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I want to talk about space travel, once again. NASA's mission back to the moon, Artemis, is slated to launch in less than a week!
Luckily from my perspective, it seems that space travel hasn't been THAT politicized by the culture war, yet. Yes the left and environmentalists hate it, but it hasn't become a hot button, tribal trigger in the way gun control, or abortion, or other major culture war issues are.
Ideally I think space travel will continue to fly under the radar, and slowly get better and better. I know there are some fascinating scientific projects unfolding around space like algae to produce plastic in space, plans for asteroid mining, various organic compounds that can only be created in zero gee, etc. Also of course we now have Space Force, and a renewed space race with China seems to be heating up, potentially.
I'm curious what folks here think about space - are we optimistic that space travel and research will become a genuine market in the next few decades? What are the political fault lines people seeing potentially being an issue here?
The crew is diverse. The backup crew is equally diverse. That increases the chances of NASA pulling off a Challenger substantially in my book. The organizations that care about diversity seems to underperform in execution of their core mission.
Why? For me peaceful space exploration is the least controversial thing - the resources it consumes are negligible, no pollution, huge moral lifter.
We need to explore space. We need to do more stuff in space. And the scientific bang for buck is extraordinary.
There are enough women, Canadians, and blacks that they can find someone competent, and all of them want to be astronauts. Diversity in itself doesn’t mean much.
Challenger astronauts were also competent.
Deliberate diversity is organizational rot. Can you think of examples of organizations that become better after dei push?
Ok, do you think the quality control inspectors on the Artemis program are DEI hires? I suspect not.
Even if they are not - organizational culture matters a great deal for outcomes. Does it matter if the pressure for you to greenlight something comes because your boss has overly optimistic schedule or because you are afraid she will call you anti black racist?
Nasa has a history of cultural drift leading to disasters. And the track record of embracing DEI is spotty at best.
Do you think that there is no way those two could interact in such a way that to lead to a failed mission?
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I have no opinion on the quality control inspectors on the Artemis program in particular, but I would note that we have seen strong DEI pushes that trade off directly against high-stakes safety institutions like air traffic controllers and pilot training, along with pretty much every field in the whole country. This is not something I'd be super confident in asserting obviously wouldn't happen, especially given the degree to which space programs are very clearly run off politics rather than engineering.
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