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NASA advisers say SpaceX rocket technology could put lives at risk

184 points by jackfoxy 8y ago

mikeash 8y ago
I have a hard time understanding this reasoning. There are two ways to do it. You can load the fuel first, then have the astronauts board a rocket full of stuff ready to go boom. Or you can load the astronauts first, and load the fuel once they’re strapped in and ready to go. In the first scenario, there’s a large window where an exploding rocket results in dead crew. The launch escape system doesn’t do them any good if they’re still on the walkway or the elevator. In the second scenario, there is no such window. At all times, either the rocket is unloaded or the launch escape system can save the crew. If I were flying on Dragon, I’d really want to be in the scenario where I can always be saved.
- cdibona 8y ago
  Can the launch escape system work during fueling? Would the gantry/service tower be in the way? I suspect if the les were to fire off during fueling it'd be .... pretty dramatic.
  - CarVac 8y ago
    Fuel is added from the sides, there's no gantry/service tower to be in the way. The gantry would only be there while loading the crew, which would take place with an inert rocket.
- extrapickles 8y ago
  That is my thinking too. The launch abort system can get the capsule away faster than the rocket blows up from a leak catching on fire. Several people have overlaid the launch abort test video with the one that caught fire on the launch pad to roughly confirm this. This is more of the current culture of being so risk adverse that you end up with more risky behavior with the ‘mitigation’ than the original risk.
  - eesmith 8y ago
    What's the failure rate of the abort system? What's the failure rate during fuel loading? That is, if we assume 0% failure rate of the abort system then your scenario works. If we assume (for argument's sake) a 50% failure rate in the abort system, and a 10% chance during fueling, then there's a 5% failure leading to human deaths. Without those numbers, it's hard to draw a conclusion.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      That’s a good point. I suspect the abort system is much less likely to kill you, since it’s fairly simple, but it would be good to actually quantify that.
    - greglindahl 8y ago
      The observed failure rate during fuel loading is 2% with a big error bar, based on one accident. And the cause of that accident has been mitigated. The expected failure rate for the LAS is pretty high, high enough that the loss of crew/mission statistic computation doesn't include the LAS.
      - mikeash 8y ago
        A bit of a nitpick: the observed failure rate is quite a bit lower. Each launch involves at least two fuelings, since they do a static fire before every launch (which is when the accident occurred). Every booster also gets tested at their facility in Texas, and there have been a lot of scrubs after fueling, so the average number of fuelings per launch is probably 3 or so. That’s around 150 total fueling events for the Falcon 9, or around 100 if you only count the ones with densifier propellants, making the failure rate so far around 0.6-1%.
- aqme28 8y ago
  I think the logic is that the chance of an explosion is a lot higher during the loading of the fuel, but is pretty stable once it is loaded. But I still like your reasoning a lot.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    I’d rather take a higher chance of survivable failure than a lower chance of certain death. Fault tolerance is better than being brittle and trying to never fail. But I’m just a software guy so this is just uninformed opinion!
    - loeg 8y ago
      I think it really depends on the actual numbers for both "chance" and "survivable." You want to minimize something like the product of "chance of occurrence" (frequency) times "chance of death, if event occurs" (severity). The numbers really matter.
      - mikeash 8y ago
        Right, but those numbers aren’t really known. You can estimate, but that’s always error-prone. (NASA famously estimated the Shuttle’s loss of crew risk at 1 in 100,000, when the actual rate was about 1 in 70, for example.) Still, I’d be really interested in seeing the estimated numbers here.
        afterburner 8y ago
        There was poor math and methodology behind that 1 in 100,000 estimate though. I don't think that level of error should be held against an estimate made with rigourous and scientifically valid methodology. https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roge...
        loeg 8y ago
        > Right, but those numbers aren’t really known. We agree! :) I was just pointing out that your first comment expressing a preference for one style over another presupposes the relative magnitude of those numbers. I would also be interested in actual data.
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  There isn't anything wrong with your reasoning, it just isn't the reasoning that NASA came up with. NASA has the entire history of US Spaceflight in its collective memory. It has many memories of accidents occurring during fueling that resulted in the loss of the spacecraft. It has no memories of a crew being saved by the crew abort systems because it has only happened once[1] and that was with a Russian rocket. Thus, going by what they "know", NASA knows that rockets can blow up when they are being fueled and they know that SpaceX blew up one of their rockets while fueling it, but they do not know if a launch escape system would save astronauts in that situation. Therefore SpaceX's plan is "risky" because they are exposing the crew to a "known" danger and relying on an "unknown" system to protect them from that danger. It is this kind of thinking that keeps NASA moving slowly and carefully. SpaceX has essentially said, "Trust us, if anything went wrong the crew escape system would save them." Unfortunately they don't have a launch pad they can blow up on purpose to demonstrate that for NASA (it would help if they could). The last time they blew up a rocket while fueling it, it took months to recondition the pad for launches again. [1] In 1983, an escape rocket pulled the three cosmonauts of Soyuz T-10-1 to safety when its booster exploded on the launch pad. As of 2015, this is the only case where an abort system saved a crew from a launchpad accident. -- https://www.space.com/29260-how-spacecraft-launch-aborts-work-infographic.html https://www.space.com/29260-how-spacecraft-launch-aborts-wor...
  - mikeash 8y ago
    “It has many memories of accidents occurring during fueling that resulted in the loss of the spacecraft.” Does it? I did a brief search and only found SpaceX’s explosion and an old Soviet ICBM accident where the engines ignited during fueling. I certainly may have missed something.
    - jccooper 8y ago
      It's not really NASA, but Atlas D and similar early vehicles did have fueling failures. But they also failed sitting empty on the pad and a hundred other ways. Propellant loading is a state change, and so it's theoretically more dangerous. But examples of real problems are rare.
- wafflebear 8y ago
  We don't know how effective the launch escape system is in a pad explosion. It might only save the crew 50% of the time, or 10% of the time. If we assume the launch escape system is unreliable, then the numbers strongly point towards loading the crew after the rocket has been fuelled. The crew avoid the riskiest part of the process, and they are on the rocket for a shorter amount of time.
  - xenadu02 8y ago
    One of SpaceX’s stated reasons for using the same thrusters for maneuvering as for launch escape is to give the system many more flight hours. Every unmanned Dragon flight is also a test of the launch abort system.
- Robotbeat 8y ago
  Not only that, but there's also a bunch of ground crew that are at risk if there's a rocket explosion while crew are being loaded. So two or three times as many people can die, none of which will have access to a LAS for a while.
pinewurst 8y ago
I see this as SLS (Senate Launch System) backers feeling threatened by their own bad economics and lack of ability to deliver. So it's time to deploy the PR submarine fleet...
- mstade 8y ago
  As much as I try not to reach for the tinfoil hat, I couldn’t help but think the same when reading this article...
- calcifer 8y ago
  > SLS (Senate Launch System) You sound like the kind of person that unironically writes Micro$oft, mistakenly believing it supports their view point. At best, it makes you look juvenile.
  - mieseratte 8y ago
    Considering pork-barrel spending is a well-known problem with Congress (See: the F-35 program), I found it a cute way to concisely describe a problem.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    I strongly disagree. In this case, I think understanding of the SLS is not something that would be expected from the audience reading his comment, and summing it up as the Senate Launch System, of course lacks nuance, but simultaneously does a great job of explaining what it is, why it's so critically flawed, and finally why individuals of certain affiliations would have surreptitious motivations in something that seems like it ought be as distanced from politics as possible.
