Question for the Romney campaign. Why is the governor opposed to opening up new resources? Why does he think that we would have to spend more to do so than we are now on a rocket that will never fly?
It was pilot error. As the article notes, humans will always be fallible (it’s one of the defining characteristics) and you can never build a guaranteed safe system. There are probably lessons to be learned here for the design of space transports as well. But I don’t think that “automated systems will be safer” is one of them.
Two articles from the current issue have been put on line for non-subscribers. One is a piece by Jeff Foust, discussing the stakes for commercial spaceflight in the upcoming COTS demonstration flights, and the other is a longer essay by Marcia Smith (who I first met at a AAS conference in Boston about thirty years ago) on the past and future of space policy, including human spaceflight. It’s a good overview, but I don’t think she’s sufficiently critical of the damaging role that Congress has played, and the role that pork, rather than actual accomplishments in space, plays in the SLS mess. She is justly harsh on the administration, whose policy making with space has been just as inept as in all else, though at least it had a more sensible policy even if it is unable to coherently articulate it. I’ve spent the last two years trying to make up for it, defending the new direction with numerous essays in various venues, but it’s hard to break through the FUD, noise and parochialism, particularly given how unimportant space policy is, as she notes herself.