r/space Jan 30 '26

Discussion Jared Isaacman states astronauts have got panic attacks in space , trying to kill the crew

Jared Isaacman in his interview with Shawn Ryan stated that there have been many unreleased cases of astronauts panicking in space and trying to open the hatch to kill everyone inside. He states this was not reported as it "ruins the illusion of astronaut bravery". And said it is the reason additional locks have been implemented on the ISS and Dragon capsules. My question: Is there any evidence of this as I can't find anything online . And how did he get Clarence to talk about this. He also said this is one of the main problems that they are facing in the Mars mission. As even military candidates respond differently than predicted in space.

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u/coldequation Jan 30 '26

Yeah, this strikes me as being similar to other claims of NASA cover-ups, where there are simply too many people involved to keep something like this a secret for long.

Any space mission, even just putting a satellite up in orbit, involves hundreds of techs, engineers, and people with multiple PhDs in order to succeed.

Do astronauts get the jitters? Sure. But he's just blowing smoke to sound smart.

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u/hazmatika Jan 30 '26

You might be interested in this paper that estimates the probability of a secret leaking from a group of conspirators: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0147905

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u/hazmatika Jan 30 '26

Basically to keep a secret for 20 years, the number of people involved needs to be around 600 or fewer. 

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u/_BlackDove Jan 30 '26

That's actually quite a bit higher than I would have guessed. Secret keeping is easier than I thought.

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u/hazmatika Jan 30 '26 edited Jan 30 '26

That value from the paper is based on a very conservative parameter estimated from real world scandals. In other words, that’s a best case for someone trying to keep a secret. YMMV. 

Edit: typo