  - wolf550e 8y ago
    The SLS is exactly the rare case where he's right and you're wrong. It is a project whose goal is blatantly to spend money, not to fly any payload on any mission. After spending tens of billions of dollars on development, you get a rocket that will cost a billion to fly, will never achieve the flight numbers to be able to honestly rely on it. It will likely fly very few times before it is cancelled. It will be uneconomical to use for any mission it flies, and any mission that uses it will only do that if they are forced to (the mission requirements changed such that only SLS allows the mission to be done, or the project is cancelled) or if the SLS budget pays for the rocket rather than the mission's budget.
soared 8y ago
I'm no scientist, but I'd expect there is a long list of things SpaceX has done that violate the "last 50 years of national and international safety standards".
- TAForObvReasons 8y ago
  "most fast and break things"
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    "launch frequently, and recover as much of the rocket as you can to inspect the parts so they can be improved"
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      That's a good point. Closing the loop probably did more for the advancement of space travel than anything else because it allows you to find out what almost failed.
- amelius 8y ago
  With respect to regulations, they are probably the Uber/Airbnb of space travel :)
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  Wanna know why it's fifty years of safety standards, not sixty and not forty? Because fifty years is how long it has been since we have done anything meaningful with manned space flight. We went back to the shallow end of the pool. It's time for a change.
tlb 8y ago
I wonder how you get get a number like "1 in 270" for the acceptable chance of death. It's not a number you'd choose as a starting point in a top-down calculation. It must be a bottom-up calculation from a sum of existing risks. I'd be curious if anyone knows more about it.
- acover 8y ago
  Maybe: "The thing that drives the 1 in 270 is really micrometeorites and orbital debris … whatever things that are in space that you can collide with. So that’s what drops that number down, because you’ve got to look at the 210 days, the fact that your heat shield or something might be exposed to whatever that debris is for that period of time. NASA looks at Loss of Vehicle the same as Loss of Crew. If the vehicle is damaged and it may not be detected prior to de-orbit, then you have loss of crew. https://www.airspacemag.com/space/certified-safe-281371/ https://www.airspacemag.com/space/certified-safe-281371/
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- oxymoron 8y ago
  Possibly Fault Tree Analysis. It’s commonly used in the aerospace industry, and SpaceX explicitly mentioned it while searching for the Amos 5 problem. Probably only one of several methods, though.
  - nraynaud 8y ago
    No, I think it’s the other way around, you make a target safety number as the customer, and the engineers use a fault tree to try to reach it. So this number can’t come from a fault tree ( unless it’s a weird comparison like “we had 1/90 on our fault tree in our internal projects last time, we want private companies to reach 3 times better”)
- soVeryTired 8y ago
  Yeah, approx. 3700 micromorts [0] is not to be sniffed at. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
eesmith 8y ago
FWIW (and because I didn't know it), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP-1#Fractions_and_formulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP-1#Fractions_and_formulation comments: > For a short period, the Soviets achieved even higher densities by super-chilling the kerosene in a rocket’s fuel tanks, ... The latest version of Falcon 9, Falcon 9 Full Thrust, also has the capability of sub-cooling the RP-1 fuel to −7 °C, giving a 2.5–4% density increase.
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  Man I really wish we would get nuclear propulsion going again one of these days. Fine, fine, not as a launch system, just orbit to orbit... but we could move much larger, more dependable payloads so much further and not have to fiddle with little tweaks like these to surf the tiny margins of chemical propulsion. It could have been a very mature technology by now. I feel like we created all the nightmares and quit the technology before we got to the actually good uses.
  - Oren-T 8y ago
    Nuclear propulsion is more efficient but doesn’t produce enough thrust for surface launch(\) We are stuck with chemical rockets for that. Nuclear could help us get to Mars faster or launch less mass from the surface. It may even be relevant for the upper stage of a launcher. But not for getting off the ground. (\) with the notable exception of Orion
    - vertexFarm 8y ago
      That's why I specified orbit-to-orbit systems. The advantages there are immense. When we finally do it, that's probably how it'll happen.
loeg 8y ago
Challenger, Columbia, and now NASA is concerned about astronaut safety? Hah. There is always risk; simple rockets are (probably) less risky than the shuttle program. More unmanned launches will help quantify that risk; NASA can then determine whether the risk is acceptable, or not.
citilife 8y ago
I think the last paragraph really says it all: > Before the very first shuttle flight, NASA estimated that the chance of death was between 1 in 500 and 1 in 5,000. Later, after the agency had compiled data from shuttle flights, it went back and came up with a very different number. The chance of death was actually 1 in 12. The fact is, these numbers are made up because the systems are too complicated to calculate based on individual components. Until they have something like 50+ launches (after the kinks are worked out), we wont really know the actual chances of blowing up a rocket are. Further, how well do the escape capsule(s) work? If they work the majority of the time (saving astronauts from he explosion), that'd also dramatically drive down the risk. If say, there was a 1 in 30 chance of a rocket exploding using the method described, but the escape capsule failed to save the astronauts 1 out of 10 times. Then the real risk of killing the astronauts is 1 in 300. Unfortunately, we simply don't have either of those numbers, so the actual "risk" level is essentially made up.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  Since the actual disaster record for the shuttle was 2/135, they must have done some other adjustments to come up with 1/12. Still, at this point it seems very likely that SpaceX will be safer than the shuttle.
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    2/135 is failed flights/total flights. Over the life of the shuttle[0], there were 355 astronauts who flew, 14 died. So for every ~25 astronauts who flew on the shuttle, 1 died.. 0) https://www.space.com/12376-nasa-space-shuttle-program-facts-statistics.html https://www.space.com/12376-nasa-space-shuttle-program-facts...
    - ebbv 8y ago
      Oh my lord you guys that is not how probabilities work. You can’t look at what actually happened and then say “Well that was the chance.” If I flip a coin 20 times and happen to end up with a 15:5 split that doesn’t mean the chance of heads is 3:1. Also the context of that 1 in 12 in the quote is important. They’re saying that was the chance on the first flight in retrospect. The shuttle and it’s supporting facilities and processes didn’t stay static, they improved over time.
_ph_ 8y ago
SpaceX has lost 2 F9 so far. The first exploded in flight, but the Dragon capsule could have been retreived, if the parashutes had not been disbled in the starting phase. The second fueling for the static fire test. In both cases, no crew would have been in danger, and of course the causes of the failures has been adressed. But it will at least take another 12 months till the first planned crew flight. If everything goes well, the Falcon 9 will have about 30 more flights till then. A lot of opportunity to build a safety record.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  Everyone expects the LAS (launch abort system) to not be very reliable. So you're a bit optimistic about the outcome of the second failure: big danger for the crew.
  - boardwaalk 8y ago
    Who is "everyone"? Because it certainly isn't actually everyone.
  - Robotbeat 8y ago
    It was a static fire, so crew wouldn't be on board anyway. 100% no danger to crew in that case. LAS is likely to be very reliable for ground aborts. Design criteria insist on high (say, 95%) total reliability for LAS. Part of the reason you might want to do such static fires is as a way to trigger (and thus reveal) such problems without endangering crew.
- Rebelgecko 8y ago
  No crew would have been danger for the second launch, but only because it was a static fire. If it were an actual launch it could've been pretty bad
  - JshWright 8y ago
