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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."

7 of 371 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Misses the point by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    9/11 Never Forget.

    9/11 Never Forget.

    9/11 Never Forget.

    We must never forget September 11, 2001. God bless our heroes like George W. Bush who rescued us from near oblivion. History will record his noble actions and he'll be revered much like FDR, except much less communist.

  2. evolvhealth by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Democrats and republicans? heheeh launching Oct. 2009 http://Evolvhealthy.com

  3. Re:Misses the point by andymadigan · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Less communist, and yet somehow more Stalinist.

    FDR wasn't communist, he saved capitalism.

    --
    The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
  4. Re:Exactly by viper34j · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    mod parent up, I almost pee'd myself.

  5. Re:Not just the space program... by ClosedSource · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    "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."

    Well the numbers are small now because most of the participants in WWI & WWII are already dead.

  6. Re:Misses the point by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    12/7 Never Forget.

    12/7 Never Forget.

    12/7 Never Forget.

  7. Re:Misses the point by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic
    I was going to do a "1/1 Never Forget ... 1/2 Never Forget ... 1/3 Never Forget ... etc", but it seems /. doesn't like that.

    Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition.

    So instead, I'll just say this:

    $month/$day Never Forget.