inaros

They do, but they are not in a position to judge. Same way as the Challenger crew despite NASA and astronauts saying, "we would not fly we would not believe to be safe enough".

Do you understand the concept of side channel attacks? :-)

Ok after looking into this in more detail, I am concerned with this mission, and the recommendation should be NOT to fly with Astronauts.

Looking at the people on the program, and specialty from the ones on this press conference [1] I see only, a bunch of check list fillers and government employees, that will cover their back with reports and third party recommendations, of the style, “I was told” or the “the technical reports said”. Its also commiserating the idiotic and irrelevant questions from most of the press present. How do these people get accredited there?

Here are some facts. When NASA flew Orion uncrewed around the Moon in 2022, the heat shield came back with deep gouges. Large chunks of Avcoat material had blown out, and three of four structural bolts had melted through. NASA own Inspector General identified three independently lethal failure modes:

- Heat shield spalling exposing the capsule to burn through

- Debris striking the parachute compartment

- Hot gas ingestion through the melted bolts

Noting the latter could cause the "breakup of the vehicle and loss of crew." Then...NASA found a credible root cause. The Avcoat was not porous enough, so pyrolysis gas built up underneath and blew pieces out, like steam cracking a lid.

Critically, areas of the Artemis I shield that were porous did not spall. But where it gets alarming is that the Artemis II heat shield was manufactured to be even less porous, a choice made before anyone knew porosity mattered.

Rather than replace it, NASA changed the reentry trajectory, instead of a skip reentry meaning dipping in, bouncing out, then re-entering, Orion will dive in steeper. The counterintuitive logic here is more intense, sustained heating actually allows the char layer to form properly and become porous enough for gas to escape, whereas the gentler intermittent heating of the skip paradoxically trapped gas. The physics reasoning is sound, but it has never been validated at full scale. As incredible as it may sound no one has flown this shield design, at this porosity, on this trajectory, at 25,000 mph lunar return speed, on a spacecraft twice the weight of Apollo.

The computer model certifying it as safe can predict crack initiation but cannot model crack propagation or the coupled multi physics material response, which is precisely what you need when your failure mode is cascading spalling that creates unpredictable hot spots and alters hypersonic airflow in ways that compound.

NASA also failed to recover the Artemis I parachutes, so there is literally zero data on whether debris impacted the system that slows the capsule from 300 mph to 15 mph for splashdown...

Perhaps most tellingly, NASA has announced its switching to an entirely new heat shield design! starting with Artemis III, simultaneously certifying this shield as safe to fly while deciding never to fly it again!

The strongest argument against crewing this flight is the simplest. NASA recently added an extra Artemis mission to its manifest, removing any programmatic need for astronauts on Artemis II.

Flying it uncrewed on the new trajectory would validate or invalidate the models at zero risk to human life, produce full-scale flight data on the actual shield at the actual porosity on the actual trajectory, and let NASA recover the parachutes to close the debris impact gap.

Then crew the next mission with data instead of models. As Camarda, a former NASA astronaut and heat shield expert has warned, this is the same organizational pattern, meaning schedule pressure, simplified models substituted for physical understanding of the system, motivated reasoning to reach a predetermined conclusion that preceded both Challenger and Columbia.

Lets say a SpaceX Dragon or Boeing Starliner came back with this level of damage, would NASA certify it for crew without an uncrewed validation flight?

NASA is risking four lives, when a straightforward, safe alternative, exists.

[1] - https://youtu.be/TQH21XCsp5U

>> Using the same o-rings afterwards is surprising, I've heard that the manufacturer was surprised that they were being used for that purpose because they weren't rated for that.

Not surprising if you understand what the real cause was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47585889

>>I find that highly surprising, because "it was the O-rings" explanation seems universally believed and sanctified by no lesser authority than the Nobel prize laureate Richard Feynman.

Essentially you are mischaracterizing what Feynman did or say, although this is also Feynman fault :-), by doing the famous public demonstration, with the ice water in a glass [2], although even there he only said it has "significance to the problem...". In other words, we should not simplify, even for the general public, what are complex subtle engineering issues. This is also the reason why current AI, will fail spectacularly, but I digress...