    The launch escape system would have been able to safely get the crew clear of the rocket in the AMOS-6 incident if it had been a crewed fight. (Based on the performance of the capsule during the pad abort test)
caconym_ 8y ago
I have trouble seeing this as anything more than irrational territorialism and/or a disingenuous defense of the pork barrel status quo. If we are unwilling to try something new because we decided fifty fucking years ago that it was a bad idea, we're done. Time for NASA to hang up its space helmets and watch China (or possibly SpaceX, BO, etc. using private funds) take the next steps.
ILMostro7 8y ago
NASA Challenger and others have proven record of putting lives at risk. It's a dangerous job. As for hypothetical danger, that's more of a clickbait "analysis", timely after recent lash-out by Musk on Tesla conference call, IMHO.
carapace 8y ago
> Robert Lightfoot, the former acting NASA administrator, lamented in candid terms how the agency, with society as a whole, has become too risk-averse. He charged the agency with recapturing some of the youthful swagger that sent men to the moon during the Apollo era. > "I worry, to be perfectly honest, if we would have ever launched Apollo in our environment here today," he said during a speech at the Space Symposium last month, "if Buzz [Aldrin] and Neil [Armstrong] would have ever been able to go to the moon in the risk environment we have today." That is a really underhanded way to say, "Let's kill more astronauts so we can get to space faster." The folks who risked their lives and, in some cases, gave their lives to get us to where we are today deserve better.
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  Disagree. We make trade offs wrt safety all the time. Driving in a car is pretty dangerous, yet many of us drive our cars every single day. Because the payoff is worth the risk. Those quotes speak to this trade off. They are advocating for a stance that is willing to take more risk, because they assume that there are tremendous benefits to be had by doing so. They are not advocating taking risks for the sake of killing astronauts.
  - carapace 8y ago
    I get what you're saying but in this case I have to ask, can we really not get those benefits without risking lives? Would it become impossible? Or would it just take longer? Can robots do it? I hate arguing this position because I want to go to space physically in person in my lifetime. But it doesn't make sense to send humans if robots can do the job because space is inimicable to life and life support is very hard and expensive and heavy. Risk lives to stave off an asteroid but not to mine it. - - - - I don't want to get into a side-thing about driving, but I don't drive in part because I see it as a Faustian bargain: we get transportation that's so convenient at the cost of forcing people to participate in a death-and-mayhem lottery. Traffic is a meat-grinder.
    - nkristoffersen 8y ago
njarboe 8y ago
For some historical perspective: on the Ferdinand Magellan expedition about 230 men out of 270, including Magellan himself, died of violence and/or disease (1 in 1.2 chance of death). As Musk has said in the past, a safety first philosophy and space travel don't mix. Safety third might work.
- calcifer 8y ago
  Than it sounds like Musk is disagreeing with SpaceX. From the article: > SpaceX says it is serious about flying people safely and is going to great lengths to study every aspect of the vehicle, down to individual valves, so that it will meet and surpass the 1-in-270 chance-of-death metric, said Benji Reed, the director of SpaceX's commercial crew program. > When Reed was down at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a recent trip, he came across a room on a special tour where the astronauts' families from the shuttle program used to wait ahead of the rocket launch. > They were stunned to see that a whiteboard with drawings made by the children of the crew lost in the 2003 Columbia disaster was still there, preserved. > "That really drives it home," Reed said. "This isn't just the people that we're flying — these are all of their families. So we take this extremely seriously, and we understand that our job is to fly people safely and bring them back safely. To do that you have to humanize it. You have to see them as your friends and as your colleagues."
  - DennisP 8y ago
    Not to mention, SpaceX wants to do routine suborbital passenger flights with the same rocket they use for flights to Mars. Safety has to be an extremely high priority for that to happen.
  - icc97 8y ago
    > SpaceX says it is serious about flying people safely > So we take this extremely seriously Musk didn't say they don't take it seriously, he said it's not the highest priority. But also there's a difference between what Space X says and what it does. I don't think we'll fully know the extent of Space X's safety consideration until some astronauts die in take off. NASA are cautious because they've had people die and that lives long in the memory. Space X engineers haven't had to go through the process of finding out which one of them missed the bug that killed people.
Zarath 8y ago
I'm alright with that.
spacenick88 8y ago
I for one who would rather sit on top of a rocket being loaded but have a LAS ready to go than going anywhere near a loaded one with no way to escape within a few seconds.
imh 8y ago
Space science is cool and useful, but is it so crucial to humanity's progress that we shouldn't be super extra careful with our astronaut's lives? Waiting an extra year or two or ten to learn about how fruit fly DNA mutates in space seems fine when the alternative is maybe killing astronauts with a decent probability.
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  What about letting the astronauts decide what level of risk they are comfortable with?
  - forapurpose 8y ago
    > What about letting the astronauts decide what level of risk they are comfortable with? That sounds like an easy solution and philosophically appealing in a libertarian sort of way. However, it doesn't work. People can be put under enormous pressure to make the choice that satisfies others - their boss, their peers, their community, etc.; it's commonsense experience, there is a lot of research about that, and a lot of implemented practices to prevent it in safety situations. How many priests in the Catholic Church or employees at Penn State allowed child rape to continue - something which provided zero benefit - under pressure? Or remember the article posted here a few months ago about the sea captain who, apparently under pressure, sailed into a hurricane and killed his crew. Also, people don't always make good decisions; they shouldn't die for it, we shouldn't exploit them, and we don't want a system that attracts and promotes people for making bad decisions.
    - wonder_er 8y ago
      > Also, people don't always make good decisions; they shouldn't die for it, we shouldn't exploit them, and we don't want a system that attracts and promotes people for making bad decisions. So, your alternative to letting someone else make their own decision is you (or someone else) making a decision for them? All of the examples you just listed cut against your argument as much as they cut for it. Bosses, peers, communities, priests in catholic churches or penn state employees _all_ have a history of abusing power as much as anyone else. So, since abuse of power exists, and people can make good and bad decisions, it seems reasonable to expect a certain amount of bad decisions. it seems safer to let individuals make their own bad (and good) decisions, rather than centralizing decision-making in a group of people that we hope will make good ones, but we must expect that a centralized group will make a certain number of bad ones. Enshrining bad actors in a position of power is likely to have much worse outcomes than letting individuals occasionally make bad decisions.
mathinpens 8y ago
I mean the only safe ship is a ship in a harbor and that's not what ships are for....buttttt I am skeptical that a for-profit-company run by elon musk has rigorous safety culture-particularly given he apparently has no concerns with libeling people killed by his firm's autopilot software
jimnotgym 8y ago
> the safety-obsessed space agency That's not how I remember Feynmans report going
- mephitix 8y ago
  That report came out 32 years ago. The article suggests that the space agency has become more safety-obsessed over time.
  - ChickeNES 8y ago
    Given that the Columbia disaster occurred in the middle of those 32 years, I'm not sure that follows....
    - ufmace 8y ago
      Somewhat true, I'd say that risk-averse is more appropriate than safety-obsessed. For such organizations, being "safety-obsessed" usually means a massive amount of bureaucracy around certain known risks, but such organizations don't tend to be consistently good at finding and addressing unknown risks.
    - vertexFarm 8y ago
      You can be safety-obsessed and still have accidents when you're doing something as risky as space travel I think.
bradknowles 8y ago
