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Comment by sitkack | Hacker News Reader

This is horrible science. A bear surviving an ejection is nothing like a human surviving an ejection.

Early this on, the process of building physically accurate "fake humans" was not really possible.

Bear tests were probably more an early proof of viability than anything else. The bears survived, proving that humans wouldn't be completely annihilated.

Animal testing cruelty wasn't really being thought about heavily in post WWII military aerospace development. It's unfortunate but a historical footnote reminding us of the importance of proper testing.

Logging the max acceleration in x,y,z would have been better than throwing a bear out of plane. Knowing a bear survives is ridiculous and they knew it. Ethics are orthogonal, cadavers would have ben a better choice.

Logging what with what, in 1962?

He meant actually put a piece of wood log inside the capsule and observe the marks on it after it returned to earth.

A pencil on a spring is enough to measure maximum acceleration, I'm sure by 62 they had something at least as sophisticated.

Imagine if they have the advanced capability of moving the paper under the pencil, they might get acceleration over time.

In 1962 they would have had multi-channel magentic tape (analog) recording. The first flight data recorders date to the early 1940s.

Fitting it in ejection seat might be another challenge but I'm sure they would have developed something before moving to live subjects.

Might these proto-engineers also harnessed radio waves to transport signals across the aether for a form of telemetry?

What can you compare that acceleration data to? Put a human on a shaker table and measure his brain damage? At some point you have to damage humans or animals to find out their limits.

You would now have numerical values to compare rather the MILSPEC 'dead_bear' units. Nowhere did I make an ethical argument against animal trials or say that we should do experimentation on humans. But launching bears out of an ejection seat was even stupid then.

>Animal testing cruelty wasn't really being thought about heavily in post WWII military aerospace development

Considering that the endpoint is machines killing actual people, it would be the height of hypocrisy in my books for them to care about "animal testing cruelty".

I don't (reading modern past and foreseeable future), but if you subscribe to the idea of 'just war'[0] it would make sense.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory

By "actual people" do you mean "who cares about animals dying in horrendous ways when people will be dying?"

More precisely, if a project is about making killing machines for people, that it might kill some animals to test them is the least of its moral problems.

Sadly we weren't there to inform them of that /s

(Seriously, who said it has to be exactly "like" it? We use crash test dummies for testing car crash behavior, and they're nothing "like" humans either).

Crash test dummies are at least a standard.

Maybe people were misconstruing "horrible science" as something other than low quality science? HN while being a seething pit of criticality, it has a low tolerance of anything that questions science or the march of technology.

>Maybe people were misconstruing "horrible science" as something other than low quality science?

It would only be "low quality" if it didn't fit their purpose. Which was some rough estimate, not to get the final word of whether humans survive an ejection.

Eggs or feta would have been a better choice.

Only density wise. Eggs or feta don't have a heart, brain matter, muscles, bones and other such stuff they'd liked to see their response, one presumes.

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