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mcarterphoto t1_j6aln46 wrote

Why don't you look at the history and see if it answers your question?

Apollo 1: Three astronauts die in a horrific fire incident, during a launch pad test. Senate inquiries and review boards, including non-NASA personnel. Fucks-up are discovered and dealt with. Many systems are re-designed and many more potential safety hazards are uncovered and solved. The program wasn't "stopped", but manned flights were put on hold. In fact, the fire gave NASA time to sort out myriad issues with other flight hardware like boosters and so on. About 5 months after the fire, the next manned mission launched and the program carried on.

Challenger: pretty-much the same thing. A two year and 8 month hiatus from launch. Problems addressed (sorta), things redesigned, replacement orbiter built.

Columbia: pretty-much the same thing, and a flight hiatus of about the same time as Challenger.

So, 17 dead astronauts, programs all continued after inquiry boards, redesigns, and some re-structuring of chains-of-command and so on. Don't know hwy an Artemis tragedy would be any different, other than the program isn't as well established as the shuttle program was at the times of those accidents, and Apollo was its own lightning-in-a-bottle thing. IMO, we won't see anything with all the supporting factors of Apollo until we (a) discover a doomsday object heading for earth, and (b) develop a program to stop it.

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thuanjinkee t1_j6cdc1d wrote

meanwhile the soviets would crispy their cosmonauts and just keep launching

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select_L0L t1_j6fca77 wrote

“Hmm, maybe if we try again, result will be different comrade”

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thuanjinkee t1_j6gr4aw wrote

The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship."

This extraordinarily intimate account of the 1967 death of a Russian cosmonaut appears in a new book, "Starman", by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony.

"Starman" tells the story of a friendship between two cosmonauts, Vladimir Kamarov and Soviet hero Yuri Gagarin, the first human to reach outer space. The two men were close; they socialized, hunted and drank together.

In 1967, both men were assigned to the same Earth-orbiting mission, and both knew the space capsule was not safe to fly. Komarov told friends he knew he would probably die. But he wouldn't back out because he didn't want Gagarin to die. Gagarin would have been his replacement.

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patrickkingart t1_j6jjuwt wrote

I seem to recall reading that his craft impacted so hard it literally turned him into a puddle of paste. Absolutely horrifying.

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MindForeverWandering t1_j6cg0c5 wrote

I agree with your general point, but would note that the pause after Apollo 1 was over eighteen months, not five. The fire took place in January of 1967; the next manned launch was in the autumn (October, I believe) of 1968.

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