So, what I don’t understand is why NASA doesn’t make this really simple — allow SpaceX to use the “load-and-go” process on flights that don’t involve putting living beings into space, and when they have repeatedly and sufficiently proven how safe the system is, then start talking about whether or not it could be used to launch humans. Don’t even talk about using the potentially more dangerous system until it has enough of a safety record.
- rst 8y ago
  SpaceX has been using supercooled propellants (and "load-and-go") for every launch since early 2016, including NASA cargo launches. It's been used over thirty times by now. Whatever additional assurance that NASA's advisory board wants, another few launches are unlikely to provide it.
alexandercrohde 8y ago
I don't get it. I imagine HN feels there's between 5% to 30% chance that humanity kills itself in the next 300 years. If we accept those odds, isn't there a point where space travel becomes the best our best plan, regardless of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of astronaut deaths?
- JetSpiegel 8y ago
  > 5% to 30% chance that humanity kills itself in the next 300 years I'm 42.69% angered at this comment, and 50% disappointed.
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  Once upon a time, thousands of people died fishing for ambergris. Whale anus wax. People died all the time. Do we really think people are going to die exploring space? Yeah, they very fucking well are going to be deaths exploring space. We can take precautions as much as practical, but this zero risk tolerance philosophy is not going to work. We haven't done anything of note when it comes to manned space exploration in half a century. Space is so dangerous that the only way to keep risk to a minimum is to not go. And that's basically what we've done. It's just that now these things are televised and PR is such a disaster when you have somebody die on air. It's not like a plumber is going to be watched by the entire world as he works in some kind of risky situation. People die doing that, too. People die doing anything. But if it's in the limelight like space exploration, it's absolutely unacceptable for anyone to risk death. That's why. Because we're watching and we can bear it only if we don't have to know about it or watch it happen. We've got to start taking a hell of a lot more risk. We're taking enormous risk by not furthering space exploration. But risk of inaction is a strange thing, psychologically speaking. People don't fret about it, even though it's a real killer. Our climate is about to be the biggest killer of all, and we only feel vaguely uncomfortable about doing absolutely nothing. And when I talk about taking risk, I'm not talking about go fever by the way--dumb political risk that leads to ignoring engineers. I mean the kind of risk that got us to the moon in the 60s. People died doing that. Mostly Soviet people, but a few Americans, too. But it was important enough. And it got done. We really shouldn't have stopped there. It's not really NASA's fault, but they haven't gotten shit done with manned spaceflight since then. Haven't done a damn thing. Yet people have still died doing it. I hope private industry at least gets somebody above the Van Allen belt in the coming years. We need to get back on the horse before we lose our chance for good.
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dzdt 8y ago
It seems to me there is a reasonably low cost solution to demonstrate safety: SpaceX should load and unload the fuel multiple times for its human-qualification spaceflights. If SpaceX is correctly confident fuel loading is safe, the extra handling won't result in incidents. This would be a fairly minor expense given nothing is consumed or destroyed -- just handling costs and incidental losses due to evaporation and so on.
- phkahler 8y ago
  OMG what a fantastically obvious idea! Now that you've mentioned it of course ;-) There may be reasons this isn't as simple as it sounds but it's worth considering.
  - Maybestring 8y ago
    Not that it wouldn't increase confidence, but if you don't know what you needed to be worried about, you can't be sure that you really tested it. Loading and unloading fuel repeatedly doesn't validate that the ground crew will be sober for a 5:00am launch on May 6th. Validation testing is good for testing a known unknown. Whether it's good for testing an unknown unknown, is unknown.
    - lucb1e 8y ago
      It's a good point that indeed there might be something different at actual-launch-time versus testing time, but I'd imagine that doing the whole procedure a few times (as complete as possible) would reveal any important unknown unknowns if present. (Where I define important as 'reasonably likely to occur': if they are indeed so likely, they'll probably occur with repeated tests.)
- perilunar 8y ago
  Don't they do that anyway as part of the static fire tests and when a launch is aborted?
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lowbloodsugar 8y ago
This is based on information from 2015, but May 2018 seems to be Take Down Elon Musk month, so lets run a negative story.
aunty_helen 8y ago
A few months ago I had a chat to one of the engineers working on the SLS during a NASA outreach presentation. Super defensive about it and dismissive of SpaceX and their accomplishments. The goals of the SLS mission before 2030, build an orbiting moon space station, isn't even that ambitious or scientifically valuable. 2 years ago, I was having a similar chat to someone who was a retired ULA ~30 launch veteran (I forget exactly their title). But they didn't want to entertain the idea that SpaceX even had a business model. 'The market that they're aiming for is only a few launches a year'
- imron 8y ago
  > The market that they're aiming for is only a few launches a year' In 1958, the chairman of IBM stated 'I think there is a world market for about five computers'. He wasn't wrong, because back then computers were extraordinarily expensive and occupied entire buildings. There was maybe a worldwide market of about 5 of those kinds of computers. What happened though was that due to technological advances, computers became cheaper, smaller, more efficient and more reliable and it drastically changed the entire market, and now almost everyone has a computer in their pocket. The market for rocket launches will also significantly take off if SpaceX can bring the cost down and the reliability up.
albertTJames 8y ago
Who knew that space exploration was risky ?
sheeshkebab 8y ago
to be fair, folks that are knowingly getting into a tube with a bunch of explosives strapped under them are not really thinking about dying that much. Personally, I would gladly climb into one of these rockets if ever given a chance, regardless of risks.
newnewpdro 8y ago
Shouldn't this headline read "could put lives at unnecessary risk" ? All rocket launches are going to carry some amount of mortal risk. The headline implies this isn't the case except for SpaceX's technology, which is hogwash.
c54 8y ago
> including Blue Origin, which was founded by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos Amazing that he's not "Amazon owner Jeff Bezos".
chrisbennet 8y ago
Sending men into space is a vanity mission, not a science mission.[1] Unmanned mission solve the risk problem for SpaceX type progress and yield more answers for a lot less money. [1] With the exception of politically valuable missions such as the International space station which employed Russian scientist in a bid to keep them from selling their skills to undesirable state actors.
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  That's just oversimplified and not true. Sending men into space in the sixties and seventies got so much more done than automated missions to the moon because it forced us to work harder and solve more important problems. We're still reaping the rewards gained from technology developed to solve those problems. Sending probes to learn trivia about the universe is not as important as developing better ways to support and transport human life. At all.
markonen 8y ago
But is the densified fuel actually needed to fly the Dragon 2 to a LEO destination? Can SpaceX do their Falcon 9 HSF missions the old fashioned way, making the safety of load-and-go a moot point?
- PeterVermont 8y ago
  I had this same thought! Presumably, ISS missions do not need total fuel capacity so boosters could be fueled only enough for mission plus landing plus safety margin. Even if they did not wish to change loading procedures they could load densified fuel and then load the astronauts. The delay to load crew would allow the fuel to warm up and expand but so what?
tomohawk 8y ago
Just goes to show that its way easier to change technology than culture. Even Congresscritters are still thinking they're calling the shots. If NASA doesn't want to use SpaceX, they're free to do so. They can go with Boeing (some of the very people pointing fingers) or the Russians. The "culture of safety" at NASA had more to do with a "culture of protecting funding lines" by ensuring that parts of the shuttle were done in important congressional districts.

