What are the odds of a safe rocket launch?
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- Опубликовано: 25 июн 2023
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How risky is it to go into space?. Compared to jumping in your car you might be surprised that it's not much more dangerous, provided that you are not on a first few launches of a new rocket system. Space is always going to be a risky business but once all the bugs are shaken out it could turn out to be like nipping down to the shops in your car. So in this video, we look at the odds of a safe launch..
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Written, Researched and Presented by Paul Shillito
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woo woo woo !!!
Are you almost done with that nord vpn shit or for how many videos did they pay for?
Let's be honest. SpaceX's rocketry program has killed fewer astronauts than NASA's.
@@ColonelEvisceratoryeah cause they only started 3 years ago!
Thanks Paul....
Shoe🇺🇸
You should do a video on the parallels between the upcoming Artemis flight and Apollo 8. Fun fact, all 3 of the astronauts from Apollo 8 (1968) are still alive today
Reading the Apollo 13 investigation , it seems that the failure of 13 can be partially traced to the changes applied to fix the Apollo 1 errors. The nasa report is a really interesting read.
I think that it would have been helpful to more explicitly point out how a lifetime risk of dying in a car accident is a different sort of measurement than a per-flight risk of dying in a rocket. It may have also been helpful to try to find a way of comparing the two that made the relative risks of each form of travel easier to understand. Comparing the risk of death per journey, per unit of time spent in transit, and per distance traveled would all be interesting comparisons to see. The Wikipedia page for "Transport Accidents and Incidents" includes those comparisons for a number of transportation methods, but not rockets.
At the end you said "then maybe going into space will become no more dangerous than jumping into the car and nipping down to the shops". It needs to be emphasized that rockets inherently need to operate much closer to their safety limits than automobiles. The fact that travel by airplane today is much safer than travel by automobiles by most metrics despite arguably being a more fundamentally dangerous technology suggests that it might also be possible to get passenger travel by rocket at least as safe as travel by automobiles. That will likely require the application of the same sort of safety procedures and standards that have been applied to passenger air travel, including thorough investigations of flight failures, and the use of lessons learned from each to correct the relevant procedures and design issues that led to each respective failure.
It will take a lot of time and work to get there, though. Perhaps ironically, we probably need to see a dramatic increase of the volume of passenger traffic by rocket (and the inevitable associated higher number of fatalities from flight disasters) in order to learn the lessons we need to learn in order to get travel by rocket as safe as travel by automobile. In the meantime, it will be a clearly less safe form of travel, which may dissuade enough of the public from using it that it won't reach a high enough flight volume to ever get as safe as travel by automobile.
Also, the perception of the safety of various types of transport is different, depending on the type of transport, the scale of the likely accident, how often people travel my that method, their understanding of the technology, etc, etc. And, generally, people have a very poor understanding of probability - far more based on the severity of the an accident, rather than it's actual likelihood, as well as factors such as familiarity and convenience. As a very basic example, air travel is much safer than going by car, yet few, if any, people worry about car travel, but nearly everyone worries to some extent about air travel. My wife (to just pick one person, at random) will always choose a taxi, over walking, especially at night (we don't have a car), despite the fact that walking (even alone at night) where we live is many times safer than road travel. Frustrated by this, I once pointed out that if crossing to the other side of the road we live on to get to the shops was as risky as travelling by car, she probably would never leave the house. Did this make any difference? No. If she could justify a taxi for the 5 minute walk to our local Aldi (which is literally visible from our front door), she would!
Well said. If you took a shuttle ride every day, you would likely be dead in a couple of months. Two astronauts were on the Space Shuttle 7 times, the most of anyone.
@@paulhaynes8045 Same with nuclear accidents. Although rare, the consequence can be both extreme and very spooky. Dying in a car wreck is not spooky, albeit the risk still quite real.
I think Paul only made the easy to make mistake of not stating the obvious. I'm sure that he understands and he likely assumed that everyone else understands that a lifetime risk of 1 in 200 in automobile driving is after tens of thousands of individual trips. He simply asked the question whether someone has a greater lifetime risk from driving than launching on rockets, I don't think he was trying to provide a definitive answer he was just mentioning a few of the factors that would need to be taken into consideration.
