(CNN) NASA is about to send people to the moon — in a spacecraft not everyone thinks is safe to fly.
Reprising the disaster of Space Shuttle Columbia, some think — including me — there is a significant chance the Artemis capsule will burn up on re-entry. Plagued by delay, NASA is pushed from behind by embarrassment. To say the least, the heat shield has not been tested under actual operating conditions.
Quoting CNN,
Camarda — who was also a member of the first space shuttle crew to launch after the 2003 Columbia disaster — is among a group of former NASA employees who do not believe that the space agency should put astronauts on board the upcoming lunar excursion. He said he has spent months trying to get agency leadership to heed his warnings to no avail.
Sounds like Space Shuttle Challenger, doesn’t it? Quoting Richard Feynman in his conclusion to the Rogers Report ,
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
Feynman noted that he was actually guided to the conclusion by workers like Camarda, who had been rendered voiceless by NASA managers. Sound familiar?
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“The reason this is such a big deal is that when the heat shield is spalling — or you have big chunks coming off — even if the vehicle isn’t destroyed, you’re right at the point of incipient failure now,” said Dr. Dan Rasky, an expert on advanced entry systems and thermal protection materials who worked at NASA for more than 30 years.
I’m with the above. Quoting Pam Melroy,
“program managers sometimes have to make these trades for cost, schedule and performance, and they certainly didn’t undertake that decision lightly.”
Cost, schedule, and performance? Where is safety? Where is lives lost? Where is end-to-end test, which means flying the capsule in the actual descent profile without a crew? Where is certification instead of guesstimation?
The nut of it: With a correctly functioning heat shield, there is redundancy, two systems, each of which prevents shield failure. If guidance is a little off, the shield takes care of it. If the shield is iffy, the ship presumably survives if the descent angle is ideal.
The margin of a robust shield is one system. The other is the accuracy of the guidance system, vital to the descent angle. With the shield margin vastly reduced, it falls to a single system, guidance, to keep the ship safe. That safety is now non-redundant; it may also be imaginary, since it has never been tested, only simulated.
NASA doesn’t need Stockton Rush to guide them. They have the false god of expediency to push them, and Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia to guide them. Columbia was a heat shield failure. This is a bad time for those of us who idealized NASA as emblematic of the best. This capsule should never fly. It belongs in the Smithsonian.