6 ms·

As unforgiving as brain surgery. :)

• rbanffy 10y ago
  On brain surgery, the worst case scenario is one dead person. Rockets tend to inflate the body count prodigiously.
  • tmptmp 10y ago
    On a slightly light-but-not-so-light note: A brain surgery can result in worse still: like, surgeon performs a surgery, makes some mistake, the patient is alive and gets up and goes home, but due to the surgical damage caused becomes a serial killer. So, strictly speaking a brain surgery can also result in a body count that is greater than 1. Respectfully submitted.
    • rbanffy 10y ago
      That's a good one. Thanks. I wonder if there is a surgeon who's that skilled.
      • carbocation 10y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Liston#Liston.27s_most_famous_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Liston#Liston.27s_most_... See "Liston's most famous case"...
        • bostonpete 10y ago
          Good grief -- cases 4, 2, and 1 all read like something out of Itchy and Scratchy! In fact, I know something like #4 was a story line in South Park...
    • tominous 10y ago
      On a similar note, there's also the case of the leg amputation that killed 3 people: the patient (gangrene), the assistant (gangrene from fingers accidentally being amputated) and a spectator (from "fright"). See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Liston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Liston
  • ajarmst 10y ago
    Be careful with that assumption: the standards for reliability and safety for crew-rated vs. uncrewed vehicles are very different. I've heard figures at around 10% hull-loss accident rates as expected for uncrewed, vs. an order of magnitude less for crew-rated. There's a very good reason that the pad had been cleared of personnel, and no one was injured in this launch. While spectacular, this explosion didn't inflate any body counts, because the risks were understood and well-managed. Spaceflight is hard, and people die, but we need to make sure we are comparing the same categories when we assess risk, reliability and cost. Trimming that 10% hull-loss rate down to 1% can be done, but probably not at anything like a cost that would make it commercially viable. The only other way to ensure reliability is the way commercial aviation did it: break enough vehicles (and lose enough people) that you understand the failure modes so well you can very nearly eliminate them.
• filereaper 10y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I
• dansze 10y ago
  Except in brain surgery the surgeon generally still gets paid.
• RIMR 10y ago
  Things like brain science and rocket surgery are hard...