And I'm not sure that airplane travel is that much more of an inherently dangerous technology than driving, even though I realize this flies in the face of logic for most people. But I think the point made by @paulhaynes8045 is quite valid that a lot of how people evaluate risk is based on their knowledge of the technology, or lack thereof. The common but overly simplistic view is that I'm on the ground in my car but in an airplane I am way up high and in constant danger. However the same person is likely completely calm driving over a bridge, even though in most cases their car is being suspended at fatal heights. But that's because they understand how a bridge works, and they can see the structure, and after all the bridge is on the ground. But we can't see air, so it's difficult to understand that the law of lift is just as reliable as the law of gravity. As long as the structure of the airplane remains intact the airplane will keep flying, or at least gliding. No different than our reliance on the structrual integrity of the bridges that we drive over every day.
And yes to state the obvious there are other things that can go wrong with airplanes, but that is pretty rare, and then we have to circle back to cars and notice that most people are perfectly calm about having 2 tons of steel and aluminum and glass heading towards them at a combined speed of over 100 mph and missing them by just a few feet, with their life fully dependent on the driver of the approaching car maintaining control of their vehicle. And they are perfectly fine with this dangerous event happening in many cases hundreds of times per day. But "I'm on the ground and I'm in control so I feel safe" compared to "I'm in the air and I'm not in control and so I feel very unsafe".
@@paulhaynes8045I agree that walking may be safer than driving, but perception is important. As a woman, I usually walk home from a friend's house at night, but am painfully aware of stories of abduction and rape - the case of Sarah Everard and Wayne Couzens still resonates with many women in the UK. And of course, perception explains why so many worry about air travel but not about getting in a car. Statistics is hard to understand, but perception is instinctive and easy.
5psi pure oxygen isn't dangerous and represents the partial pressure of oxygen in air. 5psi positive pressure at seal level (for a total of 20psi) in order to simulate the loads on the capsule is, however really dangerous.
Those pesky seals, eh?!
@@paulhaynes8045
Yeah, they need to get off their high horses.
3psi, and even that has potential problems--the lack of nitrogen (~80%) affects the combustion, probably due to changes in convection. These differences were not well enough studied, snd even less so considering a 0g environment.
Seals are pesky.
I read that Apollo 1 was at 16 psi, if so they were just over 1 psi difference. Enough apparently to make it difficult to open the hatch, although I'm not sure they even got that far as I think several bolts had to be loosened first. Also I hadn't thought about it before, but I wonder if the astronauts (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo) ever had their visors open while at that pressure (16 psi or whatever it was), since breathing pure oxygen at atmospheric pressure can be toxic, and I would think the higher pressure makes that worse. But I suppose it's okay for a couple of hours. Apparently people in hyperbaric chambers alternate between pure oxygen and normal air but I don't know how often. And they are usually at extremely high pressure so that may be a factor also.
I cant help but imagine that behind every big boom is an engineer or inspector muttering to themselves _"I f%&#@+ told them so..."_
Or an idiot claiming it was a 'success' because "we got loads of data"...
@@paulhaynes8045 Along with a youtube comment that belies a strongly held opinion lacking in reality.
Naysayers are always present in every endeavor. Most don't get their say as things generally work out.
@@paulhaynes8045 that is what testing is... a quest for data.
I used to work for Lloyd's doing high risk stuff like PGA hole-in-one insurance and million dollar full-court basketball shots. Actuaries are just a wild-ass guess and a starting point.
Once we pulled a number out of our ass, the only thing that mattered was if we made money. We'd then adjust the odds and the premiums accordingly.
It really is that screwed up and simple.
One of my favorite channels. Everything is explained very well. I missed the moon shots, and started at Sky Lab. The first shuttle launch with Columbia was on my birthday. Thanks for your presentation. I always look forward to your next one. Crazy shirts not withstanding.
The odds are better than a trip with oceangate.
Fantastic topic, thanks for always provoking thought :)
I love your videos Curious Droid. They are well researched and always concern interesting topics. Thumbs up!
