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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

The middle ground you're ignoring (between #yolo startup culture and Boeing's defense contractor culture) has been done pretty well with SpaceX's Falcon 9.

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The technologies to delivery humans to and back from Mars with any defensible level of safety do not currently exist. The benefits of doing so are dubious and the real viability of a human colony are almost nil. The sort of people that advocate otherwise have killed innocent civilians deep in the North Atlantic and are failing to run a previously healthy, if unspectacular, social network. It is less exciting work, but we should make every effort to not reduce ourselves to a Paleolithic lifestyle on our home planet via accidental terraforming instead.

> The technologies to delivery humans to and back from Mars with any defensible level of safety do not currently exist.

But are being worked on. This statement would've been true about landing Falcon 9 stages less than a decade ago.

> The sort of people that advocate otherwise have killed innocent civilians deep in the North Atlantic and are failing to run a previous healthy, if unspectacular, social network.

The differences between SpaceX's approach to safety and how Twitter's being run are pretty stark. Same guy, very different cultures. SpaceX's safety record is good enough for NASA, and they're hardly the #yolo set.

https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-closes-spacex-starship-mish... I was not impressed by this incident and it gives me concerns for their safety culture. My comment is not limited to propulsion or delivery technology.

I respect SpaceX, but I also respect the real challenges of responsibly sending a crew to Mars.

Does the Apollo 1 accident report give you similar concerns about NASA's culture and ability to get to the moon?

I find it silly saying that risk of a few settlers dying on the first tries outweighs the risk to the whole species when we arent' ready.

Musk is in the driver's seat at Twitter. At SpaceX he's a frontman, carefully managed by people who know both him and rocket science.

While I agree (and give a lot of credit to Gwynne Shotwell for the steady hand), that reinforces the point; that you can do space work somewhere inbetween "startup" and "giant defense contractor" style approaches.

Well said. It's a bit disheartening that there's no other companies as capable as SpaceX, but man am I happy we have them. When the company I was a cofounder was still up an year ago I would have rather had it founder than SpaceX.

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