321–330 of 667 posts
I'm literally guest lecturing at a Harvard class tomorrow on systemic failures in decision making, using the Columbia and Challenger disasters as case studies, and changed my slides last night to include Artemis II because it could literally happen again. This broken safety culture has been around since the beginning of the Shuttle program. In 1980, Gregg Easterbrook published "Goodbye, Columbia" in The Washington Mo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure the other astronauts are really looking forward to fly with a person showing signs of tolerating massive risks.
Each and every one of them is fully aware that it’s a massive risk and has made their peace with that. You’re getting strapped to a giant rocket. It’s inherently dangerous
Maybe this is a perspective or semantics thing, but I think it’s distinct and important. They’re not Mavericks they’re Icemans.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might not seem like it, but I really am on your team. What you're missing and Sabine understands is that there is no such thing as spending that's insignificant, and whether we're talking cash or mission bandwidth, everything has opportunity costs. Exactly how many possible missions are thrown out every time we decide to send squishy humans instead of robots? As for defense spending, to be clear I'm all for swappi…
Sabine got her wish. DOGE cut NSF by 40%. Tons of scientists out of work including physicists. But she'll be ok, she only needs to pimp another ad for Brilliant.com
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There were 9 crewed missions and 1 almost killed its crew (I will omit Apollo 1 for now). I could argue that Apollo had a 1 in 20 chance of killing a crew. That's not how risk analysis works. Let's say every Apollo mission had gone flawlessly, and no one even came close to dying. Would you then say that the risk of death for future missions would be zero? No, of course not.
If you only look at this data it would be the most reasonable guess. Of course one should also analyze the technical sytems involved and then it is clear that 0% failure is not reasonable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
NASA does both manned and unmanned stuff. Don't conflate those when you are looking at returns. Look at this joke of a list https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/20-breakthroughs-from-... for an illustration. And those were the 20 best things they could come up with.
There are actually a lot of really interesting discoveries on that list. I haven't thought deeply about whether it represents value for money, but I would say that that is anything but "a joke of a list."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you bothered to ask the astronauts on board if they want to risk it? You're getting clicks, they're going to the moon and there's a lot of people on Earth who would happily take any tradeoff for that.
Hang on, without a dog in this fight, have I asked the people who trained their whole lives to drive cool cars if this particular cool car, which they were not involved in designing or building, is safe to drive? Is that what you are asking?
It just depends on whether you think that the fact that they accept the risks is reason enough to let them fly a potentially-dangerous spacecraft.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
SpaceX is the only major operator of spaceflights in the US: more than 95% of all satellites launched are launched by SpaceX, not just in the US, but worldwide .
That's an eye catching stat. What is the impact of starlink satellites on the number, ie what if you drop them from both numerator and denominator?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is bound to happen again and again considering humans are so oblivious to safety.
Then explain the Apollo program, and the actual printed literature that came out of the program that summarized how they were successful.
That being said, I'm a big proponent of "you can't make ICBM's carrying humans 100% safe", but you sure can try your best.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is bound to happen again and again considering humans are so oblivious to safety.
Then explain the Apollo program, and the actual printed literature that came out of the program that summarized how they were successful.
I'm literally guest lecturing at a Harvard class tomorrow on systemic failures in decision making, using the Columbia and Challenger disasters as case studies, and changed my slides last night to include Artemis II because it could literally happen again. This broken safety culture has been around since the beginning of the Shuttle program. In 1980, Gregg Easterbrook published "Goodbye, Columbia" in The Washington Mo…
It is bound to happen again and again considering humans are so oblivious to safety.
If you’re interested in a heck of a good read, the Columbia Accident Investigation Report is a good place to start:
https://ehss.energy.gov/deprep/archive/documents/0308_caib_r...
It looks at the safety culture in NASA and at how that safety culture ran into budget issues, time pressure and a culture that ‘it’s always been okay’. But people were aware of the problems.
There’s a really frustrating example from Columbia where engineers on the ground badly wanted to inspect the shuttle’s left wing from the ground using ground based telescopes or even observations from telescopes or any other assets. There’s footage available was an email circulated where an engineer all but begged anyone to take a look with anything. That request was not approved - they never looked.
Realistically there’s a point to be made that NASA wasn’t capable of saving those astronauts at that point. But they had a shuttle almost ready to to, they could have jettisoned its science load and possibly had a rescue of some sort available. They never looked though but alarm bells were ringing.
It’s more accurate to say people are highly aware of safety but when you get a bunch of us together, add in cognitive biases and promotion bands we can get stuck in unsafe ruts.