But they are almost all space related. He stopped doing non-related space videos years ago. Channel hasn't grown in years because of that decision.
People will finally stop applauding and cheering…when SpaceX launch explodes again…with a crew onboard 😔 Nothing has exploded in its development..more…than SpaceX….the comic book design is prone to always to find a new…unexpected…fatal problem 🚀💥🔥 🎉Building space ships must under a government safety program with adequate budgets to make no shortcuts and allow the expense for thorough reliability testing and backups.
Great content, love your videos. Technically there has never been an escape system for reentry, just for launch. The Columbia disaster was inevitable once they made the decision to reenter the atmosphere just as it would have been for the Apollo program. I’m speculating but I think this will always be the most vulnerable part of the mission as long as we rely on ceramic tiles for heat shielding. The only option is a rigorous inspection plan and a redundant lander.
The giant tank with "LIQUID OXYGEN NO SMOKING" written on it is probably the most 1960s thing I've ever seen
A friend worked in commercial satellite production, they had an order for as I recall 4 comms satellites and give the chance of a launch failure and the production time they built 5 identical satellites. The four launched successfully so they booked a later launch and put that up too since it was already built the cost was much less than for a dedicated one.
"Soyuz 1 in 20 failure rate" BZZT! If you include all the uncrewed test missions. Soyuz has had just two total losses, and no deaths since 1971. Wish I could say the same for USA.
We need to have the designer of your shirts in each show notes.
The bald wizard is so captivating I can't skip the NordVPN add😢
A key point to keep in mind regarding Starship is that they won't be carrying people anytime soon so they are free to blow them up to their heart content essentially.
Shuttle didn't have such luxury with STS-1 being crewed and very narrowly avoiding a tragedy and SLS/Orion is also on the same boat pretty much. While there have been some tests Orion will carry crew on its second SLS flight and on top of that it will be the first time a key system like ECLSS will be used.
In other words SpaceX can blow Starship as much as they want to quickly find issues and fix them while NASA so far didn't have this luxury which means they have LESS opportunities of finding issues in a safe way (no people on board) and this makes SpaceX way MORE safe not LESS
Yes, Elton is free to blow the government's money
@@vladdumitrica849 What government money exactly?
@@vladdumitrica849 Right. Because Boeing and LockMart aren't doing the same thing or worse... Do you have a real argument or just MDS (Musk Derangement Syndrome)?
@@vladdumitrica849to fly to the moon, Space X is taking a loss on that NASA contract and funding practically it all by itself. And before that it started developing Starship and it's engines with zero NASA money, just their own.
When it came to developing Falcon 9 NASA estimated it would cost 4 billion, Space X did it for 390 million, saving billions, less than 1/10th the estimate. And since then NASA (and the world) have been Space X's customer, and Space X charge half what the next cheapest rocket provider charges. Again that's saved NASA (and many others) billions!
Any idea how much one SLS launch costs? How much money has been spent on the SLS for development?? Seems to me you'd rather waste billions just cause you don't like Space X (or Musk)
@@vladdumitrica849 I used to think that Elon would be a great modern role-model, until he went off the deep-end during covid and all this other crazy bullshit. His engineering prowess is top notch tho, only people that have no idea try and dispute this.
Such a relief from some of the dross being pumped out.
I really do look forward to CD uploads.
I always have the urge to re-watch Apollo 13 after you, Scott Manley or Frasier Cain upload a video.
A documentary some years ago narrated by David McCullough featured lots of the early footage from the US space program, failing badly. "Our rockets always blow up!" It also featured the tern "Stay-Putnik".
Just watched Ship 25 perform the first static fire since the big one! Next vid I see is yours. Talk about timing. Great topic. Thanks for sharing.🚀🚀🚀👍
Wohoo! Great way to end my day. Thanks, CD!
Sometimes the technician decided to install the guidance system backward, and they even use a hammer to put it in as there are guides that prevent this sort of thing.
The drunken proton launch. A classic
You are referring to the controllers in the Proton rocket that turned itself back on earth. Yeah that was pretty mucked up. So was that hole in the soyuz. Russian quality control still isn't quite there yet. Russians always try to cut corners to cut cost. And sometimes that yields a very foolish and incompetent technician.