184 points by jackfoxy 8y ago

I have a hard time understanding this reasoning. There are two ways to do it. You can load the fuel first, then have the astronauts board a rocket full of stuff ready to go boom. Or you can load the astronauts first, and load the fuel once they’re strapped in and ready to go. In the first scenario, there’s a large window where an exploding rocket results in dead crew. The launch escape system doesn’t do them any good if they’re still on the walkway or the elevator. In the second scenario, there is no such window. At all times, either the rocket is unloaded or the launch escape system can save the crew. If I were flying on Dragon, I’d really want to be in the scenario where I can always be saved.

cdibona 8y ago
Can the launch escape system work during fueling? Would the gantry/service tower be in the way? I suspect if the les were to fire off during fueling it'd be .... pretty dramatic.
- CarVac 8y ago
  Fuel is added from the sides, there's no gantry/service tower to be in the way. The gantry would only be there while loading the crew, which would take place with an inert rocket.
extrapickles 8y ago
That is my thinking too. The launch abort system can get the capsule away faster than the rocket blows up from a leak catching on fire. Several people have overlaid the launch abort test video with the one that caught fire on the launch pad to roughly confirm this. This is more of the current culture of being so risk adverse that you end up with more risky behavior with the ‘mitigation’ than the original risk.
- eesmith 8y ago
  What's the failure rate of the abort system? What's the failure rate during fuel loading? That is, if we assume 0% failure rate of the abort system then your scenario works. If we assume (for argument's sake) a 50% failure rate in the abort system, and a 10% chance during fueling, then there's a 5% failure leading to human deaths. Without those numbers, it's hard to draw a conclusion.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    That’s a good point. I suspect the abort system is much less likely to kill you, since it’s fairly simple, but it would be good to actually quantify that.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    The observed failure rate during fuel loading is 2% with a big error bar, based on one accident. And the cause of that accident has been mitigated. The expected failure rate for the LAS is pretty high, high enough that the loss of crew/mission statistic computation doesn't include the LAS.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      A bit of a nitpick: the observed failure rate is quite a bit lower. Each launch involves at least two fuelings, since they do a static fire before every launch (which is when the accident occurred). Every booster also gets tested at their facility in Texas, and there have been a lot of scrubs after fueling, so the average number of fuelings per launch is probably 3 or so. That’s around 150 total fueling events for the Falcon 9, or around 100 if you only count the ones with densifier propellants, making the failure rate so far around 0.6-1%.
aqme28 8y ago
I think the logic is that the chance of an explosion is a lot higher during the loading of the fuel, but is pretty stable once it is loaded. But I still like your reasoning a lot.
- mikeash 8y ago
  I’d rather take a higher chance of survivable failure than a lower chance of certain death. Fault tolerance is better than being brittle and trying to never fail. But I’m just a software guy so this is just uninformed opinion!
  - loeg 8y ago
    I think it really depends on the actual numbers for both "chance" and "survivable." You want to minimize something like the product of "chance of occurrence" (frequency) times "chance of death, if event occurs" (severity). The numbers really matter.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      Right, but those numbers aren’t really known. You can estimate, but that’s always error-prone. (NASA famously estimated the Shuttle’s loss of crew risk at 1 in 100,000, when the actual rate was about 1 in 70, for example.) Still, I’d be really interested in seeing the estimated numbers here.
      - afterburner 8y ago
        There was poor math and methodology behind that 1 in 100,000 estimate though. I don't think that level of error should be held against an estimate made with rigourous and scientifically valid methodology. https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roge...
      - loeg 8y ago
        > Right, but those numbers aren’t really known. We agree! :) I was just pointing out that your first comment expressing a preference for one style over another presupposes the relative magnitude of those numbers. I would also be interested in actual data.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
There isn't anything wrong with your reasoning, it just isn't the reasoning that NASA came up with. NASA has the entire history of US Spaceflight in its collective memory. It has many memories of accidents occurring during fueling that resulted in the loss of the spacecraft. It has no memories of a crew being saved by the crew abort systems because it has only happened once[1] and that was with a Russian rocket. Thus, going by what they "know", NASA knows that rockets can blow up when they are being fueled and they know that SpaceX blew up one of their rockets while fueling it, but they do not know if a launch escape system would save astronauts in that situation. Therefore SpaceX's plan is "risky" because they are exposing the crew to a "known" danger and relying on an "unknown" system to protect them from that danger. It is this kind of thinking that keeps NASA moving slowly and carefully. SpaceX has essentially said, "Trust us, if anything went wrong the crew escape system would save them." Unfortunately they don't have a launch pad they can blow up on purpose to demonstrate that for NASA (it would help if they could). The last time they blew up a rocket while fueling it, it took months to recondition the pad for launches again. [1] In 1983, an escape rocket pulled the three cosmonauts of Soyuz T-10-1 to safety when its booster exploded on the launch pad. As of 2015, this is the only case where an abort system saved a crew from a launchpad accident. -- https://www.space.com/29260-how-spacecraft-launch-aborts-work-infographic.html https://www.space.com/29260-how-spacecraft-launch-aborts-wor...
- mikeash 8y ago
  “It has many memories of accidents occurring during fueling that resulted in the loss of the spacecraft.” Does it? I did a brief search and only found SpaceX’s explosion and an old Soviet ICBM accident where the engines ignited during fueling. I certainly may have missed something.
  - jccooper 8y ago
    It's not really NASA, but Atlas D and similar early vehicles did have fueling failures. But they also failed sitting empty on the pad and a hundred other ways. Propellant loading is a state change, and so it's theoretically more dangerous. But examples of real problems are rare.
wafflebear 8y ago
We don't know how effective the launch escape system is in a pad explosion. It might only save the crew 50% of the time, or 10% of the time. If we assume the launch escape system is unreliable, then the numbers strongly point towards loading the crew after the rocket has been fuelled. The crew avoid the riskiest part of the process, and they are on the rocket for a shorter amount of time.
- xenadu02 8y ago
  One of SpaceX’s stated reasons for using the same thrusters for maneuvering as for launch escape is to give the system many more flight hours. Every unmanned Dragon flight is also a test of the launch abort system.
Robotbeat 8y ago
Not only that, but there's also a bunch of ground crew that are at risk if there's a rocket explosion while crew are being loaded. So two or three times as many people can die, none of which will have access to a LAS for a while.

pinewurst 8y ago

I see this as SLS (Senate Launch System) backers feeling threatened by their own bad economics and lack of ability to deliver. So it's time to deploy the PR submarine fleet...

mstade 8y ago
As much as I try not to reach for the tinfoil hat, I couldn’t help but think the same when reading this article...
calcifer 8y ago
> SLS (Senate Launch System) You sound like the kind of person that unironically writes Micro$oft, mistakenly believing it supports their view point. At best, it makes you look juvenile.
- mieseratte 8y ago
  Considering pork-barrel spending is a well-known problem with Congress (See: the F-35 program), I found it a cute way to concisely describe a problem.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  I strongly disagree. In this case, I think understanding of the SLS is not something that would be expected from the audience reading his comment, and summing it up as the Senate Launch System, of course lacks nuance, but simultaneously does a great job of explaining what it is, why it's so critically flawed, and finally why individuals of certain affiliations would have surreptitious motivations in something that seems like it ought be as distanced from politics as possible.
- wolf550e 8y ago
  The SLS is exactly the rare case where he's right and you're wrong. It is a project whose goal is blatantly to spend money, not to fly any payload on any mission. After spending tens of billions of dollars on development, you get a rocket that will cost a billion to fly, will never achieve the flight numbers to be able to honestly rely on it. It will likely fly very few times before it is cancelled. It will be uneconomical to use for any mission it flies, and any mission that uses it will only do that if they are forced to (the mission requirements changed such that only SLS allows the mission to be done, or the project is cancelled) or if the SLS budget pays for the rocket rather than the mission's budget.

soared 8y ago

I'm no scientist, but I'd expect there is a long list of things SpaceX has done that violate the "last 50 years of national and international safety standards".

