NASA ‘playing Russian roulette’ with astronauts’ lives, ex-engineer says<\/a><\/p>\nAfter years of delays, NASA’s Artemis II mission is aiming to launch next month. But issues with the heat shield are causing some people to raise the alarm.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“It’s a test flight and it is not without risk, but our team and our hardware are ready,” Lori Glaze, NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate associate administrator, said .<\/p>\n
Dr Glaze and other NASA officials declined to provide the risk probabilities for the upcoming mission.<\/p>\n
John Honeycutt, chair of the mission management team, said history had shown that a new rocket had essentially a 50 per cent chance of success.<\/p>\n
“There’s so much gap since the only other SLS flight \u2014 more than three years ago without anyone on board \u2014 that it’s difficult to understand any risk assessment numbers,” Mr Honeycutt said.<\/p>\n
“It’s not the first flight,” Dr Glaze said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“But we’re also not in a regular cadence. So we definitely have significantly more risk than a flight system that’s flying all the time.”<\/p>\n
Late last month, NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman, announced a major overhaul of the Artemis program to speed things up and, by doing so, reduce risk.<\/p>\n
Dissatisfied with the slow pace and lengthy gaps between lunar missions, he added an extra practice flight in orbit around Earth for next year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That is now the new Artemis III, with the moon landing by two astronauts shifted to Artemis IV.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mr Isaacman is targeting one and maybe even two lunar landings in 2028.<\/p>\n
NASA’s Office of Inspector General warned in an audit this week that the space agency needs to come up with a rescue plan for its lunar crews.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/2c41c7780e8d4cc655789743940098c3.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Fuel leaks and other problems with the Space Launch System rocket have interfered with the luanch date. (AP: John Raoux)<\/p>\n
Landing near the moon’s south pole will be riskier than it was for the Apollo astronauts closer to the equator given, the rough polar terrain, according to the report.<\/p>\n
The report cited the lunar landers as the top contributor for potential loss of crew during the first few Artemis moon landings. It listed the space agency’s loss-of-crew threshold at one-in-40 for lunar operations and one-in-30 for Artemis missions overall.<\/p>\n
Contracted by NASA to provide the moon landers for astronauts, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have accelerated work in order to meet the new 2028 target date.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The inside story of the Challenger disaster<\/a><\/p>\nForty years ago, the Challenger space shuttle disintegrated just after lift-off. A small team of engineers tried to prevent the tragedy.<\/p>\n
The inspector general’s office said many technical challenges remained, including refuelling their landers in orbit around Earth before flying to the moon.<\/p>\n
NASA sent 24 astronauts to the moon during Apollo, 12 of whom landed on it. All but one of the moonshots \u2014 Apollo 13 \u2014 achieved their prime objectives.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The program ended with Apollo 17 in 1972.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA has cleared its moon rocket for an April launch with four astronauts after completing the latest round…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":536741,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[42588,216873,44688,64,63,90401,3120,131,202746,128,285,5437],"class_list":["post-536740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-apollo-missions","tag-artemis-program","tag-astronauts","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cape-canaveral","tag-elon-musk","tag-nasa","tag-orion-spacecraft","tag-science","tag-space","tag-spacex"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=536740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536740\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/536741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Artemis](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/0f22adbe27a0081812893d0bf168923c.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n