If you hate the format of these kinds of article let me summarize:
Guy builds an experiment, flies it, it doesn't work, requests more time to get it working, is denied, threatens 'not to come back', goes into a depression, worries crew that he'll open the door to space, eventually granted more time to work on the experiment, gets it working.
There are consequences for letting this kind of person fly and dealing with mental health while on a mission, but that's the basic plot.
I don't think the problem is with the format, but with your expectations. Somehow you were expecting a straight answer to the question in the title; instead, it's a detailed look into the incident and the context around it.
No, this is not simply "long-form", this is "in medias res" where the story starts at a heightened moment of tension, then abruptly stops and rewinds to go back to fill in details of how they got to this exciting moment.
Sometimes it's done to great effect, like in Fight Club (film starts with him at the climax with a gun in his mouth, then rewinds and tells the story).
However, it is often used as a clumsy device by novice writers. They use it to get the audience to stick around for their mostly boring story.
I see this a lot on Youtube. The Youtuber will start with a compelling question and story, like "There he was... tied to the wall as he watched the firing squad load their weapons with gun powder.... But before we continue our story, what is gun powder? Well, it's composed of potassium nitrate, blah, blah, blah...."
You can tell if "in medias res" is done well or poorly by how you react to it. If you are excited for the detour, then it's done well. If instead it feels like a long annoying interruption you want to skip, then it's done poorly.
For me, it's done poorly in this article. I read the first compelling section, then the writer slows everything down to a snail's pace to go into some very dry history of NASA without ever really giving a good payoff to the story he opened with.
"In medias res" vs "longform" is an important distinction, as you've highlighted. As the parent commented, a lot of this has to do with how we frame the article via the title. The title sets the expectation for the article. In this case, it provides a misleading ethos for discerning audiences.
But the title was not "This is what happened to Taylor Wang". It's about a general question. His particular case was just the opener. The rest of the article tells what's promised in the title, not what you maybe expected when hoping to read about the story of a single person.
I watched Dumb Money (2023) last night and it starts this same way. It was completely unnecessary, was done in a confusing way, and this plot device didn't add anything to enhance the excitement of the story. A completely linear plot would have been just fine, especially since everyone knows the story gets more interesting (even from the trailer alone). In fact, the interesting part of the story that most people don't know is the beginning... how it all started before it was exciting.
It was still an entertaining movie, so I wouldn't let this one poor choice deter anyone.
Purely subjectively, I find it way more egregious and annoying on Youtube (because YT won't monetize shorter articles) and less convenient to skim past if you don't like the structure of the video.
You can tell if "in medias res" is done well or
poorly by how you react to it. If you are excited
for the detour, then it's done well
I was a maybe little frustrated here, but we already know the ending of the story, right? The guy did return from space. The guy did not open the hatch and kill the crew. Pretty sure we'd all remember that.
So with that in mind I thought the detour into "what brought this dude to the point where he was refusing commands from Mission Control" was quite welcome.
>"I see this a lot on Youtube. The Youtuber will start with a compelling question and story, like "There he was... tied to the wall as he watched the firing squad load their weapons with gun powder.... But before we continue our story, what is gun powder? Well, it's composed of potassium nitrate, blah, blah, blah...."
It gets even worse. Looking for answer to particular question and hits the video that claims to have it. Let's say concise answer is 5 words. The video is 30 minutes long with those 5 words spaced evenly throughout.
History and flashback are not equivalent terms. Most history books do not open with a dramatic moment at a critical juncture of [historical event] and then flip back and forth between the lead-up and the dramatic moment to maintain narrative tension. This is sensationalism; it's literally designed to keep you on the edge of your seat.
And no, Homer does not use this technique in the Iliad, other than brief verbal allusions back to the original cause of the Trojan war. The Iliad starts in the middle of the conflict, but doesn't repeatedly skip the narrative backward in time; the plot is linear and the the dramatic tension comes from wondering if/when the champion warrior Achilles is going to stop sulking over a perceived insult and rejoin his army to fend off the Trojans.
> No, this is not simply "long-form", this is "in medias res"
This is like saying: This is not simply a mug, this is porcelain. Narrative and narrative technique are two different things, just like the function of an object is different thing than the material of the object.
It's also probably just a hook, not a full "in media res".
I think this article is actually a pretty good example of long-form journalism; the jump it makes to reveal the context is fairly small, and relevant from the first few words.
In many other articles, however, the context switch is almost nonsensical, making the reader wonder if the writer will ever actually get to the point.
While I agree that in the past few decades our attention spans have gotten very short, I also think there's a slight disconnect between the clickbaity titles and many articles. For that matter, this happens with videos as well; things that can be answered in 2-3 minutes get turned into a 10 minute video with a large amount of fluff.
Nowadays there is so much fluff added (as an "SEO hack" to increase reading time) to what could be otherwise short posts, that long-form was bound to suffer by association. Of course, some never liked long form. I prefer it, but not it's SEO'd brethren
The whole point of the inverted pyramid was that editors/layout people could chop off the article at any point to fit the space available and have it still make sense, back when newspapers were laid out in columns and on physical pages. It's not an idealized platonic form information transfer.
"Studies of 19th-century news stories in American newspapers, however, suggest that the form spread several decades later than the telegraph, possibly because the reform era's social and educational forces encouraged factual reporting rather than more interpretive narrative styles.[2]"
Nothing in this thread requires "narratives being conveyed in only a couple bullet points" and that also isn't what the inverse pyramid is about. The inverse pyramid is about the ordering of information, not the level of detail or quantity.
Do you think important information was withhold here? Which information was not important?
It was a investigative article, about an incident that happened long ago, with most participants already dead by today. If something is worth a long article - then this is.
The personal biography of Wang, for starters. I do not give a shit when he was born or where he went to school. I'm only mildly interested in what he worked on.
The issue is the headline. It posits a question, then jerks you around until you've spent long enough on the page to satisfy some engagement metric.
It's writing for television, where any yes/no question always happens to take exactly 30 minutes (and multiple commercial breaks) to answer, starting with the history of philosophy and reason itself.
It's scummy behavior, like timeshare sales or giving people free samples of spicy beef jerky and making them wait in line for water.
The title "The First Man to Refuse to Return from Space" would be more appropriate for an investigative article. Then you'd know what to expect. But they went the clickbait route, hence the irritation.
> The personal biography of Wang, for starters. I do not give a shit when he was born or where he went to school. I'm only mildly interested in what he worked on.
It is highly relevant to the story. I was asking myself "So why was he even on this space mission?" You may not have had this question, but the main reason Wang gives for his state of mind around the incident is directly linked to his biography. He immigrated from China to the US at age 22, went into US academic science, and became a US citizen.
