Space Ship Two down near Mojave

I would consider both Shuttle losses unacceptable, given the extensive engineering agitation that went on about them before the accidents happened.

Any loss of life is unacceptable. Both shuttles crashed because of negligence in NASA. That most certainly unacceptable.
 
If we use the same percentage that would be 15 airplane crashes into and out of Atlanta... Every day.

And if we figure it based on years, then Delta has had one additional accident than the shuttles and far more loss of life. You are comparing apples and oranges just like I did.
 
I would consider both Shuttle losses unacceptable, given the extensive engineering agitation that went on about them before the accidents happened.

Any loss, even from an "unavoidable" reason is unacceptable. That's what should drive every single one of us in our industry to work hard to better ourselves every day.
 
And if we figure it based on years, then Delta has had one additional accident than the shuttles and far more loss of life. You are comparing apples and oranges just like I did.

Years don't matter.

Ships don't sink when they are in port.

When the craft moves the statistics are running and if it crashes 2% of the movements then your odds of being in the next smoking hole are disturbingly high.
 
Years don't matter.

Ships don't sink when they are in port.

When the craft moves the statistics are running and if it crashes 2% of the movements then your odds of being in the next smoking hole are disturbingly high.
I watched a talk today that said you had a 1 in 9 chance of dying on a shuttle launch.
 
Did Faux News tell you that?

Ummm. No. Unlike people that enjoy Fox news I actually do my own math and research.

Keep up if you can.

135 shuttle missions with 2 disasters. That's a 1.4% accident rate.

I actually used the wrong number for Atlanta. September operations data (http://www.atlanta-airport.com/docs/Traffic/201409.pdf) shows about 2300 daily operations (more than double the 1000 figure I quoted, which I think is Delta's number of daily ATL operations).

So a 1.4% accident rate on 2300 flights is about 32 accidents a day.

And if we figure it based on years, then Delta has had one additional accident than the shuttles and far more loss of life. You are comparing apples and oranges just like I did.

If Delta only operated 4.5 flights a year we could actually compare. They don't. They operate at several orders of magnitude more than that. Just based on the 1000 daily operations in ATL only figure (which isn't accurate at all because they operate out of other airports too), in 30 years they operated almost 11 million flights (compared to the 135 shuttle operations). During the 30 year period of 1981 to 2011 they had 3 fatal accidents. Even if you include the fatal accidents of their regional carriers you are still at less than 20 total accidents that involved fatalities. That's a .00018% accident rate compared to the shuttle program's 1.4% rate.

It may be apples and oranges, but it's all fruit when you use the right numbers.
 
I got a statistic from @Seggy earlier that really made me think. I've done a little research on the topic since this spiked my interest and that fatality rate is much higher than I thought. Still, it doesn't surprise me as this is a frontier we know far less about than flying within our atmosphere and there is a much smaller margin for errors of any kind. Again, I just hope it doesn't slow down the private space sector.
 
Bottom line, this is still new to us. Space travel is STILL in its infancy. While accidents like this, and the Space Shuttle, are tragic, they should be expected. To say otherwise, you are doing those who have died in the pursuit of space travel a disservice. There aren't many people who have operated on the ragged edge of technology that have done so with a zero failure rate. Those who test pilot these things, and then go on to become "the regulars" know AND accept the risks willingly. The selection process is so hard, that men and women devote their entire life's work to just being accepted into these programs. Good for them. They are pioneers. And history teaches us that sometimes, that comes at a heavy cost.
 
I hate it that the Virgin craft went down and that there was any loss of life. Of course to say "any loss of life is unacceptable" probably isn't reasonable. NASA makes mistakes and sometimes those consequences take a human life (or more) in the balance. Mistakes are OK. Over reaching is OK. I think anyone that's worked with NASA understands that 50 guys watching you change a bolt is NOT an exaggeration. NASA doesn't cowboy up. What does this have to do with the price of tea in China? Allow me to segue.

Virgin, Orbital, and SpaceX are all heralds announcing the start of the space age. Industrial Rev, Technological, Rev, and now a Spacial Revolution. The first Trillionair will be a space pirate that we will later remember as an intrepid industrialist who shook worlds to the foundation with his pioneering blah blah blah *other soaring rhetoric*. When government moves out of the way (or in our case gives up) and private enterprise jumps in, you're going to have a few clowns that trade profits for human life. Some will even get away with it. However, that's not the majority of these people. There will be tragedies, there will be pain, but there is a huge payoff outside of money. Exploration, increasing scientific knowledge, developing new technologies, that all leads to MORE opportunities for all of humanity. Exploration and science truly is the tide that raises all boats. All good things (exploration & colonizing all of earth's continents by a small tribe of fuzzy axe wielders) have come from exploration, and so have many bad, but the sum of the equation is still positive.

