Artemis 1: Nasa to make second attempt at launching rocket around moon

SeniorBen

SeniorBen

Senior Member
A review found the problem with the attempt a few days ago was a faulty sensor, not a failure of the cooling system or engine itself, and the launch team has said it will be ignored if it malfunctions again during fueling for Saturday’s planned attempt at 2:17pm EDT.

Sounds reminiscent of the Space Shuttle Challenger o-ring problem where management decided, oh, it will be okay... We'll look bad if we cancel at this point.

Maybe not. We shall see.

I worked for several military contractors during my career and considering all the incompetence (mainly in management), it's actually amazing that any of its projects are successful. That's why this mission is of interest to me. Can they pull it off despite all the problems? We shall see.
 

I worked for a government contractor and the problem was always "the schedule" when things had to be done at a certain time and it was rush, rush and rush to get it out the door. Cross your fingers.
 
It would be a kick to be able to watch it in person. I got to see one of the shuttles launch back in the '90s, which was cool, but this rocket is even bigger and far more powerful.

Three hours until launch! :)
 
This is the largest rocket/engine used in a launch? If goes well I think this has reuseable sections.
 
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All it wants is for 110 cent washer not to be seated correctly by 110 thousandth of an inch and there's an awful lot of 10 cent washers and things like that in Artemis.

As a time served aeronautical engineer they have my sympathies!
 
The Artemis 1 mission is costing about $4.1 billion and is years behind schedule. The cost doesn't seem that out of line, relatively speaking.

I worked on a $3 billion project back in the '90s that wasn't as complex as the Artemis mission. There were a lot of good engineers on the project and some really poor ones... some good managers and some really bad.

The department where I worked had a manager and a team lead who knew absolutely nothing about software development nor had any desire to learn. I have no idea how they got into those positions of leadership on a software development project, but that was just something the developers had to live with. Actually, one of the worst developers on the project got promoted by one of the inept managers into a leadership role, so that probably explains how inept people become managers.

And the QA (quality assurance) people had less technical knowledge than a first year semester computer science student. That could be the problem on the Artemis project: poor quality control. If they were competent, they'd become engineers — not QA people.
 
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