@@danielrodelli345 It literally takes more effort to install it wrong than right. I mean if you put it in right way, it just snaps in. The guy literally took a hammer and bang it in.
For my senior design class for my aerospace engineering degree I had to do a presentation of an ethics review for the Challenger disaster. The review had to be conducted from the perspective of having all the information available up to the day before the launch, and we had to give it a go/no-go for flight.
Risk for rocket launches are discussed in the video as though they were “one off”. A thoughtless extension is that rocket launches are the only risky action that is done. But this is not so. In the case of space exploration, rocket LANDING is even more risky. Just calculate the probability of landing on Mars. In the case of the space shuttle, one accident was a landing or re-entry event. More generally, the entire set exploration expeditions is very risky. Of two expeditions to the South Pole, the Amundsen expedition came back while the Scott expedition did not.
Amazing content as always, super interesting,Thanks!
Due iterations and improvements applied on the each mission the last Apollo missions were safer that the first ones. I would have liked to have flown in the 17 and not in the 11.
Voshkod had no escape system. Vostok, like Gemini, had the questionable ejection seat system.
More motivation to NOT screw up while onboard.
@@TucsonDude Launch escape systems mostly protect against failures of the rocket. Astronauts and cosmonauts usually have little or no control over the operation of the rocket. During launch, they are pretty much passive passengers, except for monitoring for any indication that a manual abort might be necessary. Thus no real opportunity for them to screw up.
Lifetime of road travel vs single launch failure rate? Then at the end it's one trip to the shops. One of these things is not like the other.
NASA also took a big chance in the Gemini program, launching without an escape tower and deciding to rely on ejection seats. I've never read a single statement from the astronauts (at least) that showed confidence in being able to survive an ejection from the Gemini capsule once it was launched. They seemed to accept the risk with an element of grim humor. Probably one of the reasons Wally Schirra didn't pull the ejection when the launch failed on Gemini 6 was he thought he was as likely to get killed by ejecting from the capsule as he was by the vehicle exploding. That was the closest call. When you recall that two of the Agena rockets launched as docking vehicles for Gemini failed to reach orbit, and the Agena by that time was considered to be a well tested and very reliable system, you can see the risk they were taking by dispensing with the conventional launch tower in the much less well tested Titan-Gemini combination was quite considerable.
Yet another excellent video. Thanks so much!
Interestingly SpaceX use a combination of modern engineering techniques combined with rapid development techniques more typical of the moon landing programs. This is what has allowed them to push the boundaries of performance while at the same time dramatically reducing costs. When they have got caught out it’s been in areas where there was a lack of knowledge in that particular area.
They were also willing to burn through a lot of money with failures before attempting their first "real" launch. That's part of the "time and resources" investment required to make things really good. Arguable whether that time and resources were better spent blowing things up in the real world vs in simulations and more cautious design, but it seems to have worked out in the end so can't really fault their methodology (and exploding test rockets makes for better memery than a stack of engineering reports).
excellent as always!
Love ya videos chap, hope your feeling better now 👍
I don't know why, but the tone and cadence of the last line you delivered reminded me of Mr Wizard from back in the '80s. Specifically when he had the segments that showed something very very zoomed in that you couldn't recognize at first and it would slowly zoom out over the course of a minute or two. Your phrase had a cadence very similar to his final phrase after the full object was revealed.
There's a reason we say " It's not Rocket Science" when something is uncomplicated bcuz.... Rocket science is complicated.
Excellent video as always!
Thank you for the upload!
Simply a great video thank you so much
We should launch experimental rockets every Fourth of July. Either it works, or we have a good show.
Love your work... Thanks...
*IT IS NOT just SpaceX.*
Reliability is increasing in the industry overall. E.g. Russia has zero rocket failures (including test flights) for years by now. So yes, the safety of space flight is becoming really good.
What does Russia's safety record have to do with eloons? Last I checked pacex &roscosmos are two entirely different entities
@@o-wolf Did you watch the video? The same advancements in design and manufacturing allow to manufacture rocket components with higher consistency and fidelity. This is common for Elon and others, it is a general trend.