Try to look past horrific accidents. If there is criminal neglect, let it be prosecuted, but bad things will happen to companies and nations who put safety first. Sometimes you lose even if you do everything right. Engineers attempt every safety measure, but pilots / passengers will still die because someone couldn't fathom every possibility. Tough.

Our culture is always trying to assign blame. I hope the investigators aren't pressured to assign blame. These guys are trying to launch rockets, and they won't get it right every time. As long as everyone in harms way understands and accepts the risk, I say we cheer first and push blame around last (assuming there was no criminal intent or criminally negligent decisions made).
 
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I got a statistic from @Seggy earlier that really made me think. I've done a little research on the topic since this spiked my interest and that fatality rate is much higher than I thought. Still, it doesn't surprise me as this is a frontier we know far less about than flying within our atmosphere and there is a much smaller margin for errors of any kind. Again, I just hope it doesn't slow down the private space sector.


It most likely won't slow down the private sector. It certainly will slow down the commercial travel aspect of it. How can it not?
 
Any loss, even from an "unavoidable" reason is unacceptable. That's what should drive every single one of us in our industry to work hard to better ourselves every day.
You might want to read The Challenger Launch Decision and Truth, Lies, and O-Rings. Both of them deal with some very interesting organizational factors that directly caused both Space Shuttle accidents.
Any loss of life is unacceptable. Both shuttles crashed because of negligence in NASA. That most certainly unacceptable.
God, we're a bunch of wusses.

Absolute boulderdash. First: There is no such thing as an operation that is zero-risk. Even when you strap on whatever regional airliner you fly, there's a chance, however remote (and it is extremely remote, nowadays), that you will not be coming home. A strategic safety goal of zero preventable hull losses, serious injuries and deaths makes sense for common carriage. It makes a lot of sense for the space business too, but in manned spaceflight, we don't know what we don't know. We don't really know, I think, what is 'preventable' in that business. We're really good at mitigating a lot of airline flying related-risks, but this isn't an airline that we're talking about here. These guys are not operating on proven technologies, and so on.

We just haven't done that much of it. We're really good at flying airliners. We're excellent at it, in fact, in this country. But we haven't had nearly that level of experience with manned spaceflight, and people are going to continue to die in the race to conquer the stars, just as they did in conquering the sky. It's not an excuse for malfeasance, criminal neglect, or things like the Challenger/Columbia disasters, but we'd be wise to re-read Gus Grissom's quote.

Spaceflight is not the airlines. In many ways we don't really know what we're doing on spaceflight. Consider that 100 years ago we didn't know what we were doing in airplanes, either. I consider it relatively amazing (given the nature of the technologies and performance extremes involved and ignoring organizational hogwash that was responsible for the Shuttle accidents) that the casualty rate for our manned spaceflight programs hasn't been higher. The Apollo system pushed the limits of the day's technology and human performance; that a single LM was not splattered across the surface of the Moon is truly remarkable.

Bureaucracy killed the Challenger/Columbia astronauts. I would call those accidents avoidable. But I'm really surprised there weren't more. (I mean, they signed the Shuttle off as "airworthy" after a grand total of four all-up flights. Four flights. Just four. Harumph. Experimental...)
 
Did you watch that clip? Tell me if it had any amount of substance whatsoever

I don't watch any of the major news networks because I already know their product sucks. You do too, but it's just fashionable to play the "LOOK HOW STUPID THEY ARE" game in this group. It's a dead horse this forum refuses to stop beating. I'm over it.
 
At the ALPA Air Safety Forum this year (just a FYI ALPA is the largest NGO Safety Organization in the world) they had Garrett Reisman who is the Commerical Crew Program Manager for SpaceX present. HE was the one who basically said that manned spaceflight has a horrific safety record and that the commercial space operators 'aspire' to be where the commercial air travel is. Attached is his presentation.

The stats are jaw dropping and speak for themselves...

http://safetyforum.alpa.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=C6PZKGkbD84=&tabid=1004
 
Any loss of life is unacceptable. Both shuttles crashed because of negligence in NASA. That most certainly unacceptable.

I agree that negligence is unacceptable. I disagree that any loss of life is, however. We wouldn't be where we are in our line of work had many before us not made the ultimate sacrifice and had those left behind not learned from that sacrifice. By continuing to do what we do every day, we accept that risk even if it is significantly less than space flight. We progress by learning from our mistakes. Unfortunately, sometimes those mistakes are sometimes fatal. As nice as it would be to recover everybody we send up there, realistically it isn't going to happen. In order to make this sort of venture safer, we have to accept these risks, learn from the mistakes and apply those lessons moving forward. Like we have done in nearly every industry that involves the very real possibility of death, including our own.

As others have mentioned, space flight is still a risky venture. It's also still relatively new to us. The more we do it, the better we'll be at it. But it won't come without a cost.
 
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