven’t announced any replacement or other fix to the problem, we are just supposed to assume they have done something to improve safety — but everyone should be concerned, too, flying the first woman (or will she really be a man identifying as a woman?) and the first person of color on a week-long mission around the Moon with a life support system untested in flight. Apollo was well tested in the relatively safe low Earth orbit before it took man on the journey to orbit another world on Apollo 8.
Poor Bryan is not the only victim of lies, with his misconception of the real world — right down to his expectation of what the world will say about him. Have lies cost him his sense of reality? Are our doctors giving us advice about our health, or are they toeing the most recent Party line? We the People lost our trust in the government agencies we had once trusted to ensure justice and liberty for all. Women have lost most of the gains they struggled to obtain over the past century. American news is now propaganda. Can we trust our military to protect us from all foreign enemies (or any foreign enemy?) or trust our police to protect us from domestic enemies? Has government of the people, by the people, and for the people finally perished from the Earth?
We the People lost our trust in the government agencies we had once trusted to ensure justice and liberty for all.
Edward, those agencies failed in their execution of that mandate, because ordinary people were led to expect, and vote for, them to go well beyond that mandate – which is about the extent of what human governance can reliably handle, and even then only if its operatives are kept focused upon those objectives – to become all things to all people, led to believe that ordinary folks are inherently inferior to our societal elite.
Our founding citizens knew what they were talking about, when they put those self-evident truths on paper.
We began to lose the recipe when we moved off the farms and replaced respect for wisdom from ALL sources – including our own common sense – with the blind worship of “established authority”. That accelerated in the last century, where a relative few government successes that aligned with the above mandate persuaded us to become even more devoted to that worship, and think that government and its “independent” agents in business, union, academia, and culture are there to solve ANY problem FOR us … so we ordinary folks don’t have to solve what we could ourselves, or even think of preparing to work around the inevitable failures of “established authority”.
Government of/by/for the people is seriously wounded, but not dead yet. Its recovery IMO requires a more fundamental change than even the election of a President like Trump can provide, though that is a step in the right direction.
The voters now have responded to the symptoms of their Flounderian trust of “established authority”, and are in my view just beginning to lose their trust in it … we now have an opportunity to inform them why that authority failed to meet their expectations, at that fundamental level, and what they can trust … so perhaps they don’t go back to such trust even when times turn good.
I don’t know why everyone apologizes for Bryan—hatred of institutions also over-reaches the mark.
To Mr. Eagleson—this is hardly “phony.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DpdKxv9WINY
That is *less* Rube Goldberg than—how many tankers to refuel lunar Starship.
Instead of trying to garrot the folks at MSFC, focus your ire on fighting legal animism:
https://www.businessinsider.in/science/news/do-you-know-about-the-volcano-that-has-the-same-rights-as-a-human-person/amp_articleshow/115486608.cms
I see that coming here on the sly.
I was once tasked with developing a ‘lessons learned’ briefing concerning the launch of a classified vehicle. I found some areas and made a list, but before exhibiting the ‘lessons’ I reviewed past briefings of ‘lessons learned.’
The past lessons were almost identical and included the areas I found. This embarrassing discovery encouraged the name change of the briefing to ‘lessons not learned’ and I was never allowed to make such reviews in the future.
If those in charge are so confident of success they should be willing to “ride the rocket” themselves! Yes, just strap them into the two back seats (if they have them) or away from any controls they might mess with and let them be the Test Subjects! I’m sure some will say “Well, Mr. Musk has never done it”, but at least he has tested his products numerous times before allowing a human to ride!
I seem to recall that NASA’s “Mission” was to enhance muslim outreach. Odd that we haven’t been updated on how that went, who was involved, how much it cost US TAXPAYERS, or if it’s still an “unofficial” policy!