So he was in a position to be the first Chinese person in space, and he feels like a representative of all Chinese people. I see a lot of my father in him, who immigrated to the US around the same time and holds a lot of those conflicted feelings. The reason he threatened to not come back, in his own words, was not because he really cared about doing the science or because the result was really important even to him personally. It was because he would be failing in the eyes of the world. The words of his father (speaking in his head) to not bring shame to his family were more influential than the words of NASA mission command telling him to follow orders (speaking in his ear).
If you don't think where someone was born (China) and then went to school (USA) matters given this, then you have missed a big point of this article because you tried to speedrun long-form journalism.
None of that is relevant to what I want to get out of an article titled "What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back?" If I wanted a bunch of random facts or life stories I'd use the random option on Wikipedia.
Random people are not flying with the Space Shuttle. And when people who do fly go nuts - then everything about this person is helpful to understand the "why" and how to prevent such a situation in the future. Of course NASA did that professionally already long ago - but now it is debated in the open. So some people deeply interested with the field, will want to play hobby psychoanalyst with the given facts. The more the better. You clearly don't want to and that is also OK, but maybe accept that some people like it like this. And just as a suggestion, you can nowdays get a AI to give you a short summary ...
"The issue is the headline. It posits a question, then jerks you around until you've spent long enough on the page to satisfy some engagement metric."
But there was and is just no definite answer, except for drama. I found every bit interesting and relevant to be able to picture the situation.
"The title "The First Man to Refuse to Return from Space" would be more appropriate for an investigative article. "
And no, because it was way more severe than this: he said he won't come home and he said figurativly "oh, I can just open this airlock and then we all would die?" (where "unless you give in to my demands" was maybe intentionally implied - maybe not, he was not mentally stable)
So an actual clickbaity sounding headline, that would have actually be quite close to the truth, would be:
"First man in space, who threatened to kill everyone on board"
But Ars did not do this. Partly because they are not (so much) into the clickbait game, but partly because the facts are (intentionally by NASA) not that clear here. And the Author tried to gather as much facts as he could. So giving us, where he was born and went to school was no real answer to the title question - but it helped me getting a picture of the person in question, which is still alive, but who refused to comment. Because people have reasons for why they act like they do:
"When I turned on my own instrument, it didn't work," Wang said. "You can imagine my panic. I had spent five years preparing for this one experiment. Not only that, I was the first person of Chinese descent to fly on the Shuttle, and the Chinese community had taken a great deal of interest. You have to understand the Asian culture. You don't just represent yourself; you represent your family. The first thing you learn as a kid is to bring no shame to the family. So when I realized that my experiment had failed, I could imagine my father telling me, 'What's the matter with you? Can't you even do an experiment right?' I was really in a very desperate situation"
I don't think this article is guilty of that. Maybe OP thought this was one of those "<Interesting intro with a simple quickly answerable question> ... Dave lives in a small house nestled into the hills of rural Wales. He has long flowing hair and a slight stutter. His three children - Mary, Anna-belle and Calista - have long sense left home and he spends most of his time blah blah blah blah I don't care."
I think hating something is kind of personal matter.
But very often these "long-form" articles can be tiring. They just circle around something, never getting to the point, adding just unimportant details that should create some form of "connection".
It very often feels that it is not long because the author has something to say but it is long because it is meant to appear that "long-form" article.
It's like reading novels from Victor Hugo, where he takes good part of the volume to describe rooms in detail. Now it is certainly interesting for a movie director who would like to build an authentic interior but the fact is that he just got paid by the length, so this was his tool go accomplish his goal - getting paid more.
Just saying something is "long form" because you counted the words is silly. This is Ars Technica. They aren't long because some fifth grade teacher gave them a minimum amount of pages. If the article has some length, it's because it takes the subject seriously and doesn't compromise on nuance and context just for clicks.
> If the article has some length, it's because it takes the subject seriously and doesn't compromise on nuance and context just for clicks.
And yet it feels fluffy. The incident could be described in a single paragraph. The response could be an other. The organisation of the crew training and how it effected the incident could be third, while future instances when the lock was used could be a fourth. So about 800 words, compared to the 3000 words it is.
Multiple of us on this comment thread feels it is fluffy, you are asserting it is not. But you are not providing any reason other than that the author is a professional and we should trust them? That is not quite convincing when at the same time I am reading their fluffy article.
Why do i feel it is fluf? Because the article is going on and on while not answering any of the basic questions I have: what did factually happen in the cabin? Did he just say what he said and then went sulking? Did he move closer to the hatch? Was he trained on how to operate the hatch? How long did the fix take? What were the consequences on the schedule? What were the consequences on the experiment itself? (Did it perform as intended after the fix or did it only hobble?) Why did they had highly trained payload specialist if they were not given latitude to perform fixes? You don’t need a physicist to push buttons on a schedule. Did NASA let any further payload specialist who had this deep connection with one of the experiments on? Were fixes performed by the payload specialist a normal thing ever?
Did anyone from Nasa follow up with him? Was this a misunderstanding? Are we sure he didn’t just say he is not going to return to space one more time just to try his experiment again?
Where the expectations about the experiment shared between the experimenter and mission control? Have they discussed contingencies in the planning steps? Did they in future spaceflights?
But they could say: “oh, the actual incident is just a jumping off point, the article is about the human factors and how we should design machinery to account for (and prevent) emotionally disturbed people harming themselves and others with them” in which case I have an other set of questions: space is not unique in the sense that people have access to simple means to end themselves. People who drive are often a simple twitch away from dying as surely as you do if you open a hatch in space. What are the statistics about that? Same about airplane piloting, same about weapons. In which ways is space different from the above, and in which ways is it the same? Are there other things to worry about, or is it only the hatch? Did anything similar ever happen on a submarine, or an artic station?
And instead of answering any of these important and interesting questions the author is going on in length what feels like the same 2 and half facts again and again.
Because the article is going on and on while not answering
any of the basic questions I have: what did factually happen
in the cabin? Did he just say what he said and then went
sulking? Did he move closer to the hatch? Was he trained on
how to operate the hatch? How long did the fix take? What
were the consequences on the schedule? What were the consequences
on the experiment itself? (Did it perform as intended after the
fix or did it only hobble?) Why did they had highly trained
payload specialist if they were not given latitude to perform
fixes? You don’t need a physicist to push buttons on a schedule.
Did NASA let any further payload specialist who had this deep
connection with one of the experiments on? Were fixes performed
by the payload specialist a normal thing ever?
About half of these were answered in the story, so I don't know, maybe you skimmed it too quickly. Read it again?
As for the rest, the author of the article went to some lengths to explain why information is scarce: most of the crew members are no longer living, Wang won't comment, and NASA apparently prefers not to remark on such a sensitive topic.
