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Held my breath the whole time after all the heat shield warnings. Very glad it all worked, or that there was enough margin!
"Reid Wiesman reporting all crew members green; that's not their complexion, all crew members are in good shape."
I noticed a delay between video and audio - the announcer on the NASA official live broadcast said splashdown before the the capsule splashed down on video. Was it intentional (in case something happened)?

Also, what were these puffs on thermal camera after the main chutes were deployed?

https://www.youtube.com/live/m3kR2KK8TEs

Glad that they're safe and sound.

It's worth pointing out that this is the first extremely public, widely acknowledged high risk mission NASA has done in over 50 years. The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle.

According to NASA's OIG, Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle. There genuinely is a world where they don't make it back home.

I am grateful that they did. And I'm grateful that we're going to go even further. I can't wait to see what Jared's cooking up (for those who don't know, he made his own version of the Gemini program in Polaris and funded it out of pocket).

>The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle.

The whole idea of the shuttle program was to make space travel routine and less-risky. Like air travel.

It obviously failed at that goal.

Jared? Sounds familiar, is it a friend of yours? If yes should you not disclose it? The casual first name use basis is a tell. You wouldn't say "glad Bill is cooking something up" about Gates. This kind of parasocial familiarity with billionaires is how PR becomes indistinguishable from fan fiction.

Isaacman is a space tourist, not an astronaut. He is the CEO of Shift4 Payments, which processes payments for SpaceX. Musk, who spent hundreds of millions on Trump's campaign, got him installed as NASA administrator. That's not meritocracy, it's transactional politics. If you or I had billions, we could also buy seats on rockets.

"His own version of Gemini" is wild spin. Polaris was Isaacman paying SpaceX to fly him on SpaceX hardware. He had no engineering role, no mission design input. Calling it "his Gemini program" is like calling a chartered yacht trip "your naval program." Naming something after a historic NASA program doesn't make it one.

The risk decision process was theater. Isaacman reportedly had already decided Artemis II would proceed, then invited Dr. Charlie Camarda and others to a "transparent review" that was anything but.

When the conclusion is predetermined and dissenting experts are brought in for optics, that's not risk management, it's liability laundering.

On the 1-in-30 mortality figure, framing astronauts making it home as something to be "grateful" for, rather than questioning why we're accepting odds 3x worse than the Shuttle (which killed 14 people), is a strange way to celebrate progress...

We should be glad the crew is safe. We should also be honest that the person running NASA got there through financial entanglements with SpaceX, not aerospace credentials

Almost everything you said is false, but to pick on a couple of issues, on Polaris Dawn he did the same tests and reported results just like the spacesuit engineer that flew with him to test the spacesuits in space. That transparent review was enough to convince skeptical experts, journalists and the astronauts that the issues were understood and the work arounds adequate.

I think your projection is the beam in your eye you are blinded by.

"Almost everything you said is false" and yet you could not name one thing. If my claims were wrong, you would correct them. You did not, because you can't.

You claim the Artemis II review convinced skeptical experts.What actually happened was Isaacman ( or shoud I say Jared? ) convened a January meeting to present NASA rationale for flying a heat shield they already knew was flawed.

CNN was denied access, only two journalists were invited, largely off the record. Isaacman own words afterward, that the meeting "only reaffirmed my confidence", tell you the conclusion preceded the review and show a level of manipulative representation, that hint he will go far in the current administration.

The most qualified skeptic in the room, Charlie Camarda, a former NASA astronaut, heat shield research engineer, and member of the first shuttle crew to fly after Columbia, walked out unconvinced. He said NASA "definitely does not have the data to show that it's safe" and that the agency was using "the same flawed thinking and crude analysis tools, similar to Columbia, similar to Challenger." He wrote an open letter to Isaacman warning that this "exhibits the same patterns that preceded past catastrophes." He estimated 1-in-20 odds of disaster. Danny Olivas was a man on the payroll, Charlie Camarda no.

On Polaris Dawn you say Isaacman, did the same tests and reported results just like the spacesuit engineer. You are making my point for me. The spacesuit engineer was Sarah Gillis, a Lead Space Operations Engineer at SpaceX who spent 11 years training astronauts, including the NASA crews for Demo-2 and Crew-1. She was there because she helped build and develop what was being tested. Isaacman was there because he paid for the mission.

Following test procedures that SpaceX engineers wrote, on hardware SpaceX engineers designed, inside a spacecraft SpaceX engineers built, does not make you an engineer. It makes you a test subject with a checkbook. A patient in a clinical drug trial also "does the same tests and reports results" as the researchers but that does not qualify them to run the FDA.

Which brings us to the question you seem to have avoided.

Why was Isaacman selected as NASA Administrator? He is the CEO of Shift4 Payments, which has a five year global payment processing deal with SpaceX's Starlink.

