Once upon a time, thousands of people died fishing for ambergris. Whale anus wax. People died all the time.
Do we really think people are going to die exploring space? Yeah, they very fucking well are going to be deaths exploring space. We can take precautions as much as practical, but this zero risk tolerance philosophy is not going to work. We haven't done anything of note when it comes to manned space exploration in half a century. Space is so dangerous that the only way to keep risk to a minimum is to not go. And that's basically what we've done.
It's just that now these things are televised and PR is such a disaster when you have somebody die on air. It's not like a plumber is going to be watched by the entire world as he works in some kind of risky situation. People die doing that, too. People die doing anything. But if it's in the limelight like space exploration, it's absolutely unacceptable for anyone to risk death. That's why. Because we're watching and we can bear it only if we don't have to know about it or watch it happen.
We've got to start taking a hell of a lot more risk. We're taking enormous risk by not furthering space exploration. But risk of inaction is a strange thing, psychologically speaking. People don't fret about it, even though it's a real killer. Our climate is about to be the biggest killer of all, and we only feel vaguely uncomfortable about doing absolutely nothing.
And when I talk about taking risk, I'm not talking about go fever by the way--dumb political risk that leads to ignoring engineers. I mean the kind of risk that got us to the moon in the 60s. People died doing that. Mostly Soviet people, but a few Americans, too. But it was important enough. And it got done. We really shouldn't have stopped there.
It's not really NASA's fault, but they haven't gotten shit done with manned spaceflight since then. Haven't done a damn thing. Yet people have still died doing it. I hope private industry at least gets somebody above the Van Allen belt in the coming years. We need to get back on the horse before we lose our chance for good.
Do we really think people are going to die exploring space? Yeah, they very fucking well are going to be deaths exploring space. We can take precautions as much as practical, but this zero risk tolerance philosophy is not going to work. We haven't done anything of note when it comes to manned space exploration in half a century. Space is so dangerous that the only way to keep risk to a minimum is to not go. And that's basically what we've done.
It's just that now these things are televised and PR is such a disaster when you have somebody die on air. It's not like a plumber is going to be watched by the entire world as he works in some kind of risky situation. People die doing that, too. People die doing anything. But if it's in the limelight like space exploration, it's absolutely unacceptable for anyone to risk death. That's why. Because we're watching and we can bear it only if we don't have to know about it or watch it happen.
We've got to start taking a hell of a lot more risk. We're taking enormous risk by not furthering space exploration. But risk of inaction is a strange thing, psychologically speaking. People don't fret about it, even though it's a real killer. Our climate is about to be the biggest killer of all, and we only feel vaguely uncomfortable about doing absolutely nothing.
And when I talk about taking risk, I'm not talking about go fever by the way--dumb political risk that leads to ignoring engineers. I mean the kind of risk that got us to the moon in the 60s. People died doing that. Mostly Soviet people, but a few Americans, too. But it was important enough. And it got done. We really shouldn't have stopped there.
It's not really NASA's fault, but they haven't gotten shit done with manned spaceflight since then. Haven't done a damn thing. Yet people have still died doing it. I hope private industry at least gets somebody above the Van Allen belt in the coming years. We need to get back on the horse before we lose our chance for good.