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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

...or possibly one would have failed, killing three astronauts and ending the program. It very nearly happened once during 13 total flights. Not great odds.

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We did kill three astronauts during the Apollo project. It's just that space people tend to die closer to the ground.

The space shuttle had something like 1:70 in practise but was planned for 1:90. Artemis is currently evaluated at 1:70 too, which is deemed a little too high.

We seem to be ready to sacrifice people to space at a relatively high cadence.

The Shuttle program never properly calculated their risk in the first place because NASA admins preferred happy fiction. Only after Challenger broke up and slammed six professional astronauts and a school teacher into the ocean were the NASA admins forced to face realistic risk figures for the program.

Today, NASA as an institution has learned nothing from it. Their heat shield for Orion is defective and they tried to cover it up instead of admitting the problem. They're still proceeding under the assumption that they can simply ignore the hear shield not performing as designed if they use a different reentry profile, which they intend to do without first testing this theory.

>We seem to be ready to sacrifice people to space at a relatively high cadence.

If people are willing, is it even an issue?

You gotta crack a few eggs to make an omlette.

That's wrong. There is no need to ever fly humans on unproven rockets. NASA has historically done it that way for non-technical reasons. For instance, the Shuttle could have been designed for unmanned operations, but that would have pissed off the astronauts by undermining their claim to necessity, and that was important to NASA at an organizational level because astronauts get NASA funding by keeping the public interested. And so they designed the Shuttle such that people must be on it. Then they started using the Shuttle to simply launch commercial satellites. Why would you ever put seven human lives on the line to launch a satellite, when you can just as well do that without endangering anybody? It was completely senseless risk and they thankfully stopped doing that after Challenger. Just because you can find people willing to go to space for any reason doesn't mean the government should be funding such pointless idiocy.

After the second shuttle failure, flights were restricted to orbits that could drop off the crew at the ISS. The Boeing Starliner crew is still sitting on the ISS because NASA was afraid to send them down with their ride.

I'm not sure our tolerance is as high as you think. Maybe it was in the 1960s, but not now. And who knows what a couple big pyrotechnic accidents would have produced then.

I do agree with you, we're much more willing to tolerate carnage on the ground (or closer to it). More astronauts have died in aircraft accidents than spacecraft accidents.

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