[noelherrick]

What SpaceX is doing is amazing, and it is a fun show. Reusable rockets are beginning to be as cool as the space shuttle was. However, it could very well be the case the Shotwell and the engineers are actively trying to prevent Musk from making bad calls while promoting good calls (I'm not saying this was a bad call). It's perfectly reasonable, if you have a company controlled by two actors, one of them bad and one of them good, to always praise the good actor when things go right and blame the bad actor when things go wrong (caveat: I am not calling Elon a bad actor, just saying that it's not hypocritical to always blame the bad actor and praise the good actor).

But this leads to a bigger problem. SpaceX's attitude of experiment vs. drawn-out design is working (perhaps not too dissimilar to agile vs. waterfall design). Even with all that careful planning, the Space Race did kill people, we almost lost Apollo 13, and there were two distinct shuttle disasters that killed everyone on board. Even with very careful progress, we still had disasters. But, as I think this launch shows, SpaceX is going to experience similar events unless there's a incentives and structures to actually empower people with safety concerns (meaning the engineers and technicians on the ground).

Both post-mortems on the shuttle disasters are filled with something like "a higher-up decided it wasn't that big of a deal and dismissed concerns because previous red flags turned out to be nothing." Single humans can be singularly stupid. Single humans that are busy running a company, incentivized by profit margins, isolated from on-the-ground operations, equipped with a golden parachute, and wealthier than god, are even more prone to detachment from reality.

I also feel a bit bad for the astronauts that have to gamble whether these rockets are safe. Did this actually pass safety checks or is my life a sacrifice Elon Musk is willing to make? I suppose this has been part of the calculus of all astronauts since the post-Space Race era started to defund NASA, but it still sucks even if it's de rigueur at this point.

[ryzvonusef]

> I also feel a bit bad for the astronauts that have to gamble whether these rockets are safe. Did this actually pass safety checks or is my life a sacrifice Elon Musk is willing to make?

isn't that an unfair assertion? Elon does not have the ability to rate his rockets "human safe", NASA did it. They make the final call, imho.

[noelherrick]

I have no idea who makes the final call, but NASA has shown they too were willing to jeopardize the life of their crew once budget cuts had removed any margins for them. I'm also not saying that Elon has made bad safety calls, but what I am saying is the Elon has every incentive in the world to push past safety concerns. Worst that can happen for him is he'll have to give an apology and payout $X0m. We also have to be a bit concerned because there are reports that Elon thinks he's ensuring humanity's survival. I do not trust someone who thinks that his mission is existential despite no evidence that a standalone Mars colony is possible. Bad incentives are present for the NASA admin too: worst that can happen is perhaps having to resign. The astronauts die, their kids don't have a parent, their partners have to bury them.