Hacker News Reader

Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com