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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

Note that NASA, I believe at Trump's urging, recently said they would try to place humans on the first flight of the Space Launch System (the new heavy lift rocket) - i.e., no unmanned testing first.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/science/nasa-looks-to-spe...

Is Musk still maintaining a relationship with Trump? When Uber founder Travis Kalanick left Trump's business council, Musk was still on it AFAIK. I wonder if Musk is doing this or announcing it for related reasons. Certainly Trump has a history, even in his short tenure, of pressuring businesses into announcements that suit his agenda. And the announcement seems to fit Trump's pattern: Impossible, brazen bravado. (Musk gives the impossible some credibility, but that's what is meant by lending someone your credibility.)

It's speculative, but it's also sad and a bad sign when we must look for government interference in the free market at this level, to provide propaganda for the President.

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NASA agreed to do a study to see if they could place humans on the test flight. That seems to me like the NASA equivalent of saying "Sure, I'll look into that" while trying to not look horrified.

I'm pretty sure that study will conclude that this is a bad idea.

I sure hope so! I wouldn't want to be on that flight.

The NASA article brought to mind a story of a well-known Cosmonaut knowingly launching in an unreliable vehicle because the politicians insisted. He died. He flew because he didn't want his understudy to be killed in his place. (I'm sure someone on HN knows the story better than I do ...).

That sounds like Soyuz 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_1

I know for a fact that NASA is still concerned about that Helium tank.

The explosion from that helium tank was slower than the emergency rockets on the dragon, from what I understand. So, had the capsule been fitted with them, it would have stayed entirely clear of the event. It'd be a rough ride, but it would have been a survivable event.

> had the capsule been fitted with them, it would have stayed entirely clear of the event. It'd be a rough ride, but it would have been a survivable event.

Safety isn't defined by, 'did it work out ok?', but by the risk. In this case, the outcome the parent describes is hypothetical; among other things, it assumes the emergency escape system would have worked perfectly. I assume NASA wants to evaluate the risk of the helium tanks, not the hypothetical outcome.

For example, some people have survived plane crashes; the fact that it worked out doesn't mean that the risk was acceptable.

> For example, some people have survived plane crashes; the fact that it worked out doesn't mean that the risk was acceptable.

The millions of people that fly every day despite past plane crashes would disagree with you.

The thing is that NASA doesn't want to put anyone on something has the chance of doing that. The emergency system is for emergencies. Ideally it should NEVER be used. Vetting for manned missions is a lot different than cargo. That's all I'm getting at here. When rockets have recently exploded NASA gets pretty worried about putting humans on it.

For comparison, the Space Shuttle has NO emergency system and approximately a 2% catastrophic failure rate ...

It had a couple abort options if one or more SMEs failed. Unfortunately, none of the catastrophic failures were predicted.

Nature has a way to do things we don't expect it to do.

Launch Abort is a system that should _never_ have to be activated. If you use Launch Abort, the series of failures preceding it was so catastrophic that you had no alternative to avoid loss of life.

I'm pretty sure Musk is doing what's reliably necessary to keep his companies running under Trump.

An administration full of oil wealth and climate change deniers are a significant business risk when you make electric cars and have States banking photovoltaics.

He needs to be within Trump's monkeysphere.

"Trump's monkeysphere" ...

I loved that. Thanks for a good chuckle.

Downvotes be damned.

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