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Risk Aversion At Odds With Manned Space Exploration
Several readers including tyghe!! sent in a Popular Mechanics piece analyzing the Augustine Commission's recommendations and NASA itself in terms of a persistent bias towards risk aversion, and arguing that such a bias is fundamentally incompatible with the mission of opening a new frontier. "Rand Simberg, a former aerospace engineer finds the report a little too innocuous. In this analysis, Simberg asks, what happens when we take the risk out of space travel? ... Aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan said a few years ago that if we're not killing people, we're not pushing hard enough. That might sound harsh to people outside the aerospace community but, as Rutan knows, test pilots and astronauts are a breed of people that willingly accepts certain risk in order to be part of great endeavors. They're volunteers and they know what they're getting into."
It's most of society now. People are so wrapped up in a single death that they make things worse for everyone. Death happens, you cant stop it forever.
A few years ago in WWI&II casualties were in the thousands and hundreds of thousands. Now they are in the dozens yet there is more protest over them than before. Life-support for people who are already dead costs millions and consumes resources otherwise usable for those that still have a chance. Prisons are full of career criminals who are little more than animals, but we have to be nice to them so that when we let them out again they can continue their life of crime. Homeowners are prosecuted for murder after killing a violent intruder in their homes or on the street (google harold fish). Gun control advocates cry about how dangerous guns are, ignoring the mountains of evidence showing they reduce violent crime and are more likely to be used in legal self-defense than in a crime.
because, if it saves even one life, isn't it worth anything in the world? Including the life of another?
There is zero urgency to colonize space, plenty of urgency to master it with unmanned systems, and given the relative costs sending meat at the moment is worse than romantic silliness, it COSTS TOO MUCH relative to the
return from remotely manned missions.
Even the Air Force has figured out leaving the meat puppet back in a control van is a good idea and the benefits more important than the romance of ghey aerial duels.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."