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I also wonder how many of NASA's own human launch vehicles would have actually passed the "human rating" requirements they're now applying to everyone else.
by octorian 8y ago
I also wonder how many of NASA's own human launch vehicles would have actually passed the "human rating" requirements they're now applying to everyone else.
- walrus01 8y agoFew, considering the 1+0 lack of redundancy for major life support systems on the Mercury, gemini and Apollo. Their test method seemed to be "fly it unmanned a couple times, if it didn't explode or lose pressure, put some people in it".
- dvdkhlng 8y agoAnd don't forget the space shuttle which had a lot of possible single-point-of failures during launch and landing (e.g. no way to do a survivable launch abort during the first phase of flight; no way to survivably compensate asymmetric thrust when one booster were to fail; no way to shut down or eject boosters until burned empty; no way to perform ballistic reentry and landing when orbital control thrusters damaged).
- ekianjo 8y agoPretty much zero since the NASA cant even launch humans in space anymore.
- ubernostrum 8y agoDepends. Do you want to rule out NASA ever being allowed to evolve its requirements based on what it's learned from past failures? Or out of a sense of fairness, do you demand that what we knew about safety at the start of the 1960s is all we're ever officially allowed to know?
- walrus01 8y agoNeither, I do think they should have extensive safety qualifications for new craft, but the process should be faster. I just find it interesting that the us agencies responsible for road+highway safety and small aircraft safety will "accept" up to tens of thousands of fatalities a year, mostly due to operator error... While something like the dragon that has the low risk of killing 4 or 5 people (who have willingly signed up for the risk), takes such a long time to qualify.