TAForObvReasons 8y ago
"most fast and break things"
- greglindahl 8y ago
  "launch frequently, and recover as much of the rocket as you can to inspect the parts so they can be improved"
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    That's a good point. Closing the loop probably did more for the advancement of space travel than anything else because it allows you to find out what almost failed.
amelius 8y ago
With respect to regulations, they are probably the Uber/Airbnb of space travel :)
vertexFarm 8y ago
Wanna know why it's fifty years of safety standards, not sixty and not forty? Because fifty years is how long it has been since we have done anything meaningful with manned space flight. We went back to the shallow end of the pool. It's time for a change.

tlb 8y ago

I wonder how you get get a number like "1 in 270" for the acceptable chance of death. It's not a number you'd choose as a starting point in a top-down calculation. It must be a bottom-up calculation from a sum of existing risks. I'd be curious if anyone knows more about it.

acover 8y ago
Maybe: "The thing that drives the 1 in 270 is really micrometeorites and orbital debris … whatever things that are in space that you can collide with. So that’s what drops that number down, because you’ve got to look at the 210 days, the fact that your heat shield or something might be exposed to whatever that debris is for that period of time. NASA looks at Loss of Vehicle the same as Loss of Crew. If the vehicle is damaged and it may not be detected prior to de-orbit, then you have loss of crew. https://www.airspacemag.com/space/certified-safe-281371/ https://www.airspacemag.com/space/certified-safe-281371/
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
oxymoron 8y ago
Possibly Fault Tree Analysis. It’s commonly used in the aerospace industry, and SpaceX explicitly mentioned it while searching for the Amos 5 problem. Probably only one of several methods, though.
- nraynaud 8y ago
  No, I think it’s the other way around, you make a target safety number as the customer, and the engineers use a fault tree to try to reach it. So this number can’t come from a fault tree ( unless it’s a weird comparison like “we had 1/90 on our fault tree in our internal projects last time, we want private companies to reach 3 times better”)
soVeryTired 8y ago
Yeah, approx. 3700 micromorts [0] is not to be sniffed at. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

eesmith 8y ago

FWIW (and because I didn't know it), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP-1#Fractions_and_formulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP-1#Fractions_and_formulation comments: > For a short period, the Soviets achieved even higher densities by super-chilling the kerosene in a rocket’s fuel tanks, ... The latest version of Falcon 9, Falcon 9 Full Thrust, also has the capability of sub-cooling the RP-1 fuel to −7 °C, giving a 2.5–4% density increase.

vertexFarm 8y ago
Man I really wish we would get nuclear propulsion going again one of these days. Fine, fine, not as a launch system, just orbit to orbit... but we could move much larger, more dependable payloads so much further and not have to fiddle with little tweaks like these to surf the tiny margins of chemical propulsion. It could have been a very mature technology by now. I feel like we created all the nightmares and quit the technology before we got to the actually good uses.
- Oren-T 8y ago
  Nuclear propulsion is more efficient but doesn’t produce enough thrust for surface launch(\) We are stuck with chemical rockets for that. Nuclear could help us get to Mars faster or launch less mass from the surface. It may even be relevant for the upper stage of a launcher. But not for getting off the ground. (\) with the notable exception of Orion
  - vertexFarm 8y ago
    That's why I specified orbit-to-orbit systems. The advantages there are immense. When we finally do it, that's probably how it'll happen.

loeg 8y ago

Challenger, Columbia, and now NASA is concerned about astronaut safety? Hah. There is always risk; simple rockets are (probably) less risky than the shuttle program. More unmanned launches will help quantify that risk; NASA can then determine whether the risk is acceptable, or not.

citilife 8y ago

I think the last paragraph really says it all: > Before the very first shuttle flight, NASA estimated that the chance of death was between 1 in 500 and 1 in 5,000. Later, after the agency had compiled data from shuttle flights, it went back and came up with a very different number. The chance of death was actually 1 in 12. The fact is, these numbers are made up because the systems are too complicated to calculate based on individual components. Until they have something like 50+ launches (after the kinks are worked out), we wont really know the actual chances of blowing up a rocket are. Further, how well do the escape capsule(s) work? If they work the majority of the time (saving astronauts from he explosion), that'd also dramatically drive down the risk. If say, there was a 1 in 30 chance of a rocket exploding using the method described, but the escape capsule failed to save the astronauts 1 out of 10 times. Then the real risk of killing the astronauts is 1 in 300. Unfortunately, we simply don't have either of those numbers, so the actual "risk" level is essentially made up.

jessaustin 8y ago
Since the actual disaster record for the shuttle was 2/135, they must have done some other adjustments to come up with 1/12. Still, at this point it seems very likely that SpaceX will be safer than the shuttle.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  2/135 is failed flights/total flights. Over the life of the shuttle[0], there were 355 astronauts who flew, 14 died. So for every ~25 astronauts who flew on the shuttle, 1 died.. 0) https://www.space.com/12376-nasa-space-shuttle-program-facts-statistics.html https://www.space.com/12376-nasa-space-shuttle-program-facts...
  - ebbv 8y ago
    Oh my lord you guys that is not how probabilities work. You can’t look at what actually happened and then say “Well that was the chance.” If I flip a coin 20 times and happen to end up with a 15:5 split that doesn’t mean the chance of heads is 3:1. Also the context of that 1 in 12 in the quote is important. They’re saying that was the chance on the first flight in retrospect. The shuttle and it’s supporting facilities and processes didn’t stay static, they improved over time.

_ph_ 8y ago

SpaceX has lost 2 F9 so far. The first exploded in flight, but the Dragon capsule could have been retreived, if the parashutes had not been disbled in the starting phase. The second fueling for the static fire test. In both cases, no crew would have been in danger, and of course the causes of the failures has been adressed. But it will at least take another 12 months till the first planned crew flight. If everything goes well, the Falcon 9 will have about 30 more flights till then. A lot of opportunity to build a safety record.

greglindahl 8y ago
Everyone expects the LAS (launch abort system) to not be very reliable. So you're a bit optimistic about the outcome of the second failure: big danger for the crew.
- boardwaalk 8y ago
  Who is "everyone"? Because it certainly isn't actually everyone.
- Robotbeat 8y ago
  It was a static fire, so crew wouldn't be on board anyway. 100% no danger to crew in that case. LAS is likely to be very reliable for ground aborts. Design criteria insist on high (say, 95%) total reliability for LAS. Part of the reason you might want to do such static fires is as a way to trigger (and thus reveal) such problems without endangering crew.
Rebelgecko 8y ago
No crew would have been danger for the second launch, but only because it was a static fire. If it were an actual launch it could've been pretty bad
- JshWright 8y ago
  The launch escape system would have been able to safely get the crew clear of the rocket in the AMOS-6 incident if it had been a crewed fight. (Based on the performance of the capsule during the pad abort test)

caconym_ 8y ago

I have trouble seeing this as anything more than irrational territorialism and/or a disingenuous defense of the pork barrel status quo. If we are unwilling to try something new because we decided fifty fucking years ago that it was a bad idea, we're done. Time for NASA to hang up its space helmets and watch China (or possibly SpaceX, BO, etc. using private funds) take the next steps.

