Risks with current Artemis 3 moon landing plan 'may be too high,' NASA safety group says

[Admin]

An annual safety report to NASA has both praise and also underscores a number of cautionary woes, including the space agency's Artemis undertaking to return astronauts to the moon.

Risks with current Artemis 3 moon landing plan 'may be too high,' NASA safety group says : Read more

 

[Unclear Engineer]

The ASAP also discussed the Boeing StarLiner situation, and noted an additional failure of one of the rocket motors on the capsule itself during the crewless return flight last fall. See https://www.orlandosentinel.com/202...eing-starliner-issue-questions-viable-future/ . (Why doesn't Space.com report on that?)

Another concern I have about this article is that it seems to conflate 2 different types of risk. One is the risk that crew will be injured or killed. The other is that the schedule will slip. Most of the risk issue bullets were of the second type. At least in my view, the risk of the schedule slipping is more of a political issue, which becomes a funding issue.

But, there is a relationship between the funding concerns and the willingness to take risks with crew, so both are worthy of concern, even if you don't think that keeping to the advertised schedule is really important from a scientific perspective.

 

[m4n8tpr8b]

Some other firsts omitted in the diagram:

1. Use of a lift to lower payload & astronauts from the HLS to the ground (risks: malfunction, tipping over on unstable ground)
2. Ascent without separate descent & ascent modules (risk: damage to ascent thrusters during landing due to dust & rocks kicked up from the lunar surface)
3. Elongated polar orbit for the orbiter (risk: narrow & infrequent time windows for the lander to meet up & dock with the orbiter, no opportunity for emergency evacuation at any time)

And, of course, the biggest risk is that DOGE will eliminate government oversight and any technical issues will be buried with greater ease than back when Sally Ride had to leak the real reason of the Challenger disaster.

 

[newtons_laws]

One thing about the proposed Artemis mission architecture that really seems astonishing is that it requires no less than 15 fueling launches! OK I know the system has a much larger Human Landing System than the old Apollo LM and that they are targetting the lunar south pole region with a maximum stay on the lunar surface of about a week, but Apollo 17 was able to spend 75 hours on the lunar surface back in 1972 with just one launch needed for the entire mission. Makes you appreciate even more what a great capability the later Apollo missions had reached.

 

[palmerfralick]

you leave the pad you are entering a very dangerous, unforgiving and dare we say risky environment. Did NASA have a risk assessment calculation or odds for success with the Apollo landings? was it 50 -50, 70 -30, 90 -10? I doubt it is was 100% and what sort of odds for success is NASA aiming for with Artemis?

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Risk assessment has advanced a lot since the 1960s. I doubt that NASA made quantitative risk assessment for entire missions at that time. But, if they did, the bottom line results were probably not very reliable, and the uncertainties in such results would probably have been grossly underestimated.

Even today, risk models are probably still better for quantifying the effects on risk from specific decisions due to the risks that we can understand, compared to providing total risk numbers, because there are still many things that we do not understand well enough.

 

[m4n8tpr8b]

One thing about the proposed Artemis mission architecture that really seems astonishing is that it requires no less than 15 fueling launches! OK I know the system has a much larger Human Landing System than the old Apollo LM and that they are targetting the lunar south pole region with a maximum stay on the lunar surface of about a week, but Apollo 17 was able to spend 75 hours on the lunar surface back in 1972 with just one launch needed for the entire mission. Makes you appreciate even more what a great capability the later Apollo missions had reached.

The need for that many launches (and I suspect it will be significantly more than 15 with current Starship technology) is in large part because the HLS is much larger, and to a smaller part because Starship is reusable while Saturn V wasn't. The length of the mission or the polar orbit count less. (For the same reason, in theory, SLS would be enough for an Apollo-style mission with a single-use lunar lander. But, while I think it was a bad choice to use a rocket as big as Starship for HLS, I also think it is a good idea for the HLS to be a multi-use shuttle.)