so the place they chose is not only next to an essential bird sanctuary, but according to that video they chose a place so close to the water table they physically can’t dig a flame and debris diversion system!?
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When they get around to launching one of these every 4 minutes (to keep everyone on Mars alive), I thought the launch platforms were going to be out in the gulf?
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i think taking musk at his word has proven to be a losing proposition. i’d bet the spacex engineers did the best with the conditions they were given. meanwhile, musk was likely the decider on where and when the launches would take place.
dousing the countryside with dust and debris of unknown toxicity seems rather parallel to the recent spate of train derailments. but i guess externalizing cost is how we get billionaires in the first place
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I think that gets to my larger point, though, about ideologically driven space programs. What drove much of the space race was the cold war, and the desire to “prove” which system was “better”… As you note, this led to deaths on both sides of the iron curtain related to the space programs.
We had an opportunity to keep NASA at the forefront of space exploration, work collaboratively with our former enemies (and with other space organizations), and genuinely work for a non-ideologically driven space program that truly reflected humanity - not just our current nation-state oriented world, driven by capitalist competition… I’d argue that the privatization of space travel (which I know people around here know has been endlessly theorized and debated in sci-fi books, films, shows, etc - we all know at least some of the canon there) is really ideological, along the same lines as the cold war. Putting private, for-profit companies at the forefront will have certain consequences, that will include rushing to market and cutting corners. And of course, that can happen with a public program too (as @anon87143080 pointed out with regards to Challenger and Columbia)… I would love to see us be more thoughtful, and understand space as not something to colonize and profit from, but to understand and enrich humanity…
I guess I’m just saying we can do better and we can think creatively and thoughtfully about how we do this work moving forward, and it does not have to be in the context of profit… Not to disappoint Quark… Sorry Quark.
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I’m in the middle of For All Mankind, and while I know they needed to somehow get to “what if the space race continued through the 70s at the same pace as the 50s and 60s”, I found it hard to swallow from the start, because (to me) alternative histories have to have a plausible causation. Knowing what we know now about the Soviet space program, it’s just too implausible. They weren’t even close. And if they had been doing successful test launches, we would have known. It took years of stepping stone missions to get there, and somehow the Soviets either did so undetected and/or just threw a dart blindfolded and hit on their first try? C’mon.
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The only thing the Soviets might have done was to send a manned capsule around the Moon before Apollo 8.
Their Zond programme tested the Soyuz 7K-L1 hardware launched on a Proton rocket which would have seen manned missions go around the Moon from May 1967 onwards; but five successive launch attempts saw the Proton booster fail catastrophically.
Once they got the Proton working, the Soviets made five attempts to launch prototype Zond missions beginning in April 1968. Zond 5 became the first spacecraft to make a successful loop around the Moon and return to Earth in September 1968 carrying a number of small animals, but landed in the Indian Ocean rather than Kazakhstan. Three further missions carrying animals were made with patchy success.
A mission called Zond 9 was planned in July 1969 to loop around the Moon (by which time of course Apollo 8 had already done just that and Apollo 10 had taken the LM to the Moon). It was cancelled shortly before the launch and Zond itself was cancelled in 1970.
Officially, the Zond missions had nothing to do with a manned programme. The truth was only revealed in the late 1980s.
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what if Korolev didn’t die?
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Unfortunately, it still wouldn’t be enough.had he lived, the feud with Glushko would have carried on, we still would have been stuck with the flaws of the N1 and there wouldn’t have been the resources to catch up to NASA’s budget.
To get a chance at a Soviet moon landing, you would need to (at least) ensure that the multiple feuding design bureaux were compelled to work together much earlier, with much earlier political support and resources.
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Are you saying the Soviets decided to yield before Zond?
Dammit, so close…
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I’d heard they damaged the pad, but I had no idea it was that bad.
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No no, no damage to the pad. IT WAS A COMPLETE SUCCESS! /s
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Hold on- did you just claim the Soviet space program has only killed four people? Have you even read this thread or a single history book about their program? We don’t even know yet how many people the Soviets killed because they literally altered photographs and destroyed records to hide it, but we know it’s a lot.
NASA’s safety record is outstanding for the things they were doing. Apollo 1 was a major wake up call, and the organization takes safety very very seriously.
A launch abort system wasn’t practical on the shuttle, and wouldn’t have helped anyway. Challenger blew up too high and too suddenly, and Columbia’s issues weren’t known until after re-entry was going to be required.
Until some private company has done even half the things for crewed spaceflight that NASA has, then we can talk safety records.
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I love how the stans can’t even retreat to the “it successfully left the pad, hence it was a successful test!” line anymore. No, it did not successfully leave the pad. There’s no trick to making a big thing go up a little ways; the trick is doing it without destroying everything in the immediate area. Note to Elon: there’s a difference between “iterative testing/moving fast and breaking things” and “blowing stuff up for shits and giggles.”
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3 engines weren’t engaged from the earliest telemetry I saw. 1 in 10 engines completely failed.
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No he very explicitly did not.
Any way you spin it the space shuttle was not a very safe way to travel.
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I agree with you about the Soviets, and also about Apollo 1, but the Space Shuttle was dangerous by design and shouldn’t have been flown. Its catastrophic failure and death rate were on a par with projections according to the leaks from Sally Ride.
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I know someone who worked for NASA while the space shuttle was still in operation, they said that there was no amount of money that would get them to go up to space on that thing.
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i tried to find more info on that, and came up nearly empty. one line in one obituary stating that it happened, and i didn’t see anything in her wikipedia article. any links or sources you know?
i did find this from an interview with her. she was i think the only person to be on both of the review panels
NASA had a strong reputation for quality control, risk management, and attention to detail—a real appreciation for the fact that nothing could be allowed to go wrong. But they had let their attention drift; there was more willingness to let problems be solved over time instead of immediately, and that was significant in both accidents. The people who were at NASA at the time of the Challenger accident will never forget it and took those lessons to heart. But the institution itself did not do anything to make sure that new people were taught those lessons when they came to NASA and were later elevated to positions of power
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Not only was it a failure from a safety standpoint, John Logsdon convincingly argues that it represented a failure of policy, as well.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6084857_The_Space_Shuttle_Program_A_Policy_Failure
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