Hacker News Reader

It seems like there is a wall in reliability with getting chemical rockets much more reliable than about 99% - 99.5%. SpaceX and Blue Origin are doing cool things, but I don't see them being any more reliable than previous generations of chemical rockets.

If an elevator could provide more 9s of reliability, that could be huge.

View on HN

But cost is also at issue. For cargo, it might make sense to take on 0.5-1.0% risk versus the massive investments necessary for the development of a space elevator.

And when we're talking about human spaceflight, consider the work SpaceX and Blue are putting into in-flight abort and propulsive landing - SpaceX's Crew Dragon should be much safer than the Space Shuttle, for example.

Yeah for cargo I agree. I was thinking more along the lines for human rating.

Propulsive landing helps for some failure modes but not all. Like I don't think it would have helped the CRS-7 failure had that been manned.

It actually would have helped on CRS-7 -- That capsule was fine until it hit the water.

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/07/saving-spaceship-dra...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com