Comment by timewizard
1 day ago
You just did. The counter reply is that true capitalism drove NASA. The original space programs were built with hundreds of contractors selected from thousands of bids. The entire purpose of NASA was to create a viable commercial space program.
Now we have two choices for some reason.
I beat this drum a lot.. but this is "monopoly" and "oligarchy."
And corruption!
> Now we have two choices for some reason.
Because its an insanely difficult problem when you have to be 99.9999% sure you won't kill an astronaut because we generally don't have the "if they die it sucks for them" attitude with space anymore.
> we generally don't have the "if they die it sucks for them" attitude with space anymore.
We kind of do though, although we strongly pretend we don't. Each time after Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia, NASA has made a show of reforming their safety culture but either not sticking to it ot not actually doing it beyond a superficial level. Most recently, there has been a developing issue with the Artemis program. The Artemis I mission, unmanned, was intended to validate all the design and modeling of the Orion spacecraft before people fly on it. It was subsequently discovered that the Orion heat shield suffered severe damage during reentry, partially falling apart in a way that wasn't expected.
At this point, a space program which actually takes the preservation of human life as seriously as NASA claims would postpone the manned Artemis II flight and fly more test missions until they get the Orion heat shield to perform as expected. But that's not what NASA is doing. They are instead proceeding with Artemis II, confident that this time their modeling is accurate. Instead of reentering with the trajectory they tested, they're going to send humans on a completely new reentry trajectory they have never tested before. Their modeling failed to predict the heat shield damage that occurred during Artemis I, but now they are trusting their modeling to keep people alive for Artemis II. It's totally wreckless.
And yeah yeah, it's mostly Congress's fault, NASA funding and all that, SLS costs too much and NASA doesn't have any more to spare for tests and they don't have time anyway with the politically imposed deadlines, etc etc.
Seems like letting the hand wringing pearl clutching public weigh in on these things was perhaps a mistake and we should be doing it the way we do every other dangerous or bleeding edge thing. There's a big enough pool of guys who'll jump off cliffs in wing suits or whatever that surely we can spare a few to put on rockets.
(Spare me the lecture about people who have no better choice feeling pressured to do so for money. Seems like every other navigable waterway in North America is named after someone who could've lived comfortably but continued sailing off into the unknown until he didn't come back. People do this stuff for glory more than money.)