ILMostro7 8y ago

NASA Challenger and others have proven record of putting lives at risk. It's a dangerous job. As for hypothetical danger, that's more of a clickbait "analysis", timely after recent lash-out by Musk on Tesla conference call, IMHO.

carapace 8y ago

> Robert Lightfoot, the former acting NASA administrator, lamented in candid terms how the agency, with society as a whole, has become too risk-averse. He charged the agency with recapturing some of the youthful swagger that sent men to the moon during the Apollo era. > "I worry, to be perfectly honest, if we would have ever launched Apollo in our environment here today," he said during a speech at the Space Symposium last month, "if Buzz [Aldrin] and Neil [Armstrong] would have ever been able to go to the moon in the risk environment we have today." That is a really underhanded way to say, "Let's kill more astronauts so we can get to space faster." The folks who risked their lives and, in some cases, gave their lives to get us to where we are today deserve better.

toasterlovin 8y ago
Disagree. We make trade offs wrt safety all the time. Driving in a car is pretty dangerous, yet many of us drive our cars every single day. Because the payoff is worth the risk. Those quotes speak to this trade off. They are advocating for a stance that is willing to take more risk, because they assume that there are tremendous benefits to be had by doing so. They are not advocating taking risks for the sake of killing astronauts.
- carapace 8y ago
  I get what you're saying but in this case I have to ask, can we really not get those benefits without risking lives? Would it become impossible? Or would it just take longer? Can robots do it? I hate arguing this position because I want to go to space physically in person in my lifetime. But it doesn't make sense to send humans if robots can do the job because space is inimicable to life and life support is very hard and expensive and heavy. Risk lives to stave off an asteroid but not to mine it. - - - - I don't want to get into a side-thing about driving, but I don't drive in part because I see it as a Faustian bargain: we get transportation that's so convenient at the cost of forcing people to participate in a death-and-mayhem lottery. Traffic is a meat-grinder.
  - nkristoffersen 8y ago

njarboe 8y ago

For some historical perspective: on the Ferdinand Magellan expedition about 230 men out of 270, including Magellan himself, died of violence and/or disease (1 in 1.2 chance of death). As Musk has said in the past, a safety first philosophy and space travel don't mix. Safety third might work.

calcifer 8y ago
Than it sounds like Musk is disagreeing with SpaceX. From the article: > SpaceX says it is serious about flying people safely and is going to great lengths to study every aspect of the vehicle, down to individual valves, so that it will meet and surpass the 1-in-270 chance-of-death metric, said Benji Reed, the director of SpaceX's commercial crew program. > When Reed was down at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a recent trip, he came across a room on a special tour where the astronauts' families from the shuttle program used to wait ahead of the rocket launch. > They were stunned to see that a whiteboard with drawings made by the children of the crew lost in the 2003 Columbia disaster was still there, preserved. > "That really drives it home," Reed said. "This isn't just the people that we're flying — these are all of their families. So we take this extremely seriously, and we understand that our job is to fly people safely and bring them back safely. To do that you have to humanize it. You have to see them as your friends and as your colleagues."
- DennisP 8y ago
  Not to mention, SpaceX wants to do routine suborbital passenger flights with the same rocket they use for flights to Mars. Safety has to be an extremely high priority for that to happen.
- icc97 8y ago
  > SpaceX says it is serious about flying people safely > So we take this extremely seriously Musk didn't say they don't take it seriously, he said it's not the highest priority. But also there's a difference between what Space X says and what it does. I don't think we'll fully know the extent of Space X's safety consideration until some astronauts die in take off. NASA are cautious because they've had people die and that lives long in the memory. Space X engineers haven't had to go through the process of finding out which one of them missed the bug that killed people.

Zarath 8y ago

I'm alright with that.

spacenick88 8y ago

I for one who would rather sit on top of a rocket being loaded but have a LAS ready to go than going anywhere near a loaded one with no way to escape within a few seconds.

imh 8y ago

Space science is cool and useful, but is it so crucial to humanity's progress that we shouldn't be super extra careful with our astronaut's lives? Waiting an extra year or two or ten to learn about how fruit fly DNA mutates in space seems fine when the alternative is maybe killing astronauts with a decent probability.

toasterlovin 8y ago
What about letting the astronauts decide what level of risk they are comfortable with?
- forapurpose 8y ago
  > What about letting the astronauts decide what level of risk they are comfortable with? That sounds like an easy solution and philosophically appealing in a libertarian sort of way. However, it doesn't work. People can be put under enormous pressure to make the choice that satisfies others - their boss, their peers, their community, etc.; it's commonsense experience, there is a lot of research about that, and a lot of implemented practices to prevent it in safety situations. How many priests in the Catholic Church or employees at Penn State allowed child rape to continue - something which provided zero benefit - under pressure? Or remember the article posted here a few months ago about the sea captain who, apparently under pressure, sailed into a hurricane and killed his crew. Also, people don't always make good decisions; they shouldn't die for it, we shouldn't exploit them, and we don't want a system that attracts and promotes people for making bad decisions.
  - wonder_er 8y ago
    > Also, people don't always make good decisions; they shouldn't die for it, we shouldn't exploit them, and we don't want a system that attracts and promotes people for making bad decisions. So, your alternative to letting someone else make their own decision is you (or someone else) making a decision for them? All of the examples you just listed cut against your argument as much as they cut for it. Bosses, peers, communities, priests in catholic churches or penn state employees _all_ have a history of abusing power as much as anyone else. So, since abuse of power exists, and people can make good and bad decisions, it seems reasonable to expect a certain amount of bad decisions. it seems safer to let individuals make their own bad (and good) decisions, rather than centralizing decision-making in a group of people that we hope will make good ones, but we must expect that a centralized group will make a certain number of bad ones. Enshrining bad actors in a position of power is likely to have much worse outcomes than letting individuals occasionally make bad decisions.

mathinpens 8y ago

I mean the only safe ship is a ship in a harbor and that's not what ships are for....buttttt I am skeptical that a for-profit-company run by elon musk has rigorous safety culture-particularly given he apparently has no concerns with libeling people killed by his firm's autopilot software

jimnotgym 8y ago

> the safety-obsessed space agency That's not how I remember Feynmans report going

mephitix 8y ago
That report came out 32 years ago. The article suggests that the space agency has become more safety-obsessed over time.
- ChickeNES 8y ago
  Given that the Columbia disaster occurred in the middle of those 32 years, I'm not sure that follows....
  - ufmace 8y ago
    Somewhat true, I'd say that risk-averse is more appropriate than safety-obsessed. For such organizations, being "safety-obsessed" usually means a massive amount of bureaucracy around certain known risks, but such organizations don't tend to be consistently good at finding and addressing unknown risks.
  - vertexFarm 8y ago
    You can be safety-obsessed and still have accidents when you're doing something as risky as space travel I think.

bradknowles 8y ago

So, what I don’t understand is why NASA doesn’t make this really simple — allow SpaceX to use the “load-and-go” process on flights that don’t involve putting living beings into space, and when they have repeatedly and sufficiently proven how safe the system is, then start talking about whether or not it could be used to launch humans. Don’t even talk about using the potentially more dangerous system until it has enough of a safety record.

rst 8y ago
SpaceX has been using supercooled propellants (and "load-and-go") for every launch since early 2016, including NASA cargo launches. It's been used over thirty times by now. Whatever additional assurance that NASA's advisory board wants, another few launches are unlikely to provide it.

alexandercrohde 8y ago

I don't get it. I imagine HN feels there's between 5% to 30% chance that humanity kills itself in the next 300 years. If we accept those odds, isn't there a point where space travel becomes the best our best plan, regardless of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of astronaut deaths?

