People don't ride around town on ICBMs every day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snTaSJk0n_Y

And planes still occasionally drop ICBMs that destroy people's houses.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/frozen-exc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_ice_(aviation)

Steve Wozniak likes to put stickers in airport bathrooms that say "DANGER: DO NOT FLUSH OVER CITIES".

https://twitter.com/stevewoz/status/912498392223252481

https://webfactory.mk/2018/05/28/do-not-flush-over-cities/

Conflating "missile" with "ICBM" is a bad habit.

What type of missile does he work on?

ATEC handles basically everything under the sun.

I'm not that familiar with him, but he mentions a couple of types he's helped test for ATEC in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOTYgcdNrXE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGM-148_Javelin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Strike_Missile

Judging by the video's contents, he's worked on more than just missiles.

I'm not trying to absolve Uber or something, for the record: the people who work for Uber aren't innocent, either. It just seems clear that they're a lesser evil. Malpractice versus malfeasance.

Consider that the US military, particularly the Navy, with its missiles, has facilitated safe global trade since the end of WWII. That in turn has lifted more people out of poverty than any previous single measure in human history. The US Navy has done more good than Uber could ever hope to achieve.

On the other side, consider for instance what Iran and Saudi Arabia would start doing to each other if the recently energy-independent US disengaged completely from the middle east. You can look at Syria in the wake of Trump's withdrawal for a tiny sample of the kind of violence that would occur in such a power vacuum.

Now none of that erases the various abuses and misadventures of the US military, but you're reducing a highly complex equation stretching over 70 years to a single simple variable: "Do the machines kill people or not?"

If every engineer in the US simply refused to build missiles as it appears you desire, the second, third and fourth order effects of that choice might kill even more people than if the missiles had just been built and potentially used. I'd argue it isn't clear at all whether Uber or the US defense industry is the lesser evil, and in fact there's a lot more history to take pride in in the defense industry.

That's a pretty random comparison. The Titan II missile killed 54 that I know of, while Uber killed 58 people in 2018, but I'm not sure what that tells us about core memory.

I just think that it's silly to boycott someone's videos about the a launch vehicle just because they work in missile testing. Especially when you consider the heritage of launch vehicles in general, and the Saturn V in particular

The Saturn V's F-1 engines were originally designed for the Air Force. Would you boycott a video about the Saturn V made by someone who actually worked on the thing, because they worked on a part of the Saturn V when it was still a military project? I feel like that is a ridiculous purity test.

The Titan series of ICBMs, with light modifications, was a workhorse for America's civilian space program. The Atlas, Delta, and Minotaur families of rockets were also originally ICBMS. AFAIK the only deaths from the Titan II were industrial accidents, which can happen just as easily for a civilian rocket program (although silo conditions did exacerbate the accidents). I don't think it's fair to say that someone who worked on testing the rocket contributed to those deaths— if anything, competent testing should reduce the number of accidents.

I won't go too much into the less wholesome background of the Saturn V, which had multiple former Nazis in leadership positions, all of whom had previously worked on rockets like the V-2. The head of the Saturn V program office even gave up his US citizenship in the 80s as part of a deal with the government to avoid prosecution for war crimes and abuse of prisoners during the Holocaust. I don't understand why someone would be willing to accept that, but not accept involvement from a random test engineer at Redstone Arsenal.