Hacker News Reader

Comment by deepsun | Hacker News Reader

And that's why it's harder (or easier?) to make the same landing again -- we taking way less chances. Today we know of way more failure modes than back then.

View on HN

They sent people up in a tin can with the bare minimum computational power to manage navigation and control sequencing. It was barely safer than taking a barrel over Niagara Falls. We do have much more capable and reliable technology.

Buzz Aldrin (?) was quoted as recalling holding a pencil inside the capsule as they were out in space and thinking "that wall isn't very thick or strong, I could probably jam a pencil through it pretty easily..."

Death being a layer of aluminum away changes your mind.

It's a miracle nobody died in flight during the program. Exploding oxygen tank, rockets shaking themselves to pieces during launch, getting hit by lightning on top of a flying skyscraper full of kerosene and liquid oxygen....

Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died on the Apollo program. I feel it's not polite to ignore that fact even if you add an 'in flight' qualifier.

And it's even more interesting in the fact that our rocket program started with the former rocket scientists from Nazi Germany who were brought over at the end of WW2 to work in the American rocket/missile program.

Starting from the first test pilots, a lot of people died for us to get to the point to launch that flight. So while no one died on the flight, lots of people died just getting us there. If I recall, in The Right Stuff, it's mentioned that those early test pilots had something like a 25% mortality rate.

The early jet age was pretty nuts. Check the Wikipedia page for a random fighter from the era and you'll see figures like, 1,300 built, 50 lost in combat, 1,100 lost in accidents. And that's operational aircraft. Test pilots were in even more danger.

Some were pretty bad, but none were nearly that bad. The B-58 Hustler lost 22% of its airframes, the F7U Cutlass 25%, the F-104 Starfighter in German service lost 33%. And those were outliers.

You're right, those numbers are from the F-8 but include non-total-loss accidents.

I don't think the numbers you quoted are outliers, though. The F-100 lost ~900 out of 2,300. The F-106 lost ~120/342. That's a pretty big list of planes with a 1/5-1/3 loss rate.

You should go back even a little further, the USPS air mail service lost 31 of the first 40 pilots.

Back in the days where the plan was "So we've built literal signal fires and giant concrete arrows and well, good luck, it won't help"

Have you ever listened to Robert Calvert's "Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters"?

Think about the "failure mode" of the aircraft that won World War II, the Supermarine Spitfire.

There was a fuel tank mounted between the engine and cockpit so if it took enough of a hit to puncture right through (not hard, in practice) the failure mode was that the cockpit was now full of a 350mph jet of burning petrol.

Still, it did the job.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com