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Comment by adwn | Hacker News Reader

> With lower budgets and less aversion to risk, private companies are also more likely than public agencies to suffer disasters in space.

I disagree very much. Throwing bureaucracy and money at problems does not decrease risk. NASA has killed several astronauts: Challenger (bad internal processes and "go-fever"), Columbia (bad technical concept and design), and Apollo 1. Then there are those near-misses with Apollo 13 and Gemini 8 [1], which could have easily resulted in the loss of the crew. Money and bureaucracy also don't protect from stupid mistakes, as seen in the Mars Climate Orbiter case (output data in wrong units) [2].

Private companies also have a strong incentive to minimize risk to human life, due to all the bad PR and losses in revenue that brings.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_8#Emergency [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter

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Everything in your comment is belied by the evidence. Yes, NASA's attention to detail certainly does reduce the risk involved, and there have been numerous HN articles about its software processes, such as:

https://gigaom.com/2012/08/20/nasa-scrubbed-mars-rover-code-...

http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/making_robust_software/

> Private companies also have a strong incentive to minimize risk to human life

There's no evidence of that whatsoever. OSHA, for example, has vastly reduced workplace fatalities and injuries.

https://www.osha.gov/dep/fatcat/dep_fatcat.html

> NASA's attention to detail certainly does reduce the risk involved

Bureaucracy and several layers of subcontractors is not the same as "attention to detail". You can easily have the latter while avoiding the former; I'd even argue that bureaucracy is dangerous in this context, since it maximizes ass-covering and minimizes personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is still the best way to ensure attention to detail.

> There's no evidence of that whatsoever. OSHA, for example, has vastly reduced workplace fatalities and injuries.

My statement was in the context of human space flight. When an astronaut dies during a mission, that will have a massive impact on the company's reputation, unlike some construction site accident. OSHA does not apply to space flight missions.

Compare commercial airplanes: Whenever a plane crashes, you'll be sure to hear about it and which airline it belonged to.

> Compare commercial airplanes: Whenever a plane crashes, you'll be sure to hear about it and which airline it belonged to.

Plane crashes are rare events thanks to the massive bureaucracy known as the FAA.

Private and public enterprises don't use the same definition of risk. For a public body, risk is measured in political capital. how their failures and successes may influence how they are treated by governments. A private enterprise measures risk according to the likelihood of turning a profit on a venture. While there is certainly an overlap, such as SpaceX having PR/lobbiests or NASA launching commercial sats, they are two fundamentally different approaches to risk.

A dangerous situations occur when either uses the wrong model. When governments try to turn profits, they may cut something that the perhaps shouldn't (Flint). And when private enterprise spends like a government, ignores the bottom line, they are ripped apart by irate shareholders. It's apples and oranges.

NASA has sent over 600 people into space not to mention orbit or the moon and killed around 17 along the way. Private companies have sent about 10 people into space and killed 2(?). Given the choice, I'd rather go to space with NASA.

That's just not enough data for either side. And the 2 you refer to were test pilots flying an experimental aircraft -- a dangerous profession in the non-space aviation world as well.

17 out of ~600 isn't really something to brag about.

And we have another good example of private companies in commercial airspace avoiding crashes as much as possible. By all means, risk is not zero, but look how far we have come in 60 years.

A big part of that is attributable to the FAA and corresponding bodies in other countries -- though not all, by any means.

But that's simply a part of how we tend to this sort of thing, private actors with a public watchdog.

I'm under the very strong impression that works better than a public actor with a public watchdog, we've seen too many examples of common mode failure (politics), the most recent notorious one being Flint's water system. (And as noted by others, private actors have marketplace feedback.)

Bureaucracies also change, and seldom for the better absent extreme pressures like fighting a war. If the same NASA with the "Can't Do" attitude demonstrated between the Columbia's launch and death were running the Apollo program, they would have also killed the Apollo 13 crew.

Well arguably in every NASA case, there were private contractors proposing astronomical (pun intended) chances of catastrophic errors, whereas internal NASA estimates were always expecting far, far greater chance of such error. So there was always this go, go, go mentality.

So you can ding NASA for bad choices, which is fair, but there's a private business component in all of that too. It's a public-private venture, space.

Risk aversion and actual reductions in risk are not necessarily related.

We couldn't even detect a planet larger than neptune inspite of having hubble telescope. I am vary of such articles which just collect positive instances and blow the trumpet.

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