The Price of the Bleeding Edge

Back in March I wrote about the history and reorganization of Artemis, focusing on the operational level of the program. Something I have routinely run into is conversations, comments, and questions about test failures in the industry. Recent publicly visible test failures from SpaceX and Blue Origin have brought up conversations about safety and waste from the programs and I wanted to bring some context to the matter. But to not bury the lede, Orbital-Vehicle development and operation has always and will continue to carry a standard of risk and complexity that is outside of what the public usually interfaces with. In Admiral Rickover’s famous 1953 Paper Reactor memo he touches on the reality with the following:

“Important decisions relative to the future development of atomic power must frequently be made by people who do not necessarily have an intimate knowledge of the technical aspects of reactors. These people are, nonetheless, interested in what a reactor plant will do, how much it will cost, how long it will take to build, and how long and how well it will operate. When they attempt to learn these things, they become aware of confusion existing in the reactor business. There appears to be unresolved conflict on almost every issue that arises.
I believe that this confusion stems from failure to distinguish between the academic and the practical. These apparent conflicts can usually be explained only when the various aspects of the issue are resolved into their academic and practical components.” ^[1]

This detachment of the operationalization of complex systems from their “paper” phase can create a strong reaction when things go wrong.

Orbital-Vehicle systems are some of the most complex things humans have ever built and operated. To put things into perspective Figure 1 shows the high level engine cycle of the Space Shuttle Main Engine the RS-25. In it are 4 turbopumps, 2 preburners, a complex H2 regenerative cooling cycle, injector manifolds for the turbine preburners, and a main injector system. Each of these engine subcomponents represent large teams spending years of development work. And this is only one of 3 engines on the larger space shuttle of which if I were to dive into the subcomponents at even a high level this would be too long of a read. The point is Orbital-Vehicle systems are immensely complex systems playing at the edge of material science and dealing with extremely energy dense materials. A few or a single component failure can have catastrophic consequences. Figure 2^[2] shows a histogram I compiled of Orbital-Vehicle development and operational failures from 1950 to the present. Of the 260 recorded, the bulk occurred during the period of 1957 to 1975. This correlates with the highest spending in space in US history with the most concurrent development programs. The recent failures you see on the news are not an historical and irresponsible aberration, they are the norm for this industry.

That tolerance for losing hardware is the deliberate flip side of a near-total intolerance for losing people. For all the failures in that dataset, fatalities are incredibly low for an industry carrying this much implicit risk. I compiled 29 Orbital-Vehicle-related fatalities from 1950 to 2026 (see Figure 3^[2]). This dataset excludes weapons development and sub-orbital programs like the previous dataset. This number is so low because of the extreme care taken around human life in the space industry. Almost half of the fatalities are concentrated in the two space shuttle disasters and the most recent two in 2010 were in decommissioning solid rocket fuel. This tradition can really trace its roots to the Apollo 1 command module tragedy where astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee were tragically killed in a fire that broke out in a preflight test. Poor design of the capsule, particularly the inward-opening hatch, left the pad crew unable to reach them before they asphyxiated^[3]. This led to a strong tradition of human safety that persists to this day.

Space really is the final frontier of human development. It offers a seemingly infinite series of bleeding edge problems to solve and overcome. The current objective of Lunar Permanence that the United States and other Space-Capable nations are targeting will require the continued development of these massively complex systems. There will be more accidents, but that's just part of the process of pushing to and beyond the limit.