Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

ithappenedone234 t1_ja062hr wrote

Reply to comment by binary_spaniard in NASA's Artemis moon program receives salute from Apollo 11's Buzz Aldrin (video) by kevindavis338

Crew Dragon isn’t meant for moon flight and Starliner hasn’t really done a convincing job of staying in orbit, so let’s not start making assumptions it’s going to keep a high rate while Starship fails.

Certainly with cost factored, Starliner and SLS don’t look to be economically viable. Just like Shuttle. Partially because of Shuttle parts they just can’t rid themselves of, culturally at least. Nothing about Shuttle should be repeated. It was a failure in many of its core design concepts and never was inexpensive nor very reusable, with thousands of parts needing refurb in the boosters, the tank being lost and the shuttle providing no capability that a capsule and a supply rocket couldn’t provide; and a lot less expensively.

The cost is going to kill SLS eventually.

0

binary_spaniard t1_ja07ihm wrote

> Nothing about Shuttle should be repeated.

Like a crew launch system without emergency escape mechanism? It is going to be hard to get NASA to accept one if there are alternatives.

What I mean is that Starship, like the Shuttle, doesn't satisfy that requirement that NASA put on Commercial Crew.

2

ithappenedone234 t1_ja0ewcc wrote

So criticize Starship on that point. That’s fair.

But the cost to risk ratio is absurd. The risk is nearing commercial airlines and they take the masses who are untrained in emergency anything, and doing so with crews that are nearly equally unable to actually pilot the craft without the computer. Or the back up computer. Or the back up to the back up computer. A trained crew with better systems will handle any issue better, and the reuse of Raptors (it appears so far) increases the assurance of safety, while keeping costs low.

The NASA requirement for escape comes directly from NASA’s own incompetence and bureaucratic inertia leading to multiple fatal errors, one of which at least was likely criminal.

0

BlueKnight17c t1_ja2mo2x wrote

>The risk is nearing commercial airlines

That's just blatantly not true

2

ithappenedone234 t1_ja2yyqg wrote

When was the last death in spacefaring?

As aircraft had major accidents from incompetent admins, incompetent engineers and institutional hubris, and only got better from lessons learned; the spacecraft have gotten better and survived NASA’s and the Soviet’s incompetent admins, incompetent engineers and institutional hubris.

Most of the deaths are blood on NASA’s hands for preventable reasons and is not a recommendation of them, it’s an indictment. The admins and engineers killed Komarov with their incompetence.

Maybe having spacefaring institutions that are not beholden to political pressures is the safest thing.

1

BlueKnight17c t1_ja3x4cl wrote

You could fit every person who's ever been to space on a single Airbus A380 very easily. You simply can not make a comparison with such a tiny sample size.

2

ithappenedone234 t1_ja4vi18 wrote

Even with different population sizes, you can still draw conclusions. We can still conclude that they are developing along similar paths. The two development timelines parallel each other.

Both suffered from bureaucracy and hubris and bad engineering. They both have seen significant drops in the death rates as the tech progressed and the admin debacles were cut down. We can see that airlines suffered from death rates linked to untrained passengers and spacecraft have not. Comparisons and contrasts can be seen.

We can still see that 0 deaths in decades are 0 deaths.

1

BlueKnight17c t1_ja5041z wrote

Let me put this another way, according to Wikipedia, the entire history of human space travel is 367 flights. From 2011-2020, there were just 47.

On average, there are almost 10,000 planes in the air carrying over 1.25 million people at any given moment.

A single Boeing 787 is designed to be able to fly 44,000 times in its life.

Even if there were no deaths in the 367 flights, which obviously isn't true, you are still many orders of magnitude away from having enough data to show the safety is the same as air travel.

1

ithappenedone234 t1_ja51eru wrote

> to show the safety is the same as air travel.

Which I never said was the case. Try again.

1

BlueKnight17c t1_ja6lfc5 wrote

What? The first comment I replied to, I was replying to this

>The risk is nearing commercial airlines

Wtf does that mean if not that you think the risk of space travel and air travel are similar?

1

ithappenedone234 t1_ja6oadc wrote

> What? The first comment I replied to, I was replying to this

I know, but you’re vasilating between two phraseologies, which are both different from mine. You’ve said “to show the safety is the same as air travel.” And now you’ve said “the risk of space travel and air travel are similar?” I said “nearing.”

“Nearing” ≠ “the same as.”

“The same as” ≠ “similar.”

Your first use was an absolute comparison that I never made. Your recent phrasing of “similar” is a more fair representation of what I said, but still not right:

Spacefaring is in its tween years and is only nearing commercial travel, as it is so vastly more expensive and technologically difficult. The developmental progress of one does however parallel the other, even if spacefaring is behind the curve for the reasons stated. It took ~a decade after the Wright Flyer for the first airlines to come around. But airlines didn’t get big until ~50 years later. The first “spaceline” is yet to be, 60+ years after the first manned space flight. But we can see how the two modes of travel do relate in terms of “ability to cost” ratio.

We are only now beginning to see mass space travel as a theoretical possibility on the horizon. As the systems improve and the volume of space passengers looks to skyrocket in the mid-term, we can see that spacefaring is on a trajectory to have numbers close to where commercial air was in its tween years. That’s the “nearing“ part.

It’s not there now, but 20 years without a fatality is a good place to be to match commercial airs’ safety rating and the space passenger capacity looks like it will dwarf the current number of those that have been to space.

0