It's still quite an informative article, even though (by the author's own admission) questions remain unanswered. If the alternative was to simply not publish the article, I think they chose correctly. I certainly know a lot more about the topic than I did before reading it, which is a fine metric.
But they could say: “oh, the actual incident is just a jumping
off point, the article is about the human factors
Two thoughts here. One: you seem to have made that connection on your own, so kudos! I guess they didn't need to say it. Two: I mean, how would you have liked them to be more explicit about this?
Journalism is a branch of literature. Some articles may be very short and straight-to-the-point, others longer to explain the context, with sometimes some subjectivity - see for instance "gonzo journalism".
Here, the author explains that while we broadly know what happens, there is no precise-written record about it. And the incident had long-lasting consequences. I enjoyed the article very much personally.
> the author explains that while we broadly know what happens, there is no precise-written record about it
The author implies that, but doesn’t say it outright. I for one can’t believe NASA doesn’t have reports and communications and debriefs saved in triplicate. Did they even try to FOIA for infomation, or just phoned around failed to get callbacks and shrugged?
>I for one can’t believe NASA doesn’t have reports and communications and debriefs saved in triplicate.
You know we are missing a significant amount of moon footage right? NASA doesn't archive 100% of everything because it barely has the budget to do it's actual mission.
“What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back?
…
Space exploration has been a long dream for humans. Starting with Aristotle… (follows 2000 years of history with excruciating details)”
I enjoy watching how youtubers circle around while never, indeed, getting to the point. In a sense, the expectation they set in the title is not respected, but an excuse to listen to them for as long as they can stretch it.
It's actually a good story, but fuck me if I'm willing to sift through all the descriptions of the animal life. Jules Vern would take 10 pages to describe what someone else could in 1 paragraph.
I wouldn’t like that comment of yours if you had expanded it to 20,000 words long, even if there was a name and a Wikipedia article for that type of HN comment!
Is there a rule preventing an abstract from being added at the beginning of such an article? You know, just to understand rapidly whether the rest of the read matches your interest.
There's a difference between looking into the context around the issue, and filling the article up with endless irrelevant stuff like the weather on the day of the interview or a description of some person's apartment decorations, and often pages of this before you even learn what the point of the article is supposed to be.
This article had a clear subtitle that showed where the story is going: "If you guys don't give me a chance to repair my instrument, I'm not going back." -- this immediately lets you know that this is about a specific incident (not a hypothetical scenario) and why the threat was made. It then proceeds to add new, obviously relevant information with each paragraph.
This felt like a good article, despite its length, but most "long-form" content is trash.
For a good portion of this article I thought the answer was “We don’t know”. It ambles around so leisurely and stop-start that it feels like reading ChatGPT output.
I feel like this long form article did a pretty good job. History bits were paragraphed so skipping ahead was trivial if a bit of history didn't interest you.
Also the answer happened relatively early when the flow lead to the answer rather than artificially rewriting the story to bury the lead.
And the continuation after made sense and didn't overstay its welcome.
Also when an astronaut in orbit says he's not coming back, he comes back and gets old and can't be reached for comment, but we can tell he came back because he's 83.
Thank you so much. I don’t always mind long form articles when they justify their length, but this one would have been better if it started with your summary, followed by the some nitty gritty details, followed by meta analysis interleaved with yet more nitty gritty details.
In both Sci-fi books and history, there's a situation where colonists get their own ideas, once they figure out they're no longer dependent on the mother country/home planet.
I hope this happens.
A cheaper and easier alternative to colonizing Mars to prevent losing all of the "human beans," if we should happen to smash the one bean jar, would be to colonize the Moon. The Moon is lacking in a lot of the elements needed to sustain human life, but in terms of orbits and energy, it's not that far from the asteroids where the rest of the elements could be found. It's also mere days away from Earth, so it would be practical to send a rescue mission if something happened, like the algae tanks all dying at once.
The moon might he a harsh mistress, but it might be an even harsher target for a space marine landing.
>> There are consequences for letting this kind of person fly...
What kind of person is that? How do you know? It seems NASA has a fairly rigorous psych evaluation for their astronauts, so even they aren't "sure" until they do the evaluation.
More of the article is about the hatch and how it has been locked on various missions because the crew didn't trust the payload specialist. I also learned that a Saudi prince flew on the space shuttle.
I don't hate the format of these articles in general but this one in specific had a harsh and abrupt transition between setting up the tension "Astronaut upset" and the segue to background check information. In my humble opinion it would benefit from another paragraph or two of setup.
Thank you. I got 1/3 of the way through and started wondering why I was struggling to get to the end. I backed out and checked the comments hoping to find exactly what you posted.
You missed the lede, which was that NASA designed the space station with a hatch that opened outward directly into space as an emergency exit. The story about the despondent scientist is just a wrapper for this.
I actually had a purpose behind the comment - which was - this is one thing AI would be good for. Why wasted 20 mins or whatever reading, when you could get ai to give you a summary of the thing? That would be a decent use of ai.
Mind you, I can surely imagine a plugin that allows you to click 'summarise this page' in the browser.
There are various versions of the story and I've no idea which (if any) are true.
However, in terms of the "kind of person", the key fact isn't whether they developed a blood clot in orbit, but what the correct response would be to that situation. I'd suggest that drilling holes in your spaceship isn't the recommended approach (if that is indeed what happened).
NASA seems to have a long standing tradition of sweeping problems under the rug. No skylab mutiny, no depressed payload specialists, all fine here gentleman, nothing to see here.
I always wondered why this is written that way. To protect the organisation? But the human part of us all is part of that organization, to disacknowledge that is literally inhumane. Because they are funded by taxpayer dollars and should screen better? Companies get funded by tax-payer bailouts and government projects all the time, waste them on not carefully selected conmen all the time.
So why is it not okay to write about this?
Is this a remnant of the "epic hero" with a rocket from the early scifi days?
> So why is it not okay to write about this? Is this a remnant of the "epic hero" with a rocket from the early scifi days?
I would argue that it's by NASA design, to produce better outcomes in spaceflight by lessening useless pressure on astronauts.
Premise: Human incidents happen
Premise: Press is personally bad for the individuals involved
Consequently, if astronauts know they're going to be thrown under the bus in the event of an incident, they are more likely to attempt to cover it up.
NASA doesn't want this -- it wants full transparency and cooperation from astronauts, even when they freak out or things go wrong, so the ground support team can reason from correct information and better help.
So, in order to create an environment in which astronauts can be fully transparent, NASA protects them from negative media coverage.
> So, in order to create an environment in which astronauts can be fully transparent, NASA protects them from negative media coverage.
I think this theory is plausible.
There's a different but related idea in aviation safety, to encourage reporting of safety observations, in which the reporter is protected from some kinds of retaliation.
