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Comment by Kwpolska | Hacker News Reader

That part wasn't well put, it was absurd techbro bullshit. Developing fast instead of carefully works if you're making a ride hailing app or a takeout ordering app or a social network. It absolutely doesn't if you're building a rocket.

If Uber experiences a catastrophic failure, some people might end up earning less money, some people might be late or miss important events. If a rocket experiences a catastrophic failure, debris may destroy the environment around it (as it did) and people on board may die (as they would have if there were any).

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You're ranting at the development approach of the company that runs the safest rocket ever flown. Heck, at 130 consecutive successful landings, their first stage touches down more reliably than most rockets have ever flown.

> It absolutely doesn't if you're building a rocket.

With all due respect, it obviously does work; on account of the Falcon 9 rocket being the safest (and cheapest, given its capability) rocket ever.

This is quite an amusing way to describe it. Clearly motivated, too.

> debris may destroy the environment around it

"Destroy the environment" invokes some rather grandiose associations for what is essentially pulverizing a steel tube in the middle of nowhere.

> and people on board may die

Perhaps you have missed the part where those tests are conducted with the explicit intention of figuring out failure modes.

SpaceX Crew Dragon is "one of two U.S. human-rated orbital transport spacecraft". This is a result of the same developmental process.

> "Destroy the environment" invokes some rather grandiose associations for what is essentially pulverizing a steel tube in the middle of nowhere.

This cavalier attitude to what it means to affect the environment is exactly what brought us to a steady march into climate disaster. The middle of nowhere is still an environment for other species, not showing a little respect or consideration for that is exactly the kind of moral arrogance from humankind we need to look into and fix.

I'd argue that this tedious posture of caring about the environment is vastly more responsible for the climate disaster; it is very popular with the anti-nuclear crowd, after all.

> the kind of moral arrogance from humankind we need to look into and fix

No we don't. What we need to fix is scope insensitivity and addiction to symbolics and gut feelings.

> I'd argue that this tedious posture of caring about the environment is vastly more responsible for the climate disaster; it is very popular with the anti-nuclear crowd, after all.

Posturing is all one can do when living under systems too big to be changed by the individual, it's through it that on can socially demonstrate insatisfaction with the status quo, posturing is just a social expression of values. I could call your posturing in the name of progress just as tedious and we wouldn't get anywhere.

> No we don't. What we need to fix is scope insensitivity and addiction to symbolics and gut feelings.

Neglect of scope in this case isn't lost, it's simply that for a facet of people the scope of a billionaire trying to reach Mars while destroying what they can get away with is what is seen as wrong with the establishment right now. It was known that the pad could be bad, they simply didn't care, probably because it'd be a little bit more expensive to do it properly, probably because people (like you did) wouldn't care, it's in "the middle of nowhere" for you anyway. That's the attitude that I'm against.

Good luck with fixing gut feelings, you'll discover that no human being is absolutely rational, and hence you'll never be able to act on pure rationality under a democracy.

Call it tedious as much as you want, I'm pretty jaded by this progress-at-any-cost posturing.

"I'm pretty jaded by this progress-at-any-cost posturing."

Some people, like me, are jaded by the suffocating safetyism that seems to have no upper limit in its appetite to introduce even more obstacles to everything in order to move the needle from 99,999 to 99,9999 per cent.

It is not just about industry; for example, the contemporary "helicopter parenting" standards are absolutely awful and I am glad that there is a "free range parenting" movement trying to counter them.

In my opinion, this pendulum needs to swing a little bit back if we want to solve the currently pressing issues. Life cannot be made riskless and Nothing Untoward Should Ever Happen isn't a viable innovation strategy.

> Life cannot be made riskless and Nothing Untoward Should Ever Happen isn't a viable innovation strategy.

Very well put. Life is all about tradeoffs. We should discuss them, both sides, instead of ignoring the downsides and pretending "you just want people to do!" You are right, it is not helpful and we can't solve problems like that.

You do realize this 100% worked with the Falcon 9 right? Nearly all things launching into space soon use the F9 to get to orbit and the bottom stage failed to land so much it was a meme until they eventually got it to work. This style of development totally works for aerospace as long as you make sure that the worst happening isn’t that bad. They failed to do that here but otherwise this development strategy is totally fine.

Also this rocket isn’t going to be human rated for a very long time, neither NASA or SpaceX are going to put people in it until it’s done a ton of cargo missions

I would argue it doesn't work in these fields too but it's a matter of attitude :)

SpaceX human fatalities: 0

NASA human fatalities: 15

It's almost as if there's benefit to running iterative tests to get real-world data. Who would've thought

incredibly bad take

it's a data point among others that SpaceX is doing something right. It's a much better argument also than the "rocket man bad" takes that envelop every Musk-related topic on HN

NASA has also existed for 80 years and conducted far more manned missions than spaceX has.

The intent was not to take a stab at NASA but rather provide a dumb counterargument to the parent poster's immature rant which would still make more sense than his positioning. Juvenile and counterproductive in retrospect.

NASA has had a failure once in every 55 manned flights, SpaceX has had 10 manned flights

I suppose in the interest of steelmanning your argument, it seems to me there’s a number of NASA deaths you’re omitting.

Challenger and Columbia each had seven crew members. Apollo I had three. Then there were a number of astronaut candidates who were killed in the line of duty and probably should be counted in your death toll.

On the other hand, how many manned missions has NASA launched, and how many has SpaceX done to date? Gotta guess there’s an order of magnitude difference there.

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