10 thoughts on “Safety In Spaceflight”

  1. You know you’ve changed the argument when the “shocking” viewpoints you once advanced are commonly echoed, as if it had been obvious to everyone all along. 🙂

  2. It is understandable that some astronauts feel “safety must be the single highest priority in human spaceflight” [“NASA Forgets Key Lesson from Columbia Accident,” Jan. 20, page 19].

    That attitude may have been reasonable during the Apollo project, and even for the space shuttle, when spaceflight was new and most things were being done for the first time.

    Safety was far from the highest priority during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo era. NASA took very serious risks due to schedule pressure to meet Kennedy’s deadline. The result was several dead astronauts from aircraft accidents and three more in the Apollo One fire. In the movie “Apollo 13”, Lovell mentioned that the loss of a second stage engine might be the mission’s expected anomaly – something went wrong as a matter of course on those Apollo missions. The crews were – with one exception – military pilots and test pilots who’d lived with a significant possibility of death their entire careers. The military aviation accident rates in the 1950s and 1960s was many times higher than today’s rate. The possibility of death was very real.

    I have to wonder whether safety was the highest priority for the Shuttle as well. They flew the first mission with a crew on board and this was after having PIO (pilot induced oscillations) on the final glide test flight without a subsequent test to ensure the fix worked. They continued flying the Shuttle with known issues that ended up killing the Challenger and Columbia crews.

    Safety is a priority but it can’t be the highest one, otherwise the safest thing to do is not fly anyone anywhere. At the risk of ridicule, I include this quote from a long ago TV episode:

    Capt. Picard: I understand what you’ve done here, Q. But I think the lesson could have been learned without the loss of 18 members of my crew.

    Q: If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it’s not for the timid.

  3. If you look at the space race they included what they considered to be the bare minimum amount of safety measures. As they actually stumbled into problems they started including more and more safety measures. e.g. the Sokol suits in the Soyuz capsule after they had that depressurization accident. Other times they preemptively added safety mechanisms like launch escape towers. That safety mechanism was actually used once to save a crews life. However I think SpaceXs method of using the same system for propulsive landing and launch escape makes a lot more sense.

    1. Incremental advancement is always the case. The problem is that once advancements are known we forget things that still work. Check out an 1800s encyclopedia some time.

      1. Just because a pencil makes economic sense to be produced globally doesn’t mean a single person with some hand tools can make one all by himself from inferior materials (or even superior.)

  5. I saw Donald’s column in ms. and mentioned your book to him. He was totally unaware of it’s existence. This is a case of two minds looking at the same data and coming to the exact same conclusion.

    1. Or that the arguments and ideas in the book are circulating through the cocktail circuit where people want to appear smart and insightful without revealing their sources, and then the ideas take on a life of their own. How many Protestants actually read Martin Luther’s 95 theses? Yet they sparked a transformation in thinking about safety (yeah, let’s just freakin’ go there, because it will be way fun).

      The Catholic Church said that the safety of your soul would cost a whole lot of money, and Martin Luther said that you have to risk your own a**, which is on the line, and no blessings from some fop who adds God knows how much to your costs can actually guarantee that your soul is going to get into heaven, or that your rocket won’t blow the f*** up.

      Anyone, feel free to join in here. This rant pretty much writes itself.

  6. Considering I have seen mention of Rand’s book in one form or another, either in articles, reviews or comment sections, on vertually every spaceblog, et cetera, I kinda find it hard to believe Donald has not read some blurb on the book. and then “timely” writes about it.

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