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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

In short, we are now using billionaires instead of dogs to test spaceships. I would argue that's progress.

This program used test pilots to test their space ships, killed one of them in the process, and later fired the director of their test flight program under dubious circumstances.

Credit to Musk here for being smart enough not to get in one of his own rockets (yet).

Is that really to his credit though? Should he not be prepared to risk his own life, just like those of his employees?

SpaceX employees haven't gone to space. Just NASA astronauts on SpaceX rockets. And this privately paid for mission coming up.

I don't think it's the CEO's job to be a test pilot. I think that's pretty crazy actually.

I know someone who is a test pilot. He's trained a long time to do it. You want someone in the craft that is an expert at both piloting spacecraft and the engineering of the craft. Musk is certainly no pilot and the job of CEO does not require you to have those skills.

It could be argued that since these systems are fully automated that you don't need anyone with special skills there. But being a programmer I don't trust software for every situation. So I sure think if you are going to put a person on it, they should be able to intervene if needed. There should be a purpose to their risk.

None of these CEOs have been test pilots-- rather, test passengers.

I think it's worth pointing out that Virgin is literally trying to enable space tourism, which is just a side effect for SpaceX. Branson was testing and advertising his product, Elon would be taking valuable time away from his mission.

Of course not. His role is CEO. The test pilots' role is test pilot. He's not a test pilot, so he shouldn't be expected to pretend to be one.

His employees haven’t got in those rockets either.

Hope those billionaires won't dare to force for their faces to be put on future postal stamps, I grew up as a kid having Laika [1] on them, I wouldn't want for future postal-stamp collector kids to have to look at the faces of Branson or, God forbid, Bezos.

[1] https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/postage-stamp-mongolia-circa...

Isn’t that the principle of football and space conquest: Giving plebs something to dream about, so we can shove them with ads and admiration for absurd ideas (like nationalism or love for any idea, maybe sovietism, patriotism, Richardbrandsonism, or for the belief that we’re in together pushing for a better world).

> Giving plebs something to dream about

To be honest I don't think the current "pleb" generations dream about space conquest anymore (I'm part of that "pleb", of course), people have gotten accustomed to the idea that everything relatively close up there is either very dark of very cold or both, so why all the fuss about some piece of rock located in those dark and cold places?

Unless we discover some new laws of physics and the accompanying new technology I think we should put firmly in our heads that's no way for us as a species to get passed our solar system, so maybe we could better use the "space exploration" resources for something closer to home.

Maybe not the plebs but the Musk fans are typically well to do white collar professionals that do dream of space and all that jazz. They don't have the problems of real plebs so they still actually care.

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