JetSpiegel 8y ago
> 5% to 30% chance that humanity kills itself in the next 300 years I'm 42.69% angered at this comment, and 50% disappointed.
vertexFarm 8y ago
Once upon a time, thousands of people died fishing for ambergris. Whale anus wax. People died all the time. Do we really think people are going to die exploring space? Yeah, they very fucking well are going to be deaths exploring space. We can take precautions as much as practical, but this zero risk tolerance philosophy is not going to work. We haven't done anything of note when it comes to manned space exploration in half a century. Space is so dangerous that the only way to keep risk to a minimum is to not go. And that's basically what we've done. It's just that now these things are televised and PR is such a disaster when you have somebody die on air. It's not like a plumber is going to be watched by the entire world as he works in some kind of risky situation. People die doing that, too. People die doing anything. But if it's in the limelight like space exploration, it's absolutely unacceptable for anyone to risk death. That's why. Because we're watching and we can bear it only if we don't have to know about it or watch it happen. We've got to start taking a hell of a lot more risk. We're taking enormous risk by not furthering space exploration. But risk of inaction is a strange thing, psychologically speaking. People don't fret about it, even though it's a real killer. Our climate is about to be the biggest killer of all, and we only feel vaguely uncomfortable about doing absolutely nothing. And when I talk about taking risk, I'm not talking about go fever by the way--dumb political risk that leads to ignoring engineers. I mean the kind of risk that got us to the moon in the 60s. People died doing that. Mostly Soviet people, but a few Americans, too. But it was important enough. And it got done. We really shouldn't have stopped there. It's not really NASA's fault, but they haven't gotten shit done with manned spaceflight since then. Haven't done a damn thing. Yet people have still died doing it. I hope private industry at least gets somebody above the Van Allen belt in the coming years. We need to get back on the horse before we lose our chance for good.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

dzdt 8y ago

It seems to me there is a reasonably low cost solution to demonstrate safety: SpaceX should load and unload the fuel multiple times for its human-qualification spaceflights. If SpaceX is correctly confident fuel loading is safe, the extra handling won't result in incidents. This would be a fairly minor expense given nothing is consumed or destroyed -- just handling costs and incidental losses due to evaporation and so on.

phkahler 8y ago
OMG what a fantastically obvious idea! Now that you've mentioned it of course ;-) There may be reasons this isn't as simple as it sounds but it's worth considering.
- Maybestring 8y ago
  Not that it wouldn't increase confidence, but if you don't know what you needed to be worried about, you can't be sure that you really tested it. Loading and unloading fuel repeatedly doesn't validate that the ground crew will be sober for a 5:00am launch on May 6th. Validation testing is good for testing a known unknown. Whether it's good for testing an unknown unknown, is unknown.
  - lucb1e 8y ago
    It's a good point that indeed there might be something different at actual-launch-time versus testing time, but I'd imagine that doing the whole procedure a few times (as complete as possible) would reveal any important unknown unknowns if present. (Where I define important as 'reasonably likely to occur': if they are indeed so likely, they'll probably occur with repeated tests.)
perilunar 8y ago
Don't they do that anyway as part of the static fire tests and when a launch is aborted?

deleted 8y ago

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lowbloodsugar 8y ago

This is based on information from 2015, but May 2018 seems to be Take Down Elon Musk month, so lets run a negative story.

aunty_helen 8y ago

A few months ago I had a chat to one of the engineers working on the SLS during a NASA outreach presentation. Super defensive about it and dismissive of SpaceX and their accomplishments. The goals of the SLS mission before 2030, build an orbiting moon space station, isn't even that ambitious or scientifically valuable. 2 years ago, I was having a similar chat to someone who was a retired ULA ~30 launch veteran (I forget exactly their title). But they didn't want to entertain the idea that SpaceX even had a business model. 'The market that they're aiming for is only a few launches a year'

imron 8y ago
> The market that they're aiming for is only a few launches a year' In 1958, the chairman of IBM stated 'I think there is a world market for about five computers'. He wasn't wrong, because back then computers were extraordinarily expensive and occupied entire buildings. There was maybe a worldwide market of about 5 of those kinds of computers. What happened though was that due to technological advances, computers became cheaper, smaller, more efficient and more reliable and it drastically changed the entire market, and now almost everyone has a computer in their pocket. The market for rocket launches will also significantly take off if SpaceX can bring the cost down and the reliability up.

albertTJames 8y ago

Who knew that space exploration was risky ?

sheeshkebab 8y ago

to be fair, folks that are knowingly getting into a tube with a bunch of explosives strapped under them are not really thinking about dying that much. Personally, I would gladly climb into one of these rockets if ever given a chance, regardless of risks.

newnewpdro 8y ago

Shouldn't this headline read "could put lives at unnecessary risk" ? All rocket launches are going to carry some amount of mortal risk. The headline implies this isn't the case except for SpaceX's technology, which is hogwash.

c54 8y ago

> including Blue Origin, which was founded by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos Amazing that he's not "Amazon owner Jeff Bezos".

chrisbennet 8y ago

Sending men into space is a vanity mission, not a science mission.[1] Unmanned mission solve the risk problem for SpaceX type progress and yield more answers for a lot less money. [1] With the exception of politically valuable missions such as the International space station which employed Russian scientist in a bid to keep them from selling their skills to undesirable state actors.

vertexFarm 8y ago
That's just oversimplified and not true. Sending men into space in the sixties and seventies got so much more done than automated missions to the moon because it forced us to work harder and solve more important problems. We're still reaping the rewards gained from technology developed to solve those problems. Sending probes to learn trivia about the universe is not as important as developing better ways to support and transport human life. At all.

markonen 8y ago

But is the densified fuel actually needed to fly the Dragon 2 to a LEO destination? Can SpaceX do their Falcon 9 HSF missions the old fashioned way, making the safety of load-and-go a moot point?

PeterVermont 8y ago
I had this same thought! Presumably, ISS missions do not need total fuel capacity so boosters could be fueled only enough for mission plus landing plus safety margin. Even if they did not wish to change loading procedures they could load densified fuel and then load the astronauts. The delay to load crew would allow the fuel to warm up and expand but so what?

tomohawk 8y ago

Just goes to show that its way easier to change technology than culture. Even Congresscritters are still thinking they're calling the shots. If NASA doesn't want to use SpaceX, they're free to do so. They can go with Boeing (some of the very people pointing fingers) or the Russians. The "culture of safety" at NASA had more to do with a "culture of protecting funding lines" by ensuring that parts of the shuttle were done in important congressional districts.