Quote:
Originally Posted by astroron
Not really,after watching Challenger and Columbia splattered across the sky not only loosing human lives but also costing Billions of dollars.
Things have to be efficient and safe now, and so they should be.
It's all right us TV hero's sitting back and saying your taking to long,but of course it's not our life's or money.
Way back in the fifties and sixties, American cars used to be death traps,falling apart in crashes that in today's cars are just classed as fender benders.
It took People like Ralph Nader and others to get safe cars built otherwise
we would still have unsafe vehicles on the roads.
Space aint going anywhere soon so when they eventually fly these spacecraft they will be the safest they can be,and so they should be.
Just my 2¢ worth.
Cheers 
PS I'm sure the astronauts and their families are glad that these things are tested to the enth degree and there is also an escape mechanism.
They wouldn't want to leave home without one.  |
Okay, Ron... not starting an argument here, not my intent at all... but, you need to understand something about me...
I served in the Navy for 28 years... we took risks... we had to.. otherwise, we'd never sail, never go on operations, never achieve anything... but, we also did so in a safety concious manner... if you get my drift... so, respectfully, I am not a TV hero getting upset... I've actually lived those risks in real time... it's part of what I did... & chose to do.
Challenger splatted across the sky was about NASA management being too worried about it's image at the cost of ignoring specific engineering advice on the morning of launch... not about a testing regime to mitigate every known risk... it was about arrogance & image, nothing less, nothing more.
Columbia on the other hand was a risk that was known & had serious potential to occur on every shuttle mission. In fact, on the first launch of the space shuttle, when they got into orbit & used the cargo bay camera they noticed tiles missing from the tail section... What is more of concern here is that despite a known risk of losing tiles & the potential ramifications, it appears that nothing was ever done to look at whether proper inspections could be undertaken pre re-entry & was it possible to repair damage prior to conducting a re-entry... two very different issues in the space shuttle program.
Cars... yep, the introduction of seatbelts, airbags, ABS brakes, impact zones to improve the safety of cars in collisions.. yep, all for that...
Cars... introduction of crash detections systems, self parking vehicles, etc... nope.. because they just increase the problem we are seeing more & more & more in our society.. people failing to take responsibility for their own poor actions... the 'it's not my fault' brigade... again, a very different issue... from what I was raising...
The fact is, certain activities that sit on the cutting edge of technology are extremely dangerous activities.. if you have watched the programs on Apollo program & more recently the shuttle program, the people who understood this the most were those sitting atop the bomb!!
So, my point wasn't that we should stop trying to mitigate safety issues, my point was that we have almost come to a stop in our progress & in some areas, notably humans taking responsibility for their own actions, we are in fact regressing.. because we've somehow decided that every activity our children, ourselves and everyone else should never, ever, ever have any chance of a bad outcome... hell, we even get upset when people die in wars because we've allowed the government & defence industry to convince us that war is some sterile thing where today, only the baddies die...
Sadly, when we choose to go to war.. lots of innocent people are gonna die... this is bad, really really bad... answer = don't go to war!! or, at least stop going to war over stupid, pointless causes.. which we seem to be doing more of just quietly..
Sorry mate, if this comes out as a rant, it's not meant to be... it's just that we have become so absorbed with making everything inherently safe & risk free in every aspect of our endeavours we are actually stifling our very progression & potentially limiting our future existence...
Safety, yup, really important, it really is but, you can & we do take it way too far...