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Comment by Incipient | Hacker News Reader

With any commercial fairly extreme engineering activity, is safety not going to suffer?

Not thinking of any particular recent extreme (high) pressure endeavours.

The pressure differential for a sub at Titanic depth is almost 6,000psi, for a spacecraft in a vacuum it's 14.7psi. It's a very different problem.

But then again, don't most materials work better in compression than in tension ?

To some extent but the stark difference in pressures makes it inherently a different problem.

It's actually easer to build a balloon than a compressible can.

0.5mm hole in a space craft is a slow leek you can fill with epoxy (it's happened). The same in a sub at the depth of the Titanic, there is no fix and it's not a 0.5mm hole, it's an implosion.

I hope this means we'll get a Chesley Bonestell -style space wheel in our lifetimes.

gravity is truly the weakest force

This is just a recency bias thing. There are gigantic private cars, private ships, private planes and even private rockets used everyday all over the world. Not to mention gigantic mining equipment, huge oil platforms and so on and so on.

Safety is always critical and commercial and non-commercial projects both can have safety issues or engineer something very safe.

Wouldn't really talk about aviation. We're still killing lots of people due to dodgy maintenance. Lack of understanding brought us popular hits such as the Hindenburg, and cars/ships/etc don't fail as catastrophically but they break all the time.

If you compare everything to a perfect world where nothing ever happens then nothing is gone measure up.

Private aviation isn't special in terms of accidents either, though. There have been plenty of NASA spacecraft and military aircraft lost due to accidents, maintenance issues, and design flaws.

>Private aviation isn't special in terms of accidents either

Yes it is, because for what it does it has an incredible safety record.

It's pretty obvious that I was comparing it to government/military aviation and not other forms of transportation, and that I was saying it was safe.

>Wouldn't really talk about aviation.

But I would. Flying is incredibly safe for putting people in aluminium tubes kilometers above the surface of the earth and propelled by combusting fans of immense power.

The idea that flying has become a low risk means of transportation is absolutely incredible and a real testament to safety standards working.

>With any commercial fairly extreme engineering activity, is safety not going to suffer?

Many, many commercial companies work on safety critical systems. You ensure safety through standards, testing and independence. Despite recent lapses, e.g. flying is still incredibly safe.

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