Feynman documented the joint rotation problem in his written Appendix F, but his televised demonstration became the explanation...[3]

Camarda is correct here. There was a fundamentally flawed field joint design, meaning the tang-and-clevis joint opened under combustion pressure instead of closing. This meant the O-rings were being asked to chase a widening gap something the O-ring manufacturer explicitly told Thiokol O-rings were never designed to do. Joint rotation was known as early as 1977, a full nine years before the disaster.

The cold temperature made things worse by stiffening the rubber so it could not chase the gap as quickly, but O-ring erosion and blow-by were occurring on flights in warm weather too and nearly every flight in 1985 showed damage.

The proof is how they fixed. NASA redesigned the joint metal structure with a capture feature to prevent rotation, added a third O-ring for redundancy, and installed heaters but kept the exact same Viton rubber. If the O-rings were the real problem, you would change the O-rings. They did not need to.

The report [1] is public for everybody to read...but not from the NASA page... who funnily enough has a block on the link from their own page, so I had to find an alternative link...

[1] - https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-99hrpt1016/pdf/...

[2] - https://youtu.be/6TInWPDJhjU

[3] - https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf

Ah yes...the criticizing Israel is antisemitic argument...

"I stand behind the Israeli soldiers; whether there are children or women, it doesn't matter to me if there is damage. There are no innocent civilians in Jenin" - https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWWUmuFDgqP/

Is it ok now to call the US electorate suckers?

"US Republicans consider health care cuts to fund Iran war" - https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/us-republicans-consider-he...

A reminder Israel has both universal healthcare and tuition free university...and voted yesterday to give $255 million to ultra-Orthodox programs and institutions, including yeshivas...that actually refuse to engage in military conscription...

https://www.timesofisrael.com/opposition-mks-voted-to-alloca...

"Dutch police also use controversial AI intelligence software by American Palantir" - https://nltimes.nl/2025/08/22/dutch-police-also-use-controve...

"Palantir is well on its way to conquering Europe" - https://www.euractiv.com/news/palantir-is-well-on-its-way-to...

"Palantir’s Architecture: Analyzing the Ethics of Surveillance AI" - https://erikabarker.ai/data-analysis/the-palantir-paradox-de...

"All the Ways Palantir is Assisting Trump’s Abusive Removal Campaign" - https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/palantir-deport...

"‘ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid" - https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-f...

"The seer and the seen: Surveying Palantir’s surveillance platform" - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01972243.2022.2...

"ICE Using Palantir Tool That Feeds On Medicaid Data" - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/report-ice-using-palan...

"How one company – Palantir – is mapping the nation’s data" - https://theconversation.com/when-the-government-can-see-ever...

"AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying" - https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blam...

This but a scratch...

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Z2VM18EH4WE

I know what AWS is...that is why your statement

>> AWS has a similar RAM consumption.

Makes no sense to me...

What us this AWS you talk about? :-)

I always saw LinkedIn, as nothing more than the best dating site in the world. My results so far have been stellar.

>> Could you, in your own words rather than someone else's, speak more about your concerns and address those assertions?

If you remove the stars you have to fill it in with what is there..behind the star, but you cant possibly know.... It could be another star, a black hole etc...Since you have to make it nice to display movie credits, you are going to fill in the space with genai images similar to the rest of the background. You might draw curved to the right when in reality if you observe from behind the star, it curves to the left...

"Despite the apparent simplicity of the challenge, Gemini was the only LLM that was able to create a web site that rendered well on mobile. Grok came in second with a mobile rendering that featured odd spacing and horizontal lines placed seemingly randomly but at least kept the text legible. Both ChatGPT and Claude’s styling resulted in mobile rendering that can only be described as broken with multiple instances of overlapping text."

How is the AGI doing Jensen Huang?

"Kim Stanley Robinson: Origins of the Red Mars Trilogy" - https://youtu.be/zn2Van5cZD4

The Apollo comparison makes no sense. The Moon is 3 days away, Mars is 9 months. Every kilogram of human requires hundreds of kilograms of life support, shielding, food, water, and return fuel. For the cost of ONE crewed mission, you could send 50 to 100 robots to different locations across the planet, operating simultaneously for decades...

The ISS comparison is even worse.... it orbits 400 km from Earth with constant resupply and emergency return in hours. That has zero in common with being trapped on Mars for 2 to 3 years with no rescue. And if a member of the crew dies, a very real probability on a first mission...the political fallout kills the program for a generation.

