GoKawiilWhen talking about risk during a press conference on Thursday, the NASA officials in charge of the upcoming Artemis II Moon mission hedged their answers.
Reporters’ questions on the risks were certainly valid and appropriate. In an open society, it is vital to set expectations for any hazardous venture such as spaceflight—most importantly for the astronauts actually making the journey, but also for NASA’s workforce, the White House, lawmakers, and members of the public paying for the endeavor.
What’s more, Artemis II will be the first mission since 1972 to fly humans to the vicinity of the Moon. This is not following the well-trodden yet perilous path that astronauts take to reach the International Space Station, just a few hundred miles above Earth.
Artemis II will travel more than 1,000 times farther from Earth than the ISS, departing on a trajectory taking the mission several thousand miles beyond the far side of the Moon. The mission will last nine days from liftoff in Florida to splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. The four-person crew will ride a rocket and spacecraft—the Space Launch System and Orion—that have flown together just once before. The sheer novelty of the mission makes it difficult to quantify the risk, NASA officials said Thursday.
Load and go
With just a single data point from flight testing—the unpiloted Artemis I demo mission in 2022—NASA managers were reluctant to publicize the bottom-line number from the probabilistic risk assessment for Artemis II.
Lori Glaze, NASA’s acting associate administrator for exploration system development, said the agency completed an assessment for Artemis II, but questioned the exercise’s usefulness.
“I think sometimes we get tricked into believing that those numbers are somehow really telling us something critically important,” Glaze said. “I think they’re valuable. I think we can do things in a relative sense to measure what’s more risky or less risky.”