Rush replied four days later, saying that he had “grown
tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument
to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their
small existing market.” He understood that his approach
“flies in the face of the submersible orthodoxy, but that is
the nature of innovation,” he wrote. “We have heard the
baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too
often. I take this as a serious personal insult.”
Are you solely counting astronaut deaths (and, if so, only the ones in the course of missions or also, say, T-38 crashes visiting contractors) or are you counting excess deaths among the 400,000 folks involved in the Apollo program?
My ignorance permits the possibility that exclusion zone wasn't big enough, for example.
But it did have an exclusion zone, and Musk gave it, what, 50% odds of making it past the launch tower? Or was 50% a different test launch?
(But this is what I get as an untrained watcher of Scott Manley videos, I'm not a rocket scientist nor a pilot so I assume I only half-understand what he says, and what he says is necessarily a summary or the videos would be x10 longer).
Oceangate also started with unmanned test dives before they declared their submersible to be safe for humans.
It's not directly comparable. Oceangate didn't do that many test dives and never tested their sub to destruction, and SpaceX is working with several government agencies on certifying Starship (both Nasa and FAA). But there are parallels in attitudes that should be drawn and compensated for.
They were reusing a material that is not safe to reuse that way. If they were only testing the design, it's unlikely anyone would be dead.
Either "reusable carbon fiber" is the design, and you need to test what it takes to break that.
Or "single use carbon fiber" is the design, and you need a new hull each trip.
They did neither.
They didn't stress test the reusability before putting people on board, and that's both one of their biggest mistakes and one of their biggest differences from SpaceX.
SpaceX's development program is explosive, but I see no evidence that they are "techbro idiots" who risk actual human lives. The stuff that explodes is remotely controlled hardware, and I am personally fine with that. You can't have rapid technological development with at least some negative externalities.
No-one mentioned Elon Musk, yet you're pre-emptively getting defensive on his behalf.
We make tradeoffs between protection of nature and technological civilization all the time. Boca Chica has some qualities that are relevant to the cosmic industry and hard to replicate elsewhere: a mostly empty sea to the east of the site, low population, closer to the Equator than most of the US.
I like nature, but I also like technological progress and it isn't obvious to me that the relatively low-level damage to the environment there (it is not as if the place was devastated Hiroshima-style) should automatically trump everything else.
Maybe we won't need to colonize some other planet if we don't trash our current planet to save shareholders some dollars in the name of "technological progress" .
But humanity in its current size definitely needs some industry, and industry is actually becoming less polluting with technological progress. I am 45 and I grew up in an industrial city; both the air and the water there have become a lot cleaner during my lifetime, because a richer and more developed society can afford better protections. When I was a kid, neither a butterfly nor a fish could survive in Ostrava, today there is plenty of both.
Also, judging someone's else's interests as "delusions" is pretty rude. Who are you to distribute such labels to others?
The place you grew up at was degraded by industrialization. It would have been cleaner today if it wasn't for that. Irreparable changes have been made. I'm about half your age and I'm disgusted by the state the planet is in right now. I understand, old people do not care about a future they won't live in. But I'm going to suffer from micro-plastics more than you. You had access to more natural landscapes than I ever will. I have every right to be angry at old people for screwing up our homes and bodies.
> because a richer
Ah, the 1% is richer, that makes it more okay! But me, little 99% guy, I got screwed by inflation. The U.S. economy is stronger than ever my little Ethiopian fisherman, what are you crying about? Go raise funds making an unprofitable startup or work for a defence contractor to build machines to kill little brown kids remotely, you'll make good money to buy a McMansion, a Tesla, and play golf on artificial grass with friends you secretly hate.
> and more developed society can afford better protections.
What protections? Against the various cancers that are more and more common? Against the mental decay I see in my young peers, caused by social media? Against the huge floating pile of trash in the sea? Against the coral reef that's mostly lost by now? Against the constant threat of the atom bomb, great technological innovation brought to you by the same friendly agencies financing SpaceX nowadays? The protection I want is protection of the environment. I don't care about your money and your materialism, it'll never buy love and community.