A robot fails? Send another one...And on the issue of humans being more capable...

Name one thing an astronaut could do on Mars that a well designed robot cant ?

- Drill cores? Perseverance already does it.

- Analyze mineral composition? Curiosity has a full chemistry lab onboard.

- Microscopy? Done remotely since 2004.

- Collect and cache samples? Done.

- Navigate unpredictable terrain autonomously? Done.

- Detect bio signatures? Instruments do it better than human senses ever could.

You can land a robot with a spectrometer, a microscope, a drill, an X-ray diffractometer, and a gas chromatograph, so literally an entire laboratory, and operate it from Earth for a decade at 1/100th the cost.

So what specific scientific task on the Martian surface, requires a human hand, that current or near future robotics and remote operation cannot accomplish?

>> SpaceX already shifted to focus on a Moon base and away from Mars.

Oh boy….beyond Falcon 9 that is just a great but conventional rocket...SpaceX so called revolutionary Starship program is nothing more than a parade of explosions. Just in 2025 they had three upper stages exploding mid flight, one blew up on the launchpad during a static fire test in June, and a V3 booster crumpled during pressure testing in November. After 11 test flights... Starship has never once delivered a single gram of payload to orbit….Not one….Think about that for a minute.

Now NASA made Starship the sole critical path for returning the US to the Moon. The Artemis III lunar landing requires Starship HLS to work, which requires orbital refueling…

Something that has never been done with cryogenic propellants by anyone, ever... and requires roughly 12 to 14 tanker flights to fill a depot before each Moon mission. NASA own safety panel visited Starbase in 2025 and concluded Starship HLS could be years late.

The propellant transfer demo, originally scheduled for March 2025, has been delayed over a year. The critical design review keeps slipping. As a result, NASA just downgraded Artemis III from a Moon landing to a low Earth orbit docking test, pushing the actual landing to Artemis IV in 2028, and nobody seriously believes that date either...

And who is overseeing all this? Jared Isaacman that is Musk personal astronaut buddy, who flew twice on SpaceX missions, whose company Shift4 processes Starlink payments, whose deal with SpaceX exceeds $50 million... and who was literally recommended to Trump by Musk. Isaacman even publicly criticized NASA for giving Blue Origin a backup lander contract! meaning he wanted SpaceX to be the ONLY option...

As for the Moon pivot... what actually happened? In January 2025, Musk said: “No, we're going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction.” ….Twelve months later, after a year of Starship explosions and with an IPO approaching, suddenly it's “Moon first.” ...This is damage control. Any competent NASA plan would never have put a single unproven company, with a rocket that cannot reach orbit, on the sole critical path for a return to the Moon.

Technically true, and completely meaningless. Can't default just means the government can print worthless paper instead. Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, and Argentina all borrowed in their own currencies...

We are not in a meeting at SpaceX trying to please Elon. I dont think you realize what you are up against...Do you know what radiation does to humans?

For example Suni Williams went to the ISS and got stuck for 9 months. Come back white haired, with bone loss, muscle wasting, and vision damage. She retired from NASA within months. And the ISS is inside Earth magnetosphere...

FYI Mars has no magnetic field and almost no atmosphere. The Curiosity radiation detector measured the following:

Mars surface: 0.67 mSv/day (that is about 70x Earth surface)

In Deep space transit: 1.8 mSv/day

for example the ISS in low Earth orbit: 0.5–1.0 mSv/day

Even with VERY optimistic 3 month transits you are looking at a total for an astronaut of about 700 mSv if you have 450 to 500 day surface stay . That is well over NASA entire career radiation limit for astronauts in a single trip. A major solar particle event could add hundreds more in hours...

And if you say they would live underground, then you have sent humans 225 million km to live in a bunker...Every EVA would accumulate 0.67 mSv/day with zero medical infrastructure...And by the way aluminum shielding on the Martian surface actually increases dose due to secondary neutron production, you need meters of regolith or water to make a real difference. Meanwhile, Curiosity has radiation hardened hardware, and after 13 years is still going.

Send lots of robots...

And you are going to explain why instead of just stating an opinion...since an opinion is not an argument...right?

Those robots were designed 20 years ago... You can send now a whole swarm of humanoid robots, that would recharge 24x7 out of a KRUSTY Reactor [1], you did not even had LLMs then.

[1] - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20205009350/downloads/03...