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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Someone dying is devastating. Trying to conquer space a handful of people at a time is the slow and dangerous way of accomplishing this task. We should be building machines to explore the solar system. This can be done for a fraction of the cost, time, and it will allow him to allow us to iterate quickly.

In 100 years, more humans will live off earth if we iterate with machines, etc now than if we move slowly trying to reduce the risk in order to keep humans safe.

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Its sad, sure. Sorry for their loss.

But people take far greater risks for far less reason. Monster Truck rallys. Motorcycle racing. Skiing. We don't change national priorities every time somebody dies at those activities.

SO lets keep it in perspective, and salute the brave folks who are trying to expand human boundaries.

I think you're overlooking the fact that Virgin Galactic isn't a national priority, it's a commercial venture. And it'll probably take years of testing to convince many people to take their flight, assuming they want to spend the money.

The ability of the United States to send people to space ended because of the last shuttle accident. So, yes, people dying did affect our national resolve. I think if you do the math, flying in the space shuttle was more dangerous. There were only 135 flights? We lost $3.5 billion of hardware and 14 lives in 2 accidents.

Virgin Galactic is American. We don't reserve that name for government employees. There are several such commercial ventures in America right now. And some of them are close to sending Americans into space.

Its a priority for these Americans to send people into space. I don't think I've overlooked anything. The importance of this adventure (to the people involved) has so far been worth the risk, partly because they regard it as far more important that motorcycle racing.

Those aren't really fair comparisons as they are several orders of magnitudes less dangerous than space flight. My quick estimates say that roughly 1-3% of people who try to get to space die during some point of the journey. Some quick Googling put the fatality rate for skiing at roughly .00002%. If 1% of people who tried skiing died, you could bet there would be national discussions about it.

About 0.4% of people working in the Alaska crab fishery die on the job, and people seem to be relatively okay with that. And it's much, much better than it was years ago. I know people who were crabbers in the 80s --- stories that would curl your hair (or straighten it, if it's already curly).

http://money.cnn.com/2003/10/13/pf/dangerousjobs/index.htm

I think you're kind of missing the point. The Alaska crab program doesn't come to a complete stop for a couple years while there's an investigation and an attempt to make it safer. It won't be on the cover of the NYT. You don't need to go to Congress and request an additional $1.7 billion for another ship.

We are moving into Space at a snail's pace because we keep insisting on spending lots of money to try and send humans there "safely", and that's not really working out so well for us.

"x The Alaska crab program doesn't come to a complete stop for a couple years while there's an investigation"

Neither will Virgin Galactic.

"You don't need to go to Congress and request an additional $1.7 billion for another ship."

Neither does Richard Branson.

Perhaps, you haven't noticed but I'm using this accident to discuss our national space program. Virgin Galactic has a plane that goes to 62 miles/100km. While this is great, in the short-term, it doesn't help our space program.

Btw, you don't think they need to revisit safety to assure their customers that it's not a one way trip? Do they even have a second plane? There's not a chance that there will be a commercial flight carrying paying customers within the next 2 years. Branson was saying this year just a month ago.

"Btw, you don't think they need to revisit safety to assure their customers that it's not a one way trip?"

Not from what I'm seeing. No one is planning to cancel their reservation. I wouldn't, if I had one.

Ok, let's revisit in 2 years to evaluate the setback this event turned out to be. Perhaps I'm overstating it.

By the way, the spacecraft cost $500 million.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/10/31/technology/virgin-galactic-s...

Summiting Everest, then? At some point, it was >10% mortality, yet people still did it, and it was considered acceptable, given that it was people doing it voluntarily. I believe that it's now in the ~1-3% mortality range.

Some people want to do stuff now, not a hundred years from now, and they don't insist on perfect safety. The test pilots were fully aware of the risk, and I honor them for it.

There are a lot of people like that. Mountain climbers. Surfers. Volunteer soldiers. Alaskan crab fishermen.

You don't see anyone proposing that crabbing be banned until we can develop automated machines to do the job, right?

I didn't say ban manned space flight. We keep trying to restart our space program by sending people to Mars. I think we should start a more extensive national unmanned space program. For example, if the Hubble, or its replacement, needs to be fixed, we should have an unmanned answer, for instance.

We should start building on Mars without humans. If our machines can't do that yet, then we should invest in them until they can.

I guarantee you that if there was sufficient profit motive, you'd see hundreds of companies being formed to go to space.

Right now the risk makes it too expensive, so the profit isn't there. Much of the work Virgin Galactic and the others are doing will lower the cost eventually. When it gets low enough, there will be people lining up around the block to become asteroid miners, etc.

Lack of willing people will never be a problem.

One potential benefit of developing the automated solution is that life support is HEAVY. You can send up much larger payloads when you don't have to worry about keeping humans alive.

Not to say that there aren't large drawbacks (huge amounts of R&D, for example). Robot space travelers are also relatively uninspiring.

Are you suggesting we send several generations of robots to Mars first? That's a great idea and exactly what we have been doing for decades.

Yeah, didn't we land something there a decade ago? And the decade before that?

And four decades ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program

>> We should be building machines to explore the solar system. This can be done for a fraction of the cost, time, and it will allow him to allow us to iterate quickly.

One man on mars for a day will be more informative than all the remote hardware we've sent so far. There is no substitute for being somewhere in person.

Is that your opinion, or do you have some facts to support that statement? As part of the program, we should be building better machines and not crawling along at 12 inches a day, of course.

Well, sure. Just look at all the jobs that are still being done by humans. Even fairly simple and formulaic jobs like working in a fast food restaurant are still in the human domain (that may be starting to change, finally, but it hasn't happened yet).

For that matter, look at the problem of operating an autonomous vehicle right here on Earth. Everyone from DARPA to MIT to Carnegie-Mellon to Google has been working on that one for the last sixty years or so. It's now gotten to where it kinda works. Sorta. In some conditions.

Remote control doesn't work well when there's a large speed-of-light lag between the earthbound operator and the vehicle. Mars is 6 minutes away, round trip, minimum and that's about the best case. For the outer planets, forget it. The Jupiter system is at least an hour round-trip (not that we'd be landing people on Jupiter itself, but there's a lot of interesting stuff in the system).

Your vehicle is toast long before you figure out that there's a problem.

I'm sure that is why things move 12 inches a day. If the remote operator sees a big rock/hole/whatever a few feet away, they have a day or two to steer left. It just might take a couple weeks to go around it though. LOL

The Google Space "Car" won't need a license on Mars. If it wrecks after 6 months, we send another. The idea is that sending machines is cheaper, and when things go wrong, it's not as much of a big deal.

That's why I keep emphasising developing the machines and sending them.

Can you justify this? I don't understand why that should be. (I also suspect that sending one person to Mars for a day will cost an order of magnitude more than all the remote hardware we've sent so far, so the comparison is unfair.)

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