> Also, judging someone's else's interests as "delusions" is pretty rude. Who are you to distribute such labels to others?
I believe the idea that we can colonize Mars is delusional. How are we supposed to terraform a planet when we can't even fix our own? Who do I have to be to be allowed to have this opinion? What is rude about that? Would you find it rude to call flat earthers delusional? At least flat earthers are not causing irreparable damages to our round planet.
I doubt that the world is objectively worse off in 2023 than it was in 2000, I would even say that it has grown a bit better. (For example, a lot more people in the developing world are food-secure.) But the perception of the world has gone from "bearable" to "irredeemable shithole" among way too many people. IMHO this is even worse than objective trouble such as climate change; widespread depression results in unwillingness to even try to improve things.
"How are we supposed to terraform a planet when we can't even fix our own? Who do I have to be to be allowed to have this opinion?"
We cannot terraform Mars in 2023. But we couldn't even fly to space in 1923, and we might be able to terraform Mars in 2123. Every passing year brings some new development, and these developments compound our abilities.
Also, here you are mixing two different sorts of questions. Fixing Earth's climate is mostly a political question, not a question of technology. It might be harder than future terraforming of Mars because you need to bring many important nations on board, and humans are notoriously bad at large scale cooperation. On Mars, there are no nuclear superpowers opposing your plans.
That's a personal attack and that's against the spirit of this website. Please do not do that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> We cannot terraform Mars in 2023. But we couldn't even fly to space in 1923, and we might be able to terraform Mars in 2123. Every passing year brings some new development, and these developments compound our abilities.
This does sound reasonable to me. What does not sound reasonable is cutting corners today in the name of "technological innovation" for something that we might be able to do in the future we are currently destroying.
The young naive person that I am thinks that in reality, this is mostly for defence purposes, to put military bases and equipment in space.
If colonization there will be, it will be only for rich people, which will pay a lot of money to get irreparable DNA damage while reading Icarus in space. Kind of funny when you think about it.
> Also, here you are mixing two different sorts of questions. Fixing Earth's climate is mostly a political question, not a question of technology.
I guess what made me angry here. This attitude is exactly why the planet is in the state it is right now. I'm not even talking about fixing, I'm talking about not destroying. You kids - if any - will have to fix the damages caused by SpaceX, but you can prevent it now.
> It might be harder than future terraforming of Mars because you need to bring many important nations on board, and humans are notoriously bad at large scale cooperation. On Mars, there are no nuclear superpowers opposing your plans.
I believe the complete opposite of your statement: it's easier to take care of our planet than terraforming another one, and on Mars there will definitely be nuclear superpowers opposing your plans. But I guess we will never agree on that.
Of course you do, or does someone evacuate all the fish from the impact zone whenever an empty rocket stage slams into the ocean?
This is only a question of the degree of the damage we are willing to tolerate. Of course the precise boundary shifts over time.
And yes, easily because since SpaceX lifts the rocket into position, they probably don't need to build an artificial hill, just the diverter itself, meaning it should be easier than for any other large rocket which relied either on an artificial hill or excavated. Excavation is hard for their location because of the water table.
But they were just not moving fast enough and breaking enough things.
You know I read all this, and it’s good, but then I get to this last line and all I want to do is tell you to fuck off with your needless, baseless attack on my beliefs. I don’t give a shit about Elon but even if I did you have now contextualized this otherwise fine discussion you’ve written with hefty research into this invitation for a dumbass mudslinging. This is so stupid and undermines everything else you have written.
I would be curious to ask about the salience of the issue you’ve brought up. I’m not convinced fixing it would actually result in everything being fine.
Also, love the binary outcome set of Hiroshima/not-Hiroshima.
I never introduced any such binary concept. I only said that the environment damage sustained was relatively trivial, because some of the reactions seem a bit hysterical to me.