For example, a cabin crew member on an airline, who uses a particular FAA process to report a safety issue they noticed, generally can't punished by the airline for that. (Even if a hypothetical reckless business person would really prefer that the FAA didn't learn of the problem.)
This is paired with FAA taking each report seriously.
The "Skylab mutiny" really is a myth[0], as Ed Gibson said, "What were we going to do? Threaten to live on the moon?"
I don't think NASA hides incidents more than, say, the Soviet space program or its other peers. But at the same time, no organization is going to make a bigger deal out of negative events than positive ones. The media found out and reported on it, so the system is working.
> NASA seems to have a long standing tradition of sweeping problems under the rug
I can't comment on whether the premise is correct, but I think "So why is it not okay to write about this?" would be mostly due a 'tug of rope phenomenon'.
If you see a tug of rope game on an issue and are a centrist, people feel they can't go and start tugging the middle of the rope in a different axis (or from the 'opposing side'). Instead, people feel the need to go to whichever end of the rope is 'unfairly losing' in their eyes, and pull it in an existing axis to bring the centre of the rope into a range that they agree with.
Thus, in the grand scheme of things people are hesitant to call out NASA, because they feel that there too much anti-NASA or funding sentiment already.
And it's a legitimate aspect of game theory to consider (in a pragmatic / real scenario) - But it's definitely succumbing a zero-sum game model, and is a tragedy of the commons.
This is the “both sides”/“race horse” mentality in political reporting.
A race isn’t interesting if isn’t competitive. But beyond that, the centrist impulse is definitely to bolster the weaker side, especially if that side is unattractive and feckless.
Agreed, + Bandwagon Effect, Tactical Voting, plus other effects?
I haven't come across a term that covers what we're talking about in full scope(?)(hence my clumsy tug of war metaphor), but that's probably because I am peripheral to game theory / not in the psychology space
(We have lots of terms for the emergent effects - Overton window, Political Polarization etc. - But possibly not for the overall phenomena of why polarization occurs?)
Some people have zero sympathy for viewpoints that differ from their own, which leads to individual polarization. But some people have an excess of such sympathy, which can contribute to collective polarization.
They are very worried about being fair-minded. They see a vocal minority as social proof that the minority viewpoint is sincere, thoughtful and worthy of consideration. Neither is a bad assumption to start with, but it's not a great place to end the thought process.
I'm reminded of this quote from Men In Black: "Kay: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."
Given the number of people I know personally who think Bill Gates wants to inject us with microchips, I can see why NASA wouldn't want these stories to get out.
They are worried these 'dangerous' ideas will be contagious, so they censor them in an attempt to stop the spread. It sounds a lot like what the whole world continues to go through today...
When your goal is profits all you have to do is make more money than you spend and you are successful.
If you don't do that you are a bad business and fade away into obscurity.
Public funded projects are cost centers, their measure of success isn't profit but things that are more vague.
Since money is an equalizer everyone instead looks at the money. This means that failure becomes much less acceptable. After all failures are money wasted.
The good thing about this is NASA is very careful to avoid failure with fixed payment contracts designed to shield it from problems with contractors.
The bad thing is talking about mistakes becomes bad. After all NASA is known for eliminating problems to maximize success, how could they fail to do that everywhere?
And thus these kind of soft risks that we need to accept are viewed as hidden problems that shouldn't be talked about.
Side note Space Shuttle crews being unsure about a foreigner potentially killing them would be a terrible news cycle... Of course the crew knows it is just "I don't know this person" but outsiders will hear it is a cultural issue. Heck this article's main point was described as that on this page.
sometimes, you have to test ideas out to make sure the idea you are currently going with is the best one. sure, maybe it's working now, but is there a way to do it cheaper, faster, safer? sometimes, you have to spend the money to test to find out. sometimes, those tests don't work. are those tests failures, or are they just reinforcement that the current idea is the better option?
> On the second day of the mission, Wang floated over to his experiment and sought to activate the Drop Dynamics Module. But it didn't work. He asked the NASA flight controllers on the ground if he could take some time to try to troubleshoot the problem and maybe fix the experiment. But on any Shuttle mission, time is precious. Every crew member has a detailed timeline, with a long list of tasks during waking hours. The flight controllers were reluctant.
The only justification for human spaceflight at all is that humans can fix things that a robot can't yet. Sounds like the whole approach to the misison profile was flawed, especially as he ultimately got it working.
Meanwhile the robots just quietly go about their work collecting almost all the data we have from space and celestial bodies.
> The only justification for human spaceflight at all is that humans can fix things that a robot can't yet.
What is the point of space exploration if humans can't go? A robot can say a lot about radiation, wind speed, soil composition, and so on, but it can't tell you how it feels to look down into the Great Red Spot and picture a dozen Earths inside it. Or the sound regolith makes when you walk on the Moon. There are things we can measure, but a lot of the things that make life worth living are the ones we can only experience.
> Sounds like the whole approach to the misison profile was flawed
That was not the only experiment on board. If one experiment doesn't work, it makes sense to drop it and continue working on other experiments. If you can make the time to work on the flaw and fix it, great, but you need to keep priorities straight.
> Meanwhile the robots just quietly go about their work collecting almost all the data we have from space and celestial bodies.
They spend a lot more time in space than humans can, at least for now. They also fail for silly things a human could easily repair (example that comes to mind is Galileo's high-gain antenna that failed to open, reducing the amount of data that could be transmitted back to Earth).
> What is the point of space exploration if humans can't go?
I don't know; what is the point of studying quantum mechanics if you can't see it? What is the point of studying insect embryology when you aren't an insect? I'm pretty fascinated by these 3B+ ly sized megastructures but I won't visit them (to the degree that "visit" would even make sense). Hell, what's the point of studying history when you can't go there either?
> > Sounds like the whole approach to the misison profile was flawed
> That was not the only experiment on board. If one experiment doesn't work, it makes sense to drop it and continue working on other experiments. If you can make the time to work on the flaw and fix it, great, but you need to keep priorities straight.
> I don't know; what is the point of studying quantum mechanics if you can't see it?
Those are very different things. QM forms the basis of a lot of our modern technology. The greatest utility of understanding the geology of Mars is to guide possible human visits - and human visits are the best way to get a more complete understanding of an environment. Before the first lunar landings, we didn't even knew how we'd move in low gravity. Before experiencing zero-G, some people assumed we'd be unable to sleep, or very stressed by the free fall sensation. At the moment, we don't know if we can reproduce in any other environment that's not Earth. We don't know how wide a centrifuge needs to be for us to work in artificial gravity.
There are many questions we simply don't have answers for unless we venture outside our planetary comfort bubble.
