Yeah, encumbrance, rations, and even sleep can be too crunchy to deal with all the time. We're making so little progress as it is! But they can be nice as occasional plot points.
Yeah, this is a huge sticking point for me. I use nav for routes I've driven a hundred times because someone will always manage to roll their semi or something in the middle of my drive home.
That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but there are definitely risks with a rocket that has only flown one time, four years ago, and a capsule with a new ECLSS system and reentry profile. Neither of those things would fly crew if we were talking about Dragon or Starliner.
It's interesting that both of the astronauts who flew on the Boeing Starliner have since retired. They were already toward the ends of their careers, but that had to be the final nail in the coffin.
Orion's heat shield would keep me up at night if I worked on the program. I know they cleared it and changed the reentry profile, but they also approved of it before Artemis 1...
Looking back, it's pretty surprising that Dragon hasn't had some more serious issues with crew aboard. Especially given the above recent safety issues and going back to Shuttle and Apollo.
That just isn't what the astronauts deal with, though? They either go do research on the ISS or wait for the next Artemis mission to go do research on it near the moon.
Odds are that they'll go bankrupt, but eventually someone will make that business model work. Hopefully one of them burns VC money on something useful and makes lunar surface research or materials a little cheaper for others.
Especially when microgravity could make routine procedures go off the rails.
That being said, if I had to pick a group of people to get stuck with, the ISS crew would never be a bad choice. Between all the astronaut/cosmonaut and military training, I'm sure they can handle quite a bit.
It was out in GEO, so that garbage will be up there forever.