yeah
@thethee. I am with ya boss.
And for somebody at NASA to be worried about managing "schedule risks getting to launch day" - WTF!?! Anybody alive over there remember Challenger post-mortem as to causal factors of being overly concerned about the launch schedule??
I am not an "engineer" but I spent the largest part of my adult life responsible for "engineered" products. I understand and respect engineering principles, I can read FMEA data, I can count to ten.
I too am troubled by the very existence of "high risk unpredictable failure modes". I suspec they have existed since the beginning of time and apply to anything made by human beings.
But, the probability of the existence of such failure modes in my household refrigerator, vs. Artemis, is very low. And my refrigerator isn't capable of flying people to the moon either.
Because we want to put humans into space alive,and return them in the same condition, requires management of inherent risks in the technologies/systems capable of doing that.
Whether risks are lower, higher, same today as they were 50 years ago I can't say. I think the folks at NASA (and their subcontractors) are consicentious, competent people with safety high on their lists.
But, I feel confident in saying if they blow up/burn up/otherwise lose any more humans trying to put them in space, public attitudes will shift to the deafeningly
negative. My toddler grandkids would
not see a manned mission to space in
their lifetimes if that happened.
My point for that hypothetical disaster scenario?
The demand side for
human space traveil will dry up. They worried about it on Apollo .. kill some people crashing into the moon -- having our orbiting, shiny, natural satellite up there to remind us constantly what happened there .. and they'd never get another chance to go on the public's dime.
Or the private sector's dime either .. Bezos, Branson, Musk business strategies for human flight would surely change for the worse too.
Commercial exploitation of space with machines (e.g., telescopes, satellites, etc) is a growth business, public or private, would be fine. To continue to live on this plaent probably requires we keep putting stuff up there.
BUt doing those same things with humans in space when you dont really have to, for knowledge sake or to prepare for a possible but unlikely dinosaur ELE or a nuclear armageddon that ruins this rock we live on?
I dunno if society would support devoting finite resources to keep putting people up there..
Still got my fingers crossed though.