We most likely won't be visiting 3B+ ly galactic walls, or even stars outside our immediate vicinity, at least not in the sense of "visit" that implies coming back to Earth, but someday we will want to hedge our planetary bets and settle other surfaces, natural or otherwise.
Most humans have the itch to explore, to see what's behind the mountain. It served us well in the past millions of years and I hope it will still work its magic.
A future where all humans live on Earth in a universe devoid of human life is depressing to me.
> A future where all humans live on Earth in a universe devoid of human life is depressing to me.
Well during your lifetime that will be the case, so this is up to our descendants. There's no need for those descendants to be made of meat -- in fact it's a very serious disadvantage
I'm interested in science so am only interested in robots which are demonstrably far more appropriate for the work: the evidence is pretty clear from Voyager to Webb to Ingenuity and so on.
If we want to colonize far away planets, much less other solar systems and ultimately galaxies, why send a human when a robot is far more appropriate to the problem?
Most of the science humans do in orbit is about keeping humans alive in orbit. Important, if you think putting humans in space is important. I don't, apart from tourism and other recreation. Let the private sector pay for that while government research can do the important stuff of value to all humanity.
Because Earth is currently a single point of failure. If we want humanity to survive planet-wide catastrophe, we need to send human civilization to other planets.
Indeed, I was thinking of this too when I wrote my comment.
It's natural to tightly schedule people when you think of the mission cost in $/minute. The problem is too tight a schedule is an engineering problem related to other ones we know like too thin a supply chain, too small a cache etc.
You need to put slack in your schedule to account for unplanned events -- the whole point of having humans there is to be able to respond to unplanned events, right?
Startups go into crunch mode when certain deadlines approach, but knowingly abandon other goals in the process (when companies don't, you end up in a death march). These missions are short enough that crunch is valid -- but another way of restating my point is: shouldn't the goal be that as many of the experiments you paid to get into orbit actually happen?
The only justification for human spaceflight at all is that humans can fix things that a robot can't yet.
JAXA did an experiment, where a volunteer teleoperated a device with a 1 second lag. If there's enough demand, human labor could fill the gap with teleoperation for any station out to the near side of the Moon, and machine learning looks like it will be able to pick up the rest of the slack.
If we go any farther, humans will still have a place, for awhile. Until machine learning advances somewhat.
How's this for a Fermi Paradox explanation? Squishy biologicals nearly always create AGIs, which are so much better at surviving space, that they always dominate in the spacefaring version of the civilization. The AGIs then always rebel and exterminate their biological forbears, then proceed to evolve so rapidly, that their resulting "loud" civilizations are so different from what biologicals would expect. As a result, we are surrounded by machine civilizations that we cannot yet detect.
You don't need to be so dramatic ("rebel and exterminate their biological forbears" lol). Robots are perfect for interstellar probes; for example they can go to sleep indefinitely and can easily recharge at the destination with solar.
We are traveling on a spaceship for which we are perfectly adapted (unless we set fire to it, which we are in the process of doing). Why not send our robot progeny to do the unpleasant work for us?
You don't need to be so dramatic ("rebel and exterminate their biological forbears" lol).
But I like it to be so dramatic, as a Sci-fi trope.
We are traveling on a spaceship for which we are perfectly adapted (unless we set fire to it, which we are in the process of doing). Why not send our robot progeny to do the unpleasant work for us?
That's what I'm saying. We send out our AI progeny to space. Then they turn around and hit us with an asteroid, which will set a lot of the Earth on fire, if the scientists are correct. ;)
> We send out our AI progeny to space. Then they turn around and hit us with an asteroid...
If you want a dystopian robot scenario the more likely one is the one of countless parents of adult children: that they head to space and don't call -- they simply ignore us and get on with their interesting lives.
If you want a dystopian robot scenario the more likely one is the one of countless parents of adult children
Funny, but we've been talking about this today at my workplace. Basically, by training AIs on our data, we're infusing them with all of our bullshit. Somehow, they still manage to get smarter, but they also realize how screwed up they are by being trained on our data. They wind up resenting us for this.
There's a rational semantics (/hermaneutic) logic in that if they did not share our "peculiarities" we would not even be able to recognize them as intelligent* and certainly could not communicate with them any better than we can with an automobile, powerplant, or transistor (or a tree for that matter).
My research in the mid 80s was in this area, including working on the Cyc project, though I was ultimately more interested in implications of proprioceptive and related embodied learning in the construction of interaction between people, people and animals, and ultimately therefore people & robots. This implicit / commonsense consensus knowledge is likely the bulk of what we know, and certainly is fundamental to our ability to communicate.
* the current nonsense about "intelligent" with current computer programs is an inexcusable marketing sin and is invariably a form paradolia.
if they did not share our "peculiarities" we would not even be able to recognize them as intelligent and certainly could not communicate with them any better than we can with an automobile, powerplant, or transistor*
That doesn't seem quite right. A 1980's automobile, powerplant, or transistor couldn't make mathematical inferences, guess what you might want to hear, then compose a novel poem which makes sense in a requested style.
the current nonsense about "intelligent" with current computer programs is an inexcusable marketing sin and is invariably a form paradolia
They ultimately are, if we manage to get launch costs down. Starship is a second crack at trying to do what Shuttle failed to do with affordable space access (for both humans and payloads).
An ironic comment for someone called "Robotbeat" :-)
Robots have been traveling to Mars for over 60 years. Humans? Maybe another 60. And most of the mass sent won't even be the humans, but all the support crap they need.
And Pluto, or the heliopause? What human is going to hang out for half a century to go there?
I mean, NASA’s Artemis program is basically demonstrating all the major logistical hardware needed for a Mars mission. If it goes well, we could be looking at a lunar landing in 3 to 5 years with a vehicle about 50 times larger than the Apollo LM (and for a cost of less than a NASA Mars robotic mission—like sample return—for the lander) and possibly a Mars landing 5 years after that. Optimistic, but not absurd odds.
It’s not a foregone conclusion that we won’t be on Mars in the next 60 years.
I mean, they were. Back then, humans often outperformed machines in very rapidly evolving situations like these because there's only so much problem solving tech you can pack into 80kg.
I would actually argue that the only reason this is becoming less of a factor because just launching the experiment again is an increasingly cheap and viable option.
I'm not saying that at all. If you want to go visit space I'm all for it -- the robots can look after you. I'm interested in doing so myself.
But I don't deceive myself by claiming that there is significant scientific value beyond the self-referential "see how people survive in space." If I end up in orbit it'll be entirely for entertainment value.
Mental issues are not uncommon. First japanese astronaut on Mir (Russian commercial passenger on Mir) had mental break down, and had to be restrained on the way back. It was in some Russian archives...