@@tatianaes3354 &yet eloon still blows up billion dollar rockets for funsies &handwaves it away as rapid unscheduled disassembly.. except this time he's even destroying launch pads because reasons
@@o-wolf Yes, but the guy’s point is that if/when Elon will solve the design issue, the rocket should be reliable. BTW, the USSR had a similar nozzle design for its Moon landing competitor rocket N1, but it was impossible to synchronise this many thruster parts at the time as it all was purely mechanical, no microcontrollers or anything was available. So the USSR lost the Moon race, but Elon has a sound chance. Let’s see.
@@tatianaes3354 *spacex has a chance. if eloon doesn't get in the way &they redesign the whole thing from ground up.. as a mission platform it has to be one of the most perplexing.. it has no safety measures so idk how he expects to get clearance to put passengers on it for his moon shot
ALSO.. unlike SLS starship cannot make a singular lunar insertion.. it has to be refuelled multiple times IN ORBIT.. (something that's never been done) before it can get to the moon
Remember what they taught us about multiple points of failure &minimising those at all costs? Yeh
Starship has to launch without killing it's passengers on takeoff..(no escape system)
it has to stay in one piece enroute to orbit (still no escape system)
it then has to achieve/maintain orbit safely
then it has to wait for another starship (tanker variant) to be launched
Then that has to do everything it did then they have to "mate" &transfer tons of fuel whilst in orbit without any issues which if even minor would be catastrophic for the crew &mission
Then they have to do it again
If there's inclement weather this could be delayed days
Then when ALLLLL that's said &done only THEN can they proceed to the most DANGEROUS part of the mission.. flying to the moon.. starting with igniting an engine that's been idle for hours of not days atp.. the achieve cis-lunar insertion &comeback home after giving ppl some nice zero grave window moon selfies
💡Idea💡
Why not channel rocket thrust I’m every launch into steal factory or clinker/cement oven or channel it into wheels to store electricity for later use⁉️🙄
Great video as always Paul! Thanks for making such interesting and well presented videos, your uploads always make my day :)
Thanks, Paul!
Does the failure numbers for the Falcon Nine include or discount the booster that was deliberately destroyed as part of the Dragon In-Flight Abort System test?
JWST's amazing success does not prove that you can make things reliable if you try hard enough. With a sample size of n=1, it might have been sheer luck.
This was an uplifting video.
Thanks Mr. Droid.
I thought I had gotten over Challenger. But I was wrong.
I think in the UK the life time risk on the road is closer to 1 in 450 at current rates with the current population - that's if rates and population stay the same. The rate you quoted (1 in 200) sounds more like the risk from about 20 years ago.
Great video, love your content
Very much a enjoyable video thank you 🙂
Surely this is an unanswerable question given the variables at play
Having watched a video on Space X's cost cutting on their launch pad construction, where chunks of concrete were blasted off it up to 500 yards and pieces even hit the rocket, I would rate it as similar to the the chance of a small deep ocean submarine imploding!
I like to think of modern space travel like this, we essentially strap chairs to a glorified bomb. The fact that it does not explode into a million pieces immediately on launch is an engineering miracle and when it does explode it should not be surprising. We as a species have stumbled our way into space on what could possibly be the most dangerous method imaginable. Could we make a safer way? Probably. Could we have done it safer in the past? I don't know. But this is the way we chose to go into space and have made it work.
And what method do you propose that does not violate Newton's second law?
Well nuclear thermal lacks the T/W so chemical rockets are your only option unless you want to go the Orion route.
Don't forget that all the parts are made by the lowest bids from contractors.
It’s not the most dangerous method, it’s the only method.
Great video! Very interesting
Well sometimes short cut are made by the management against the technical engineering point of view, for financials, politics or marketing reasons. Like with the rubber seal of Challenger or the reinforce carbone panel of Colombia. The Murphy's law is one basic engineering rules too.
Well, seeing how I will never actually be in a rocket, I suppose it's safer for me than pretty much anything 😂
I'm gonna start documenting all your shirts.
I’m imagining some Cambridge historian (in the year 3000) finding your work…. And fscepalming. Lol.