He has no aerospace engineering background, no government management experience, no science credentials. During his confirmation hearing, when Senator Markey asked about his ties to Musk, Isaacman claimed they were not close :-)) and that he had not discussed his NASA plans with Musk...

But when Markey asked whether Musk was present at his interview with Trump, a simple yes or no question... Isaacman refused to answer.

A payments CEO with financial ties to SpaceX, nominated by a president who received hundreds of millions from Musk, who can't say whether Musk was in the room when he got the job... If you don't see the problem, you either are not looking or dont want to look.

Huh, COMPLETELY off-topic and bordering on weird, but I saw something on your profile that was eerily reminding to an idiosyncrasy I've personally possessed. I clicked your profile and saw the first line in your bio was a hexcode for salmon/persimmon color; my favorite color as well, and I used to religiously use it in much of my projects as #FF7256 - it's even my HN banner color. I was curious on what the color or its application means to you?
Who/What is "Jared"?
Cheers! Looking forward to future space travel!!
Now this is actually for the benefit of humanity.
Wild that they manage to fly to the moon but still seem to be having those comms problems. Asking the astronauts if they’re really pressing the PTT button is wild.
"NASA reporting four green crew members. That is not their complexion, it is that they are in good condition. That's what that means." LOL
Apparently there's more work than just clicking "Recover Vessel" after splashdown!
For All Mankind aired an episode today that movingly commemorated the fictional lead character Ed Baldwin's Apollo 10-like in-universe mission on the same day that the real world Artemis II mission which also strongly resembles Apollo 10 landed safely. A strange and moving coincidence.
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This almost brought tears to my eyes. I can only imagine how people felt when the first astronauts got to the Moon, and then when they got back to Earth in one piece.
It’s been amazing - and inspirational - watching the live stream of Mission Control and the capsule over the last ten days. Or at least having it as background audio. I’m going to miss all these folks I’ve grown to know.

Bring on Artemis III and IV!

This whole mission was amazing, and the most positive and hopeful thing I have seen as a global event in the last 5 years at least. Bravo and cheers to everyone involved :)
I don't know how to describe the feeling but it feels like a bad movie remake. Maybe I am just a sucker for practical effects and not 2020s CGI to stick with the metaphor and conspiracy...
Watching that capsule fall out of the sky at high speed from the teaching cameras was nerve wracking! Awesome footage, exciting to watch it live in such detail.
Agreed. I have been repeating how much I think this is all useless (sending humans in space, that is), but I will admit: watching the reentry was something.

Because it's useless doesn't mean it is not cool. Sport and art are "useless", too.

As a long time space nerd, I'm not sure what this accomplishes by repeating the previous stunts that failed to usher in the promised space frontier.

Apollo was, IMO, not successful at changing the course of human history. A really cool footnote, sure, but everything else that was to follow, nope, just a bunch of neat, interesting but ultimately meh science missions.

An exciting change would be more like Delta-V/Critical Mass, but NASA is not going to deliver that, at least not in any form it has taken thus far.

Huh? The research done to develop the flight control computer for Apollo (and IBCMs of the time) lead directly to modern microcomputers. It’s hard to name something more impactful than that.

It could easily have taken another decade or two to develop the modern computer if not for the resources spent in the space program at that time. It still would have happened, but Apollo and the space program was soaking up something like 90% of computer demand for a full decade. Computers went from room sized behemoths to the size of a file cabinet in that time.

Dear NASA. Please dial back the poetics and rhetoric. Be more like ATC than Shakspear.
Went out to the beach hoping to hear/see something, but sadly grey skies and no boom. Tons of other people out there doing the same thing too.
Amazing live video of the descent and splash down. Really awesome to watch!
Announcer just said “we just reenacted” the last Apollo mission. So, yep. That’ll be used as proof-text that this was all staged.
Dealing with the typical Excel foot guns during the last few hours before re-entry felt like an unnecessary risk.

Missaved their version 2 Excel spreadsheet using the wrong file name causing confusion about this version was the latest.

Nearly missed a cell in their burn sheet had multiple lines of text until mission control reminded them to resize the cell.

Buzz Aldrin is reported to be watching this on TV.
Watching this, I can only describe it as holy. An incredible reminder of what humanity can do, and the beauty of our curiosity and the universe around us. I grew up learning that my great uncle was in Mission Control for Apollo; missions like this are what inspired me to pursue engineering in the first place.
> An incredible reminder of what humanity can do

Yep, while we are measurably destroying the Earth's biodiversity orders of magnitudes faster than the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs. And this is without global warming, which is another great thing we are doing.

Arguably, the biggest thing humanity is doing is killing the Earth. Great that we have some comfort in doing fun things on the side.