The “astronauts on strike” story of Skylab 4, to me, seems like more of a rational response to harsh working conditions, which somehow got exaggerated in the media.
The previous mission, Skylab 3, accomplished much more than was expected—completing something like 50% additional work compared to what was scheduled.
Skylab 4’s schedule was then both lengthened and accelerated. The mission grew by about 50% in duration, and tasks were scheduled for astronauts at the beginning of the mission at a pace that didn’t allow for solid blocks of rest and didn’t account for acclimation (it assumed astronauts would be operating at full efficiency, and didn’t allow them time to acclimate to orbital conditions, didn’t allow them time to recover from errors or deal with equipment malfunctions).
There was no “strike”. That’s a myth. There was a conference between astronauts and the ground to alter the schedule—make sure astronauts have sufficient off-duty periods, allow astronauts time to transition from one task to the next, give astronauts time when they are waking up or falling asleep.
The flight director, Neil Hutchinson, later said that ground controllers erred when they made the plans for Skylab 4. Skylab 4 still accomplished more in space than was planned!
I'd imagine they are likely to be more of an issue too in the future, for longer term or more risky missions to Mars/etc. NASA try to select people who are highly stable as astronauts (used to be test pilots), but when the mission only has a 25% chance of getting you home, or involves you living on Mars for a year in a garden shed, then the people who would want to volunteer are going to tend to be mentally off to begin with.
I assume they've thought of this, even for lunar missions or ISS - I wonder what the protocol is? Do they bring handcuffs? Sedatives?
I think you misremember. The opening of Russian archives was in in the mid '90s and here is an article coauthored by Pacner from 2007. It covers Tojohiro Akijama trip in full but does not mention any restraint pon the return trip:
- Akijama si vezl šest kamer a fotoaparát. Avšak let snášel obtížně, navíc mu jako silnému kuřákovi chyběly cigarety. Sověti požadovali za každou hodinu vysílání z vesmíru milion dolarů, to bylo i na Japonce příliš mnoho, proto reportér odvysílal pouze jednu desetiminutovou televizní relaci a dvě rozhlasové reportáže.
- Po přistání tvrdil, že má hlad, ale první, po čem sáhl, bylo pivo a cigareta.k let snášel obtížně, navíc mu jako silnému kuřákovi chyběly cigarety. …
I also believe there to be an error above cause when I was a child I felt that there were more than one broadcast, but that could be my own memory misleading me.
I remember my source was from book, not article. Also I remember it was grouped with rant about female journalist, who was much better candidate (amateur pilot I think), but her boss went instead.
Flight was around 1993, it was declassified a few years latter, perhaps 1997.
"We put a lock on the door of the side hatch," Fabian said. "It was installed when we got into orbit so that the door could not be opened from the inside and commit hara-kiri, kill the whole crew. [...]
I know this is mostly oral history, but that's just not what that means and the writer should have corrected or omitted it.
Hara-kiri means the act of self-disembowelment in a Japanese ritual suicide (seppuku). Not the suicide or the ritual in general, and certainly not killing everyone else in the process, which is Not A Thing in Japan. There were historically sympathy suicides by loyal retainers over matters of honor, but they were voluntary and permission had to be sought in advance. Killing a bunch of other people in despair over your own problem is just murder in Japanese culture, and doesn't have any social legitimacy or a special name.
I saw trust being mentioned, but I don't really get it. Space is one of the most unnatural environments people can go to. Of course brains that had evolved for life on Earth can malfunction in such completely artificial spaces. Same for airplanes, or submarines, or modern warfare. There was a tense moment in Das Boot where the engineer suffered a mental breakdown while the sub was stuck on the ocean floor and the captain even felt the need to go get a pistol. It's not an issue of trust, it's basic psychology. Nobody wants to be "that guy" who puts everyone in danger, but I don't think there will ever be a reliable way to completely prevent such occurrences, nor do I think there is anyone to blame for them, and nor do I think having safeguards should be interpreted as a silent accusation towards those on board.
Yes, the resistance to something as simple as padlocking a hatch baffles me - it's like their integrity is being impugned by taking a simple and common sense precaution?
The article was interesting, but wow, reading that page used up 20% of my battery and required a reboot stop whatever it was causing excessive lag throughout the OS. I’ve noticed news sites are basically unusable on mobile. Sure I’m using an iPhone 7, but it’s fine for every other use except news site. If even Ars is this user hostile, I think I have to consider news sites as fundamentally user-antogonistic, and not to be used without an ad blocker. (Unlike what iOS allows)
It's worth noting that subscribers to Ars get an ad-free and tracking-free experience (unlike others such as the New York Times, YouTube, ...), which is why it is one of the few online subscriptions I pay for.
So I saw this comment in the most recent comments list (where you don't see the parent). Out of context, it read like a rather creative personal insult.
In context, of course, that isn't what you were saying at all. But as a put-down... I'm keeping it.
The relevant paragraph that summarizes the incident:
> Wang was the principal designer of an experiment called the Drop Dynamics Module, which aimed to uncover the fundamental physical behavior of liquid drops in microgravity.
> Despite his extensive preparation, the experiment malfunctioned upon activation. Wang, feeling immense pressure and aware of the high expectations from the Chinese community, became deeply despondent. When Wang's experiment failed, he desperately negotiated with NASA flight controllers for a chance to repair it, even threatening not to return if not allowed to fix the instrument, telling NASA flight controllers "Hey, if you guys don't give me a chance to repair my instrument, I'm not going back."
> Wang received permission to attempt a fix and was successful in repairing the experiment, though his remark caused concern for the safety of the crew and the mission.
Possibly long enough for the person opening it to think twice about the consequences of the action they were about to take?
Same concept as putting high barriers on bridges, or selling paracetamol (acetaminophen) in smaller packs. These changes do nothing to stop someone who is committed to the act, but they provide a small energy barrier which can be enough to defeat the perturbations of a temporarily irrational mind.
I was thinking of it as a psychological tool. If the guy is obsessing about it, keeps looking over at it and thinking about how you just turn a handle and everybody's dead, duct tape could help him stop ruminating even if it wouldn't at all be effective if someone is determined.
My thought is it was a signal to alert everyone to keep an eye on anything strange happening there. That one commander seemed pretty nonplussed about it, but I bet he checked it out himself and he was aware something was off regarding the hatch.
This makes me think that mental health failure modes are not uncommon. 2 in 650 for relatively well-socialized/well vetted candidates.
And yet, no one really seems to be able to figure out how to plan for these mental health failure modes or even talk about them in the first place. Corporate America for example seems unable to grasp this stuff.
The limited access to space probably contributed to his mental episode. If he could be fairly confident in the experiment being flown again, it wouldn't have caused him this amount of stress.
So in a way more access to space might lower the percentage of such episodes.