I implore you to get a life.
I have loved you videos for years ❤❤❤❤
Thanks for the video.
If one would die every 120 drives, nobody would drive.
NASA took a needless risk by launching the first shuttle with a human crew. I was told once, and this may be urban legend, that the only thing a human was needed for to pilot the orbiter was to throw the landing gear lever on final approach. Everything else the vehicle did could be done by computer and remote commanding, at least for basic stuff. For once the Soviets did something smart and launched Buran's first flight unmanned. NASA was super cocky after the Apollo program and to put Young and Crippen into a couple of ejection seats and hope for the best was not wise. To make matters worse, it was later determined that the ejection seats were useless and would've killed the astronauts in the plume of the SRBs, so they were very fortunate they never felt compelled to activate them. It's a testament to the engineers who built STS that it worked so well on it's very first flight. The program managers should've known better, though.
Buran did it at the end of 80s without any human on board )) but did it only once ((
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
@@felixfrenkel7937 They did it only once because they ran out of money. The whole country ran out of money actually.
I agree with most of what you said. But actually the Shuttle absolutely required pilots, and not just to lower the landing gear. Which by the way was purposely not computer controlled because they were concerned about the computer accidently releasing the landing gear and the doors while on orbit, which would have made reentry unsurvivable because they were only designed to release in flight, the gear had to be manually retracted when back on the ground.
The launch itself was fully automated to orbit. But most of the on orbit operations required pilot control. Similar to the autopilot on an airliner, which contrary to popular misconception cannot function without the pilots telling it what do the entire flight. Also the computer managed the reentry and initial atmospheric descent automatically, but the automated landing system proved to be pretty incompetent during the one time they attempted to use it and the pilots took over and they never tried another automated landing for the remainder of the program as it was considered too risky with no real benefits. Actually the pilots relied on the computer for visual guidance all the way down to the runway, but the pilots could make the subtle changes needed as they got closer to the runway, something the Shuttle autopilot was not good at.
NASA actually looked at automating the Shuttle, but the study concluded that it would cost many millions of dollars and would actually be less safe than having the astronauts perform the tasks that they were already doing.
The downside, and this was a big one, is that there was no possibility of test flights without people on board. That's of course true with airplanes, but spaceships are nothing like airplanes, they are in a whole differnt league. And it would have allowed uncrewed test flights after changes to the Shuttle, or even uncrewed missions to launch satellites.The Russians proved with Buran that it could be automated.
Actually although I have always been a big Shuttle fan, I am now of the opinion that it should have not only been fully automated, but never should have carried crew to and from orbit. Which is also how I feel about Starship. As I mentioned automated satellite launches and other missions could have been flown remotely from the ground. And for missions that did require crew like SpaceHab missions or Hubble repair, the crew could have flown up on Apollo capsules and docked with the Shuttle on orbit. But Congress never would have gone with that, they required Shuttle to be one stop shopping for everything. In the end it wound up costing much more, both monetarily and in lives.
As for the ejection seats, yes they would likely not help during the first two minutes while the SRB's were firing. But they would have at least provided an escape method afterwards, something that was lacking after the four test flights were completed until after Challenger when they at least provided some bailout capability if they were not able to make it back to KSC or an emergency landing site.
You are not correct. The shuttle had to be hand flown when landing which is why they had a commander and a “pilot” as opposed to other flight crews. The terminology has since stuck.
Please do a video comparing the Apollo vs the new Indian trip. Why the difference in time to arrive?
I think an important thing to note about the Falcon 9 is that although the total failure rate is ~1 in 120, all launch failures were before flight 30. Falcon 9 has now flown successfully over 210 times consecutively, which beats the previous records for consecutive success by the Soyuz and Delta II rockets, which each achieved about 100 consecutive successes at maximum. I genuinely think SpaceX has a chance to never have a failed Falcon 9 (or Heavy) launch again, and will likely launch 500+ total Falcon's before they are retired. This is an unprecedented reliability that, coupled with the launch escape system on the Dragon capsule, mean dying in a Falcon launch is almost impossible.
