- "The night before, Ebeling and other Morton Thiokol engineers tried to convince NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, that launching in cold weather could be disastrous." www.npr.org/2026/01/25/g...
Jan 30, 2026 17:55
- and now they are sending Artemis II in the cold, again, into space bc politics want results instead of living people into space
- There were many compounding factors and many mistakes surrounding this launch in particular, but one underlying problem was that the shuttle was an inherently dangerous design from the start. Some people wistfully described "the most complex machine ever built" as if that was a GOOD thing… /1
- …but really that just meant that there were far too many ways that something could go terribly wrong. Of 135 shuttle missions, two ended with total loss of crew & vehicle. That's a *terrible* safety record even for a high-risk endeavor like spaceflight. Soyuz is practically a Volvo by comparison. /2
- And now we have the Artemis program, which put together the most ridiculously overcomplicated plan for reaching the moon imaginable. Even MORE ways to go wrong. Some people never learn. /3
