5 ms·
Great read and interesting article. Hard to believe that NASA would risk astronauts lives simply to save face, but that appears to be what's going to happen.
by johng 7mo ago
Great read and interesting article. Hard to believe that NASA would risk astronauts lives simply to save face, but that appears to be what's going to happen.
- jojobas 7mo agoWas there ever a risk-free spaceflight? Pretty sure even with this finding this flight would be safer than any Apollo.
- everyone 7mo agoSaturn 5 had a flawless record. The leftover space shuttle parts which SLS is cobbled together from, not so much. SRBs are inherently dangerous, theyre designed to quickly launch nukes from silos, not people. And Orion is just a typical modern Boeing project. So far its fallen at every hurdle right?
- evan_a_a 7mo agoOrion is a Lockheed (CM) and Airbus (ESM) project.
- everyone 7mo agoYeah, I thought it was Starliner on top. I dont know anything about Orion then. SLS is very crappy and disappointing, its using shitty old space shuttle tech, + its ridiculously expensive in terms of payload to orbit, but it will probably work. I didnt know, cus I just dont give a shit about this stupid project.
- wat10000 7mo agoSaturn 5 came close to catastrophic failure at least once. It had partial failures. Its sort of perfect record is mostly down to luck and not launching very many times. Of course, six decades later, we should be able to do a lot better.
- saghm 7mo agoYou seem to be ignoring the "just to save face" part. I'd argue it would be a worse thing for our bar for how safe it should be to be raised significantly from when we had been in space as a species less than a decade to now that it's been 65 years.
- tonymet 7mo agoNever risk free , but Soyuz hardly lost any crew over its 50+ years
- wiseowise 7mo agoYeah, and where is it now?
- idlewords 7mo agoThe next two Soyuz launches are this Wednesday and Saturday.
- IndrekR 7mo ago2/156 lost for Soyuz in 59 years, 2/135 for Space Shuttle in 30 years. Same rate. People often underestimate how intense STS actually was.
- tonymet 7mo agoThe 2 were early, and fewer lives were lost. The shuttle was unnecessarily risky , and NASA was aware from its inception
- cr125rider 7mo agoBut that’s exactly what happened with Challenger
- jaggederest 7mo agoAnd Columbia, too, when they made the decision to reenter without inspection, and reenter instead of waiting for rescue.
- fishgoesblub 7mo agoA rescue was impractical and potentially riskier no?
- paleotrope 7mo agoRiskier? Didn't they all die. Maybe if you ended up with 2 stranded shuttle crews, but correct me if I'm wrong, and I probably am, but couldn't the shuttle fly without any crew?
- idlewords 7mo agoIt couldn't, for a funny reason. Everything on a Shuttle flight could be automated except lowering the landing gear just before touchdown, which had to be done by hand from inside the cockpit. There are rumors (that I've never been able to run down) that the astronaut corps insisted on this so the Shuttle could not be flown unmanned.
- gambiting 7mo agoAnd Buran(soviet copy of the shuttle) could and in fact did fly completely unmanned. In a way it's a shame the collapse of the soviet union killed that program, because a crew less shuttle would have been a huge asset to have.
- dabluecaboose 7mo ago
- steve-atx-7600 7mo agoAstronauts are smart folks. They can vote with their feet.
- tonymet 7mo agoThey’ve killed dozens during the shuttle program , or did you forget ? Also a number during Gemini, Mercury and Appollo. Terrible safety record , and 5x worse than Soyuz . Shuttle fatality rate was 1/10. Approaching Russian roulette odds
- mikelitoris 7mo agoIt’s the American roulette
- shrubble 7mo ago*Freedom Roulette
- wat10000 7mo ago135 missions, 2 fatal accidents, that’s not 1/10.
- tonymet 7mo ago[flagged]
- kelnos 7mo agoThat... doesn't make any sense.
- tonymet 7mo agoIf the odds were only 1% , how did 14 people die ? You’re not including the lives in your risk assessment . There were 135 events and 14 people died . If you were asked to join mission 136 would you say yes or no? Which risk profile fits: 1% fatality or 10%?
- wat10000 7mo agoBy that logic, the fatality rate in NYC skyscrapers on 9/11 was something like 1500%, since there were <200 skyscrapers and ~2,700 people died. It doesn't make any sense. Your numerator and denominator need to use the same units. The rate of fatal accidents was 2/135. The rate of crew fatalities was 14/355. The rate for crew-flight fatalities (separately counting multiple flights by the same person) was 14/852. If you were evaluating your risk for another flight, the number of crew aboard doesn't affect the risk and it's pretty reasonable to assume that an accident results in either a 0% or 100% fatality rate, so the relevant figure would be the fatal accident rate of 2/135. If your flight follows that profile then that's your probability of dying in an accident.