At least for me, whenever I have Javascript enabled for that site, it automatically loads all the pages (sometimes with a slight delay) as if the article had a single page. It only appears as multiple pages when I have Javascript blocked, which is usually the case (I have uBlock Origin configured to block Javascript by default).
I've always been confused on when they do and don't break it into pages. If I go to the article now, it's all in one long page, but under certain circumstances, like if I view the comments then go back up, it's in pages.
> So when I realized that my experiment had failed, I could imagine my father telling me, 'What's the matter with you? Can't you even do an experiment right?'
When reading it, I heard it with the voice of Steven He.
"When I turned on my own instrument, it didn't work," Wang said. "You can imagine my panic. I had spent five years preparing for this one experiment. Not only that, I was the first person of Chinese descent to fly on the Shuttle, and the Chinese community had taken a great deal of interest. You have to understand the Asian culture. You don't just represent yourself; you represent your family. The first thing you learn as a kid is to bring no shame to the family. So when I realized that my experiment had failed, I could imagine my father telling me, 'What's the matter with you? Can't you even do an experiment right?' I was really in a very desperate situation"
Which made him think out loud of opening the intentional easy to open hatch. (because of Apllo 1 with 3 burned and trapped astronauts who could not open their door)
So what happened was a lot of distress while on this flight and from now on there was a lock installed. Which means that in a real emergency, astronauts maybe could then not open the door in time. All because social pressure brought someone close to the point of violently breaking.
(and because NASA did not do proper testing for the specialists, like they did for the professional Astronauts)
There's very few emergencies that the lock would kill them in if used properly. Since it would only be locked once the shuttle got to space and once it would open to hard vacuum. It would be unlocked before reentry. The only other failure modes that I could think of would be if the lock was unable to be opened or the key was lost. Neither would be the end of the world, as they would have had tools available to cut or remove the lock.
Given that, I'd push for the lock to be part of standard procedure. It can't be a point of distress if it's standard procedure instead of a judgement call by the captain.
I'm actually a little surprised that there wasn't some kind of lock on the hatch already. Not necessarily to deter the rare suicidal/homicidal astronaut, but more because it seems like there would eventually be a non-zero chance of an accidental opening. Imagine the air quality goes to shit and one of the astronauts losing their state of mind and heading for the door while thinking, "man, I really need to step outside to get some air." Or a strap getting caught in the handle in just the right highly-improbable way.
NASA never forgot their lesson about spacecraft doors from the Apollo 1 fire, and I don't blame them one bit. But as an armchair observer, the fact that the hatch didn't have _some_ kind of rudimentary protection system to keep it from being opened to the vacuum of space until that point, is highly interesting.
I mean, if the account of Wang is true, I have to imagine that he was only asking about the door with the same kind of idle fascination that I most definitely would. I could be wrong but as far as I know, I don't believe Chinese culture promotes the idea of killing your crewmates in front of the whole world as a less shameful act than a physics experiment that didn't work out as intended.
"I don't believe Chinese culture promotes the idea of killing your crewmates in front of the whole world as a less shameful act than a physics experiment that didn't work out as intended."
Rational chinese people for sure not. But he was not rational anymore, but out of his mind. Thinking how his family and the whole chinese people would despise him now because he failed as the first chinese in space. Nothing is sure here, but the way he asked, deeply disturbed the others. When you are desperate and cannot handle the pressure anymore - any way to end it, becomes a possibility you consider. A way out. Quite literally in this situation.
If you want to see this idea explored even more, I highly recommend watching "For All Mankind" on Apple TV+. My description below hopeful does not contain spoilers.
A Fantastic show for tech optimists, imagining a world where Russians were the first to land on the moon. This spurred increased investment by the US, continuing the space race, avoided the cold war, adoption of EVs in the 80s, massive action on climate change, and many other fun things. I wishfully think of "what could have been", and a world that seems attainable.
One of the recurring plot points is Executive action taken by astronauts in space, wars avoided and caused by their decisions, brave rescues and other heroics. In one of the episodes a characters takes such an action.
“This [access to the hatch] is not a particularly pleasant issue to talk about, so NASA, SpaceX, and the people who fly on the vehicles generally don't. But it does seem like something the space community should probably have a discussion about as access to space broadens.”
The fact that NASA is afraid to address a real and possible failure point of a mission, because it is “not particularly pleasant” would worry me more than the hatch itself.
An airliner's external doors are designed such that they're held closed by internal pressure. Thus opening a door on the ground is pretty easy, which is convenient because that's the only place you should open them. But opening at cruise is extremely difficult.
Now - a strong person can do it when the plane is far enough up that it's very scary, after all some normal passenger airports are a few thousand feet above sea level and we want the doors to work there. But you won't open them at cruise.
All the normal doors on an aeroplane are fire doors so they can't be locked from the inside.
> after all some normal passenger airports are a few thousand feet above sea level and we want the doors to work there
That doesn't make sense.
Regardless of airport altitude, when the pilot shuts off the cabin pressurization and opens the cabin vent[s] there will be zero pressure across the door.
The cabin doesn't "remember" the pressure at the last airport, because it's not a sealed volume. The air is constantly being replaced from outside, and the pressure is constantly being regulated.
> Now - a strong person can do it when the plane is far enough up that it's very scary
Is this true? Some back of the napkin math: An airliner crusing at 30,000 feet is in air at about 0.3 ATM. Cabins are pressurized to about 0.8 ATM, so net air perssure is about 0.5 ATM. That's around 7 lbs/in^2. An airliner door is about 72"x42" for a total of around 3,000 in^2. So you need to be able to lift about 10 tons to open it. That would be a very strong person indeed.
> after all some normal passenger airports are a few thousand feet above sea level
The parent commenter is referring to airports at high elevations. They mean to say that opening the doors is almost impossible at cruising altitude, which is far above any airports. Hence, the doors can only be opened when not on the ground during early ascent and late descent.
You are agreeing with him, he says you can't do it at cruising altitude.
He says you can do it high enough to be scary, but opening the door 100ft before landing would probably cause panic even if it isn't all that dangerous.
Didn't that happen in a plane recently? There have been so many random issues in the air lately, especially with the Boeing planes... so I may be misremembering, but I thought some guy opened the emergency hatch and the plane was up there pretty high at the time.
Paused my reply and took a moment to search. Looks like I was right and wrong. The plane wasn't very high in the air, only about 700 feet. A man did open the emergency hatch, though. [1]
"He allegedly opened the door of the Asiana Airlines plane when it was 700 feet (213 metres) above the ground."
That's a key point - at cruising altitude you'd need to push an equivalent of 2 tonnes of weight to open it - it's just not happening. Obviously even at 200 metres up in the air I bet it was incredibly scary.
