19 thoughts on “Is Safety Stifling Space Development?”

  3. Good, concise and to the point.

    One nit :”Q:What could NASA do to change?” A: “I’m not sure there is anything that NASA can do”

    I think they can – if they are more vocal about the science and statistics of the relative safety. Say for example, if they routinely the relative recite risk figures of cheerleading vs spaceflight, they may get the point through in congressional hearings and public perception.
    After all, NASA is perceived as the egghead scientists, so whatever they say must be true. But i think NASA spokespersons do lack the incentive to call this out.

  4. Speaking of the risks of space flight, this 45-second ad may slightly exaggerate them.

    I won’t spoil it by pointing out an obvious physics issue with the ending.

      1. I’m sure it’s genuine, obviously the sounds traveling through the ground – and that must have been a heck of a fart at the end.

      2. Despite the fact that the video quality exceeds what I’ve seen so far from the Chinese lander, I’m skeptical of the video’s authenticity. However, in an overabundance of caution, I’m sure someone at NASA has just marked “beans” off the menu of future lunar missions, along with marking “lunar mission” off the list of future planned space activities.

  5. Rand, instead of just including dangerous fun activities in response to the last question in the article, be sure to include historical frontiers and great achievements like liberating Kuwait, opening the American West, building bridges, Hoover Dam or fill in your favorite dangerous military, exploratory or commercial milestone. While it’s a travesty that there’s a risk that people won’t have fun in space due to the future possibility of over regulation, it’s making the place livable that opens the compelling narrative about its value as a frontier.

    2. Wasn’t letting Glenn Reynolds review the book so early introducing a large element of unknown risk into the reviewing process? What if something went wrong? What if you didn’t have a handle on all the possible ways a chapter could go awry, or how an unanticipated chain of logic could lead to the loss of narrative and conclusion? Just hammering out some good text and giving it a test run without a thorough in-house QA process seems to invite all sorts of potential failure modes.

      For each page of text you should have two pages of notes, which should link to studies explaining how the page of text has been reviewed, tested, and certified, and listing the procedures to follow if there’s a loss of narrative at any point. To do otherwise risks losing a reader, and the loss of a single reader is unacceptable.

      To further mitigate the chances of reader loss, I’d also recommend a battery of tests to wade through a “reader pool” to select only readers who are committed, trained, educated, and healthy enough to follow all presented arguments to their conclusions, without risk of distraction, along with a program to actively monitor levels of reader comprehension and potential sources of confusion. Along with this, I certainly wire each reader with telemetry so their health and heart rate can be continuously monitored.

      What author would want to wake up to the headline “Amazon customer reads Rand Simberg’s book, suffers fatal aneurysm?”, or “Readers of ‘Safe Is Not an Option’ suffering irreparable bone loss?”

      When it comes to publishing, you just can’t be too safe.

        2. Thats exactly the trick ! You write the analysis long enough and bury the part where you pull the stunt in Appendix C.

          Like ESAS. It will take years for anyone to figure it out.

          Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called “The Pledge”. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course…it probably isn’t. The second act is called “The Turn”. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call “The Prestige”

          1. That sooo describes some dates I’ve been on. O_o.

            In fact, it may describe much of what happens on a date these days. If someone writes it up, Glenn Reynolds will link it under “Relationships in the 21st Century”.

      2. Dammit. That means we all need to set up a committee to review commenting policy and procedures, along with a comment quality assurance department that will review and certify the interest value and readability of each one.

        Failure is NOT an option.

        Space flight is one of the most dangerous things humans can do, and yet writing books and commenting on blogs doesn’t even meet those safety standards. Whether you order a book on Amazon or comment on a blog post, shouldn’t you have at least as much assurance that you won’t die in a supersonic fireball as someone who is strapped to a rocket? But we readers don’t have an abort system, and escape system, a risk estimate, or even a helmet (though I usually wear either a caving helmet or a WW-I helmet when I get on the net, just out of caution).

        I find this unacceptable. As readers, as commenters, safety should be our highest priority. So what if it take three weeks or three months for you comment to show up, and take dozens of people putting in hundreds of man-hours to certify it, and that the system won’t actually work worth a dam* because all the reviewers are rejects from the DMV? Is that any worse than Obamacare, the sine qua non of acceptable public health care? No, it’s not.

        I’m not saying this blog should go as far as Reddit in shielding readers from politically uncomfortable truths, I’m just saying that there’s no procedures here to even try to certify that comments won’t be boring or off-topic, or that readers won’t burn in a massive explosion of hypergolic fuel that burns their flesh down to the bone.

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