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Comment by figassis | Hacker News Reader

What worries me about space innovation is the fact that there is such little margin for error. Materials are being stressed so much while trying to defy the laws of physics that the smallest angle error, the smallest pressure mismatch, smallest timing error, and boom. This did not happen when we were inventing cars, trains and air planes. Now imagine these risks, while you're halfway to mars. Is it possible that we just have no found/invented the right materials or the right fuel/propulsion mechanism to de-risk this, and that is where we should be allocating a lot more resources?

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It definitely happened with planes, we have a century of improvements that made them much much safer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatigue_(material)#de_Havillan...

> This did not happen when we were inventing cars, trains and air planes.

Cars are small, and they still go up in flames routinely all on their own (for older cars, aged fuel lines rupturing is a top cause, for newer cars shit with the turbocharger), it just doesn't make more news than a line in the local advertisement rag because usually all it needs is five minutes work for a firefighter truck.

Trains had quite the deadly period until it was figured out how to deal with steam safely - and yet, in Germany we had the last explosion of a steam train in 1977, killing nine people [1].

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesselzerknall_in_Bitterfeld

What makes you think this didn't happen in other industries? See the first iteration of the de Havilland Comet for a great example.

The Space Industry to date has killed many fewer people than planes, trains, or automobiles.

> The Space Industry to date has killed many fewer people than planes, trains, or automobiles.

Except as a proportion of passengers. In which case it's killed several of orders of magnitude more.

Because people rarely go to space, and it was much more dangerous when the last person died than it is today. The vast majority of flights are unmanned, just like this test was.

If you want to continue playing apples to oranges though, nobody has died on a spaceflight in the last twenty years. How many have died on airplanes in that timeframe?

[correction: there was one additional fatal flight in 2014 with the destruction of SpaceShipTwo. I would argue that one doesn't count, though, as it was more akin to a relatively mundane aircraft accident than anything else.]

The requirements of orbital launch are unyielding. If you make a car 50% heavier, it will have worse mileage and handling, but it will still get you where you need to go. If you make a spacecraft 50% heavier, it will never reach orbit.

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