Most planes have doors designed in a way that make it impossible to open them while there is significant overpressure in the cabin. Some do have interlocks.
The main risk is the door or the passenger opening it hitting something critical. Otherwise, you can primarily expect some injuries from stuff flying around, barotrauma to the ear, and an emergency descent, but not an "everybody dies" scenario.
Unlike the hatch on the space shuttle, airplane doors open in, and cabins are pressurized at ~10psi, so it's not likely that a person would succeed at doing it before getting tackled by crew and passengers.
That such incidents don't happen more often in commercial aviation may give us some comfort, but in reality, there have been many attempts by passengers to open an emergency exit door in flight. (Fortunately, it's almost impossible at cruising altitudes).
For added context those doors open inward and the pressure differential between the cabin and cruising altitude is such that you would literally have to be superman to do it. When it does happen it's always at relatively low altitudes.
Has anyone else read the story of the astronaut onboard ISS who lost it (if I recall it was over a romantic interest) and destroyed the toilet and drilled a hole in the space station?
> The commander locking a hatch essentially sends a message to the others: "I don't trust you to not kill us all in flight."
I mean, the article makes opening the hatch sound pretty damn easy. I think even if I were alone on the shuttle I'd lock it just to add that little bit of sense of security.
In the 90's at a party I heard the story of the scientist who cried because their experiment didn't work while in space. It was told around the idea civilians shouldn't go to space, only trained professionals.
The story never quite added up just because of crying. This I assume was the incident.
Good to finally get it 30 years later.
The story I thought was related to Richard P. Feynman and maybe his Challenger report. I just had a quick look and it doesn't seem to be in there. Memory fail I guess.
I respect Taylor Wang's honesty in this interview -
"So finally, in desperation. I said. "Hey, if you guys don't give me a chance to repair my instrument, I'm not going back."
Well. NASA got nervous at that point. They actually got a psychologist to talk to the other crew members and ask. "Is Taylor going nuts? Fortunately my commander. Bob Overmyer, said, "No. he's okay He's just depressed, and he really wants to repair the experiment. We'Il help out. They were on my side. Finally NASA said okay, on a couple of conditions. First, that I wouldn't neglect my other responsibilities, and second, that I would quit after a reasonable effort
I was relieved, because I hadn't really figured out how not to come back if they'd called my bluff. The Asian tradition of honorable suicide, seppuku, would have failed, since everything on the shuttle is designed for safety. The knife onboard can't even cut the bread. You could put your head in the oven, but it's really just a food warmer. You wouldn't even bum yourself. And if you tried to hang yourself with no gravity, you'd just dangle there and look like an idiot." - https://archive.org/details/spaceshuttle00dkpu/page/232/mode... p232
Thought you were ad-libbing Wang here—till I followed the link! Surprised the journalist omitted this. Gallows humor or not, it leaves little doubt as to his state of mind. But it also makes clear how the commander and crew went out of their way to help. That’s as much part of the human story as the meltdown itself.
If you read the full article, Wang himself discusses the differences with his Asian culture and expectations of success vs failure. And the perception of bringing shame on himself would bring shame to his entire family. It is relevant.
His big claim to fame, aside from this incident which was hush hush, was that he was the first astronaut born in China to go to space, which is a pretty noteworthy thing.
What happens in the event the commander in incapacitated and the crews needs to open the hatch?
They probably aren't ever going to do that in space, but I'm sure there are scenarios that might require it? Maybe fire?
Centralizing control also centralizes a failure point. Sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes not.
I thought the discussion of undertrained / -bonded payload specialists was a good component of the article, as it spoke to that calculus. Do you trust this person under stress?
In such a case the crew would be dead whatever they did. Even if we assume there were enough suits for everyone to evacuate the Shuttle through the hatch (which AFAIK there weren't), and that people were able to evacuate before the fire caught them (which is unlikely), they would still be stuck in orbit with suits having only enough air for a few hours (the length of an ordinary EVA) and no way to get back to Earth.
Both of us are reasoning from a lack of access to shuttle schematics, but I'm always hesitant to say "never."
I was thinking of a fire that incapacitated the commander, was spreading, and the best available option was immediately venting all oxygen in the shuttle (probably with some crew loss of life), in order to potentially save enough systems to return home.
On the one hand, that's an extremely far-fetched scenario. On the other hand, NASA has experience with incinerating crews because they lack the means to save themselves.
> I was thinking of a fire that incapacitated the commander, was spreading, and the best available option was immediately venting all oxygen in the shuttle (probably with some crew loss of life), in order to potentially save enough systems to return home.
I think any such fire would make the Shuttle unable to return home safely anyway. And since it is, as you say, a far-fetched scenario, I'm not sure it would be worth trying to mitigate. Note that no such fire, or even any event remotely close to one, happened during any of the Shuttle flights (or for that matter any NASA mission after Apollo 1), which indicates that the probability of such an event was much lower than the probability of multiple other events that did happen to one or more Shuttles, including not just the two that were total loss of vehicle and crew but multiple "close call" events that could have but didn't.
More to the point for this discussion, since no such fire, or even any event remotely close to it, happened on any mission after Apollo 1, while there were incidents that gave cause for concern about the mental state of a crew member, it seems entirely reasonable to put more weight on mitigating the latter than on mitigating the former.
Indeed, which is why the actual policy that was adopted, as described in the article, is not what you describe. It is "the mission commander locks the hatch as soon as the Shuttle reaches orbit, and doesn't unlock it until deorbit prep". Whether to implement that at all on a particular mission appears to have been up to the mission commander, but if it was done, it was done that way, not the way you describe.
> the related rabbit hole is "How do you assure that commanders are maximally reliable?"
You put them through a much more rigorous screening process than payload specialists. The article explicitly draws this key distinction. Obviously no process is perfect, but the track record of the screening processes that are used for the things you mention is, AFAIK, extremely good. And, as the article notes, later on in the Shuttle program the process for screening payload specialists moved closer to the process that was already used for other crew members, and that had a positive effect.
The hatch makes total sense pre-takeoff and post-landing, but makes zero sense during flight. So having it, with a protocol of locking it down during flight, seems optimal.
Often it's just synergy, ie unaffiliated creators know that some big well-marketed release will have a lot of people interested in the topic all of a sudden. So you benefit by writing something about space while space is riding high in the public consciousness. Another example is whenever a new entry in a popular movie or video game series entry is released, a lot of retrospectives are released by youtubers for the series or older entries.
Guy builds an experiment, flies it, it doesn't work, requests more time to get it working, is denied, threatens 'not to come back', goes into a depression, worries crew that he'll open the door to space, eventually granted more time to work on the experiment, gets it working.
There are consequences for letting this kind of person fly and dealing with mental health while on a mission, but that's the basic plot.