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It’s astounding that until very recently it was standard practice to put humans on top of untested, first-of-kind rockets.
by kaiwen1 3y ago
It’s astounding that until very recently it was standard practice to put humans on top of untested, first-of-kind rockets.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoWell, to be fair, NASA is much more risk-averse than SpaceX. That’s why everything takes so much longer, the “classic” way. But the way SpaceX does things, gets seriously good results, quite quickly (and gives us some great videos of stuff getting blowed up).
- cryptonector 3y agoI think it's the other way around. NASA flew the shuttle 135 times and lost two of them, but they kept going after the first failure. And both failures followed NASA being advised of the root cause before the orbiters' destruction, and NASA management ignored the advice. Meanwhile the safety track record for Falcon 9 exceeds that of the shuttle, and it exceeded it before humans were put on top of Falcon 9. The Apollo program did very few launches and yet they put humans on top of it. No, I think what you might say is that NASA in the 60s cared a lot less about safety than SpaceX do today, though perhaps NASA today cares a lot more about safety than NASA 20 years ago (and definitely than 60 years ago).
- jiggawatts 3y agoLip-service to safety versus actual safety that looks unsafe. I deal with bureaucracies a lot and this is how they do everything: it has to look good, but they don’t actually care to make things good. E.g.: fill out a ton of paperwork about how secure the web application is against hacking, but nobody reviews the source code for vulnerabilities. Or they fill out the paperwork and report the app as “secure” even when third parties like me are listing vulnerability after vulnerability. The report is what mattered, not reality. OFFICIALLY, on paper, the Shuttle was very safe.
- cryptonector 3y agoIt was five nines "safe".
- cryptonector 3y agoGP might have meant that NASA is more risk-averse in the business sense of the word risk, as in they don't want to risk failure, therefore they don't risk success. SpaceX definitely doesn't have that sort of risk aversion.
- icegreentea2 3y agoWhat are you referencing???
- Denvercoder9 3y ago"very recently" is more than 40 years ago, when the Space Shuttle made its first flight in 1981. That's closer in time to Sputnik than it is to today.
- dotnet00 3y agoWe haven't fully stopped. The Orion that flew in SLS's first flight didn't test the life support system, the second launch is already going to carry a crew.