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However SpaceX have had certification for human spaceflight from the necessary agencies, have a strong safety record – comparable to competitors – and seemingly have a development process that is producing better hardware than Boeing at this point (as seen in the Dragon vs Starliner debacle). That's all radically different in approach to OceanGate.
While Musk and SpaceX in general sound like they're pushing the "move fast and break things" mantra I think they're more nuanced than that. It's more: move fast while things don't matter, so we can gather data and experience for when things do matter. This isn't much of a defence of Musk mind you, more of the team at SpaceX and the wider aerospace community.
Tesla, however, is not doing everything right. Their self-driving and collision mitigation software is janky, causing deaths, and shoudln't be used on public roads until it is in a better state. Musk's insistence on using computer vision only reminds me a lot of Rush's stance on mixing materials. No one else agrees with either on this, and both made these decisions to save money.
Overall, however, Tesla cars are still pretty safe. The cars themselves are at the top of safety ratings. The hardware part of their cars from a safety perspective is a polar opposite of what Rush was doing. Their software is the weak point right now -- and probably not that far behind most car companies.
I am a big critic of Musk, but I don't think he'd ever have a company involved with such poor hardware design and engineering like Rush was. SpaceX does amazing work. Tesla can fix their software issues if they map their ambitions to reality better.
My comment is a bit all over the place, but Musk is ultimately a lot more experienced and responsbile than Rush.
"Environmental disaster"? A bit overdramatic, isn't it? The amount of "debris and dust" was absolutely minuscule compared to regular human activity in a developed country like the US.
unless something comes out in discovery, they didn't know it was going to do that. and they had a reasonable basis for that belief, in the form of the static fire tests.
there are no whistleblowers popping up. i haven't even seen any youtubers popping up with "i told you so!" claims based on all of the footage that was available of the launch site beforehand.
> considering what we've known since the Saturn V.
the saturn V launch facility is an absolutely massive pile of earthworks; it's perfectly reasonable to try and engineer something smaller than that when you want to build a couple dozen of them.
Tesla’s safety standards do seem to be high in tests, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is primarily because safety tests for cars are a well understood part of car marketing, rather than because Musk fundamentally believes Tesla should make the safest cars.
Tesla's are also all unibodies, which are safer than body-on-frame. Body-on-frame is mostly used in legacy trucks and SUVs. The Big 3 sell a lot of body-on-frame trucks and SUVs because it is older, higher margin tech. You also need to do a lot of extra work to get to the same level of safety as a unibody.
Beyond that, EVs in general are safer because they have such a low center of gravity. The risk of a rollover in a Tesla is low.
You say this in the comment section of an article about the death of a CEO in his own craft because he ignored safety warnings.
"Hoist by his own petard" isn't even a new saying.
Including the President and COO of SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell, an extremely qualified aerospace engineer who has run SpaceX for the past 15 years. She's been in the space industry since 1988, she knows what she's doing.
I suppose the FAA would be more of an independent authority in that regard, although I'm not sure how much authority they have over space regulations (compared to launch).
https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/as...