Hasn't SpaceX tried to buy the whole village to avoid any kind of lawsuit happening after those kind of incidents?
If Uber experiences a catastrophic failure, some people might end up earning less money, some people might be late or miss important events. If a rocket experiences a catastrophic failure, debris may destroy the environment around it (as it did) and people on board may die (as they would have if there were any).
> debris may destroy the environment around it
"Destroy the environment" invokes some rather grandiose associations for what is essentially pulverizing a steel tube in the middle of nowhere.
> and people on board may die
Perhaps you have missed the part where those tests are conducted with the explicit intention of figuring out failure modes.
SpaceX Crew Dragon is "one of two U.S. human-rated orbital transport spacecraft". This is a result of the same developmental process.
This cavalier attitude to what it means to affect the environment is exactly what brought us to a steady march into climate disaster. The middle of nowhere is still an environment for other species, not showing a little respect or consideration for that is exactly the kind of moral arrogance from humankind we need to look into and fix.
> the kind of moral arrogance from humankind we need to look into and fix
No we don't. What we need to fix is scope insensitivity and addiction to symbolics and gut feelings.
Posturing is all one can do when living under systems too big to be changed by the individual, it's through it that on can socially demonstrate insatisfaction with the status quo, posturing is just a social expression of values. I could call your posturing in the name of progress just as tedious and we wouldn't get anywhere.
> No we don't. What we need to fix is scope insensitivity and addiction to symbolics and gut feelings.
Neglect of scope in this case isn't lost, it's simply that for a facet of people the scope of a billionaire trying to reach Mars while destroying what they can get away with is what is seen as wrong with the establishment right now. It was known that the pad could be bad, they simply didn't care, probably because it'd be a little bit more expensive to do it properly, probably because people (like you did) wouldn't care, it's in "the middle of nowhere" for you anyway. That's the attitude that I'm against.
Good luck with fixing gut feelings, you'll discover that no human being is absolutely rational, and hence you'll never be able to act on pure rationality under a democracy.
Call it tedious as much as you want, I'm pretty jaded by this progress-at-any-cost posturing.
Some people, like me, are jaded by the suffocating safetyism that seems to have no upper limit in its appetite to introduce even more obstacles to everything in order to move the needle from 99,999 to 99,9999 per cent.
It is not just about industry; for example, the contemporary "helicopter parenting" standards are absolutely awful and I am glad that there is a "free range parenting" movement trying to counter them.
In my opinion, this pendulum needs to swing a little bit back if we want to solve the currently pressing issues. Life cannot be made riskless and Nothing Untoward Should Ever Happen isn't a viable innovation strategy.
Very well put. Life is all about tradeoffs. We should discuss them, both sides, instead of ignoring the downsides and pretending "you just want people to do!" You are right, it is not helpful and we can't solve problems like that.
With all due respect, it obviously does work; on account of the Falcon 9 rocket being the safest (and cheapest, given its capability) rocket ever.
NASA human fatalities: 15
It's almost as if there's benefit to running iterative tests to get real-world data. Who would've thought
Challenger and Columbia each had seven crew members. Apollo I had three. Then there were a number of astronaut candidates who were killed in the line of duty and probably should be counted in your death toll.
On the other hand, how many manned missions has NASA launched, and how many has SpaceX done to date? Gotta guess there’s an order of magnitude difference there.
Also this rocket isn’t going to be human rated for a very long time, neither NASA or SpaceX are going to put people in it until it’s done a ton of cargo missions
> That’s the nature of SpaceX and why many find them so exciting. Unlike NASA that spends years in planning and engineering, SpaceX uses rapid development cycles and full-scale tests to work toward their eventual goals. They push their hardware to the limit to learn as much as possible, and we get to follow along. They’re betting it will pay off to develop fast instead of carefully.
> But this wasn’t just a test of the hardware. It was also a test of federal regulations and the good graces of the people who live, work, play, and care about the Boca Chica area. And, SpaceX definitely pushed those limits as well with their first orbital test.