Finally, someone at NASA is willing to take the book seriously enough to critically review it. Obviously, I will respond at some point (TL;DR version, he cherry picks and ignores much of what I have to say, but that’s to be expected, given his NASA-centric viewpoint), but it’s a bad week between taxes and ISPCS. Anyway, despite my disagreement with the review itself, I’m sincerely grateful to Mr. Fodrocci for finally acknowledging the book’s existence, rather than (as much of the industry, including IAASS, has) pretending it doesn’t exist and hoping it will just go away.
12 thoughts on “Safe Is Not An Option: A Review”
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If we listened to you, Rand, we’d not only have no LAS on spacecraft, but we wouldn’t have LAS on commercial airliners either.
Oh, wait….
🙂
It’s kind of a strawman. Rand never said an escape system wasn’t desirable or useful, he merely said the immediate lack of one should not be considered a roadblock to operating, I.E. nice to have but not absolutely necessary.
I totally agree with Rand on the LAS issue (my crack above was in jest) . I just found it a head-scratcher that the NASA guy doing the review would pick it that particular issue – maybe he hasn’t heard of the Space Shuttle, which NASA seemed to think was just fine without a LAS?
Well, they never did make many of them. And it’s been years since they last flew.
It is great when people demonstrate how stuck in group think they are:
Yeah, right. Like the present Indian Mars orbiter. Or the Chinese moon rover.
The exploration of the solar system will be carried out by international partnerships, not by daredevils, and they will insist on a methodical approach to risk identification and mitigation, which will almost certainly include an LAS.
So did the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria have a LAS? Magellan sure could have used a LAS in the Philippines…
Private enterprise never did any exploration on their own. Planetary Resource and other current enterprises are just flukes of history. Never have business, or Trading Companies, done any exploring on their own for fame or profit except for ones such as:
African & Eastern Trade Corporation
Augustine Heard & Co.
Austrian East India Company
Barbary Company
Bergen Greenland Company
Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation
CFAO
Compagnie de Chine
Compagnie de Saint-Christophe
Compagnie du Nord
Company of One Hundred Associates
Company of Scotland
Company of the Moluccas
Comprador
Courteen association
Danish East India Company
Danish West India Company
Dent & Co.
Dieppe Company
Dodwell & Co.
Dutch East India Company
Dutch West India Company
East India Company
French East India Company
French West India Company
General Trade Company
Gibb, Livingston & Co.
Guinea Company (London)
Guinea Company of Scotland
Hudson’s Bay Company
Hutchison Whampoa
Indonesia Trading Company
MMTC Ltd
Jardine Matheson
Kaptallah
King George’s Sound Company
Kunst and Albers
Lamson & Hubbard Trading Company
Li & Fung
London Company
Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie
Mississippi Company
Muscovy Company
North West Company
Northern Traders Company
Northwest Cameroon Company
Olyphant & Co.
Plus500
Portuguese East India Company
Royal African Company
Royal Greenland Trading Department
Samuel Samuel & Co
Shewan, Tomes & Co.
Society of Berbice
Society of Suriname
Somers Isles Company
South Cameroon Company
Swedish East India Company
Swedish West India Company
TeleTrade
Virginia Company
It seems increasingly likely that the next person to stand on the Moon or the first to go to Mars will get their via private means. Maybe even completely private, without government involvement at all.
Meanwhile, governments haven’t gotten people out of LEO since 1972.
So every once in a while someone will start complaning about how NASA needs to go back to the moon or something similar, I always say the same thing. “The next time a US government employees lands on the mood, they will be meet at the airlock by a Hooters Girl offering 25% off ‘loony chicken wings’.”
I just bought the Kindle version of the book and read it. Nice work, Rand.
We have a guy in Australia, Dick Smith, who got a lot of flak when he was chairman of the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (Australian equivalent of FAA but much less competent) , for promoting the concept of “affordable safety”. It simply meant that you spend the money (which is always limited) where it will do the most good (after careful analysis) instead of where you “feel” it needs to be spent. Fortunately he has a thick hide.
The NASA type philosophy on safety has resulted in a situation where we have a sparsely populated continent in a first world country, with terrain and weather ideally suited to aviation, with a relatively small and expensive aviation economy. Oh, and it isn’t that good at safety either. Helicopter operations are 2.74 times as dangerous in Australia as in the USA. I’ve no reason to believe fixed wing is much different.
Dick Smith also has a helicopter. He flies a helicopter. Did we mention that he likes his helicopter? Helicopter.
Knee-jerk reaction at 0550 CDT: Fodroci unintentionally reinforces some of Rand’s arguments. What’s more important, when a conscious choice can be made in time to affect outcome: Saving/protecting the crew, or saving a multi-billion dollar vehicle? Fodroci gives examples of NASA accepting more risk to crewmember safety to save ISS. In emergencies. Perhaps NASA should think hard about that in current and future DDTE efforts (especially Commercial Crew), in the following processes Fodroci says are SOP at NASA:
“Safety, cost, schedule, and functionality are routinely traded against one another. ”
“Our focus is on identifying, characterizing, communicating, and mitigating risk to the greatest extent practical, so that we accept risk with our eyes wide open.”
I had the same sense, Fodroci’s arguments are exactly what I would expect from him and exactly why NASA isn’t launching vehicles anymore. To that end, his review reinforces Rands arguments.