“ 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.”
That is what SpaceX is doing. Their manned and unmanned spacecraft systems are similar now (Falcon 9 + Dragon/Crew Dragon) and will be the same with the next system (Super Heavy + Starship). Hopefully the Starship will begin unmanned launches in 2020 as planned and get a good number of launches under its belt so that manned launches can start soon. With Starship SpaceX won't be constrained by NASA safety requirements. They will have the NASA approved Crew Dragon to launch NASA astronauts while they can use the Starship to launch anyone who decides that the Starship is safe enough for them. There is even a low probability that Starship will be launching people before Crew Dragon starts launching people, which would be a real blow for NASA, but would really point out the problems of a safety first attitude for technological progress.
Safety first attitude? The space shuttle exploded with all crew lost, twice. Crew dragon exploded on one of its tests. Boeing test went tits up.
Rarely does a year go by without a rocket crashing or blowing up. If you want to blow up metal fine, but when it comes to people I find your attitude unhelpful.
>Safety first attitude? The space shuttle exploded with all crew lost, twice
2 lost out of 135 missions. That's what, a 1.48% failure rate? In a spacecraft that was kinda wonky given things like the fact each shuttle had nearly 3,000 FRCI tiles (each one present a possible failure point).
Launching into space with rockets will always be dangerous, you're strapping your cargo (human or otherwise) to one or more bombs and saying "please blow up in the way we want and not all at once".
Even if someone develops magical anti-gravity, there would always be the chance that it would fail and you'd drop out of the sky with no means of propulsion or that something would go wonky and part of the craft would suddenly implode. Even a space elevator would have risks.
Everyone knew the vehicle was wonky and that makes it even more egregious, it's not an excuse. It should have never stayed in service for as long as it did.
You seem to think 1.5% is an acceptable failure rate? Then what is too high in your mind, 50%?
Imagine we did have large scale space infrastructure/ spacestations / lunar colony, astronauts would have to fly that vehicle several hundred times in their career. No-one would survive till pension. We've had rockets for like 70 years now, it should not be a gamble whether you will survive.
18 people have died in space exploration since the 1950's. Over a million people die in car wrecks each year on earth[1]. Yes, we want to make space travel safer, but letting people who want to take bigger risks to do great things is something to encourage. It is not like the people going on these rockets are forced to do so. They work hard all their lives just to have a small chance to go. Some risk is needed to make technological progress in space travel at some reasonable rate.
So by US automotive safety standards, space travel has a long ways to go in terms of fatality reduction, whereas by global safety standards space travel is approximately on par.
⁴: Assuming - again - a constant 1 million deaths per year over 50 years
⁵: https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-the-world-population-k..., which assumes that there is at least one person capable of driving per registered vehicle in the world; this is almost certainly a drastic underestimation, since it doesn't factor in passengers at all.
This is an interesting comparison, but I think it unfairly favours rockets because you seem to be calculating chance of fatality of each passenger/driver.
Typically astronauts will have less than 10 flights, whereas a driver could have 10,000 trips in a car.
Typically you won't be driving (or riding in) a car for up to a year non-stop (without so much as a fuel stop), either; I feel like that offsets the quantity of trips to at least some extent.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540405
What I said then still stands:
“ 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.”