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Comment by petermcneeley | Hacker News Reader

"Apollo couldn’t happen today, not because we don’t want to go to the Moon, but because the risk would be unacceptable" I would imagine that there would be hundreds of highly qualified candidates that would find this risk acceptable. I would guess that if risk plays a role at all it would mostly the financial risk of these kinds of projects.

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Because the only reason to send a human to the moon is publicity, and having said human die defeats the whole point. If there were an actual reason to send people to space, we'd be just fine with deaths. People die in construction, engineering, research, war, and even recreation all the time.

But not on TV.

If construction had a reality TV component, we might be more comfortable with the idea of death on TV. That being said, millions watch LiveLeak.

or construction might have tighter safety constraints and better practices, or there might be less construction!

He means that management or organization wouldn't be willing to risk the death of an individual, not that the individual wouldn't accept the risk.

Shuttle engineers felt that the risk of an accident was about 1%.

Managers couldn't accept more than 0.01%

It turned out to be ... 1%.

Talk about a disconnect in risk assessment!

How risk friendly was NASA back in the day? I know there were deaths associated with the program, but every move was public, and every failure was a national failure and cold war propaganda defeat. I gotta imagine in that sort of climate nasa must have been very concerned about safety

I had to write and sign a letter to a Vodafone group company testifying that I would always wear my seatbelt when driving to their offices.

Even though that is the law of the land.

In the local public library, there's a "code of conduct" sign on the wall. The first item is that library patrons agree to obey the law.

Apollo happened when it did because the inflationary excess of our monetary system hadn’t caught up to us yet... but notice that when the bill came due (1970)... Apollo was dead.

> I would imagine that there would be hundreds of highly qualified candidates that would find this risk acceptable.

Sure. But modern politics finds this unacceptable.

arent boeing and spacex preparing capsules for the moon? would you be OK with applying 1969 safety tests standards on them?

The Apollo missions saw no loss of life in outside of training. Given the number of flights I would guess that it's single digit levels of risk. It's interestingly losses in space went up as time went on.

Of the 12 manned Apollo missions [1], 3 out of 36 astronauts died, for an 8% fatality rate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_missions#Manned...

“outside of training” includes Apollo 1

Like the shuttle program the numbers for Apollo could have rapidly gone far worse - and nearly did with 13.

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