I think the reason why government is often bad at what it does is because it is influenced by the actions of everyone.
my view in a nutshell- private sector- usually evil but efficient.
government- usually benevlolent but incompetent.
As far as having a real influence through the ballot box, frankly, I’ve never had an election where I wasn’t profoundly disappointed with a year or two even when my guys won.
With a private entity, I’m usually satisfied with the result, or I don’t go there a second time.
Case in point, we are probably going to go to a private enterprise space program. NASA will contract with private contractors to get payloads up, as will research institutes and even private individuals. Some rich fool wants to create thousands of jobs to to fly in space, I’m totally down with that. (Yes, I mean you, Richard Branson.)
Also- two disasterous flights out of 133 is about a 1% fail rate.
Airlines have 37,000 flights a day. How often do you hear about a crash where everyone was killed? Maybe once or twice a year, usually in another country.
That aeroplanes don’t go into outer space. That’s a trifling irrelevancy that cannot possibly have anything whatsoever to do with the matter at hand, which is that government sucks, always and forever, at everything. Like that time when teachers, nurses, school bus drivers, cops, city councillors, and administrators all got together and crashed the stock market, wiped out banks, and damn near destroyed the universe while hauling in billions in bonuses and paying no tax. Anyway, government sucks and planes are space shuttles.
Airliners not going into space does not have anything to do with the rates of failure. A certain percentage of aircraft crash, and a certain percentage of people are killed. There are percentages of spacecraft failures, and car crashes, and medical device failures. The decision to make is what percentage of losses are acceptable for any endeavor. A 1% rate for fatal car crashes or fatal airline crashes is considered too great. Given the nature of space flight, and of flight test in general, 1% is tragic but reasonable.
Ummm…yea. That was my point. Its silly to compare statistics of spacecraft to airplanes. Rocket travel is going to be inherently more dangerous the airline travel, regardless of whether the rocket is being launched by private or public actors.
The program came to a screaching halt when Challenger blew up, leaving a 2% failure rate. I understand the PR aspect, but I wonder what NASA insiders think an acceptable failure rate of manned space fight is between themselves.
Either way, while I understand the previous point, stating that ‘X’ is remarkable success if I set aside all of it’s failures isn’t much of a claim.
Acceptance of a 1% failure rate is actually codified in NASA/TM-2003-210785 Guidelines and Capabilities for Designing Human Missions, Chapter 3: Human-Rated Vehicle Requirements:
*3.2 Safety and Reliability
Requirement 6: The program shall be designed so that the cumulative probability of safe crew return over the life of the program exceeds 0.99. This will be accomplished through the use of all available mechanisms including mission success, abort, safe haven, and crew escape.
Requirement 7: A crew escape system shall be provided on future (e.g. post-Space Shuttle) Earth-to-orbit (ETO) vehicles for safe crew extraction and recovery from in-flight failures across the flight envelope from prelaunch to landing. The escape system shall have a probability of successful crew return of 0.99.*
Thanks Stranger. Faciniating discussion as always when it’s about space flight.
We have discussions about “acceptable” losses when doing campaign analysis for the military in my day job. We were writing about war ship losses not too long ago when a three-star said “you can have all the analysis you want, but remember the American people have their own definition of what’s acceptable.”
The particular issue with both the Challenger and Columbia (and, to a certain extent, the Apollo 1 cabin fire that killed White, Chafee, and Grissom) was at the hazard that caused the failure was known and had been briefed to program management as a serious issue, and management turned around and dismissed it based not upon a credible risk hazard study or after consideration of potential motivations, but rather on a “this hasn’t proven to be a problem yet so we’ll assume that it won’t become one.” All of these tragedies could have been avoided with awareness, inspection criteria, or appropriate launch constraints, with a minimal increase in cost or effort, but the fear by management is that it would expose more skeletons that would lead to greater delays and the potential for cancellation by a mercurial Congress. The fact is that space propulsion technology is not sufficiently mature for “routine” human spaceflight in the way that air travel is, and the cost of learning and improving is so onerous that we prefer to be obtuse to a real estimation of risk.
If you’re going to compare the safety record of airplanes to space shuttles, the real question would be, out of the first 133 flights of airplanes, how many ended in disaster? The reason the Shuttle is so dangerous is that 133 flights really isn’t enough testing for proper R&D on a device that complicated. After the Challenger disaster, the designs and procedures were improved so that that sort of failure wouldn’t happen again. Likewise, after the Columbia. Repeat often enough, and disasters become as rare as they’ve become with airplanes.
And the government basically crushed the dreams of millions of American children. That means that kids can’t say “When I grow up, I want to be an astronaut!”, anymore, because there are no astronauts, and if shit doesn’t get straightened out pretty soon, there won’t be any more astronauts, ever, for infinity.