Falcon 9 has more successful landing (attempts) in a row than any other rocket launches :D.
Which makes it all the more baffling that they chose to have no launch escape system whatsoever on Starship. That's a step backwards for them, as far as I'm concerned.
@@newqTDIL Starship really has NO CREW ESCAPE! Unbelievable. I think the world is going to start taking a lot more interest in listening to professional engineers after recent events.
„Almost impossible“…famous last words on so many occasions.
@@mbbb9244 it will have though, probably, as in starship being able to detatch from SH mid flight and go on its own in quite little time. You could complain starship itself won't have one, but then again the dragon capsule itself does not have any either.
Awesome 👌 👍.... Thank you sir 🙂
💡 idea 💡
Submersible implosion as a way to ignite fusion reaction‼️😳 Why not install collapsible chambers deep down into the ocean floor & use the energy of the intense pressure to produce electricity or/and ignite fusion. 😳
Hmmm. That 'lifetime risk' of 0.2% for car users is deceiving - who gets into a rocket multiple times a day, every day? Risk should be measured per trip or per hour, and not over lifetime use. That 1 chance of death in every 67th trip for the shuttle would kill the bulk of the UK population if extended over just a few months for its drivers.
Oops, the image in "This IBM 650" from 1956 was an IBM 360 from a decade later, looks like a 360/50. Nevertheless, the presentation and story was great. ❤️👏👍
Great video
12:53 …sure 😄 not in our lifetime though
I love your content thank you
Could you do a program on non-chemical burn means to achieve orbit - it would be very interesting.
Falcon rocket safety? Starship was expected to fail first time. Space X are cutting edge pioneers
Great vid
There were 135 space shuttle launches with 2 catastrophic failures. That's a failure rate of 1.5% which isn't great.
It's always interesting when people talk about "safety." Safe is really a pretty useless term. Nothing is really safe but more a risk-benefit ratio. People are afraid to fly but don't realize they're more likely to be injured or killed on the way to the airport than be involved in an airline accident. In the US more than one death per day is associated with electrocution but we haven't a single thought about plugging in electronics. So in the end, safe is a relative term that always needs to be quantified with risk/reward.
Yep we're really bad at assessing risk. When I did my first parachute jump the instructor greeted the students "morning everyone well you done the most dangerous part by driving here today"
NASA do not want to lose another crew which is why they are being conservative with SLS. That approach to the design and build paid off handsomely with a great first flight that tested the entire mission profile that the Artemis Astronauts will use.
4 billion per launch. We can’t afford that.
I'm going to mutilate a Quote/Question I remember hearing sometime back in the 70's that was allegedly made between Astronauts while waiting to be launched. Even if I don't get it exactly right, the point is clear and plays heavily into this piece on Rocket reliability. So the Quote goes something like this; " . . . so how's it feel knowing that everything below you were built by the Lowest Bidder"? That question points to a built-in flaw w/ the Gov Bidding process for Aerospace Contracts. Yea, they are building "to spec" but the contractor's ability to do thorough R&D work is tied directly to a limited Budget and that naturally leads to cost & delivery date overruns (which is almost expected w/ Cost+ Gov Bidding nowadays) and/or cutting corners. Privately run R&D groups have Much more latitude w/ materials, specs, processes as long as the goal of Scalability for mass production are met. Failure IS an option w/ privately funded R&D which teaches Many more lessons than that of a contractor who's told what materials, processes and the final spec must be while "under the gun" to avoid failure. I think there's a private Aerospace Company or two out there who may have already proven as much . . . who could that be ? ? ?
Every step you take, every click you make, I'll be tracking you 😂
Back in those days people where brought up with the words of J.F. Kennedy, "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country" and while it did end up costing some human life it also put the USA at the forefront of space race. You can argue whether that was right or wrong to do but they did achieve the unachievable whereas today we struggle to achieve any major leaps forward in comparison. You cannot even fly from New York to London in less than 3.5 hours anymore, and they say they can go to the moon again, but goodness it is very complicated and it is all talk, talk, talk, and very little action.
Ok now do per minute of travel.
People can not be replaced? Corporate America would bed to differ lol. Death is tragic yes, but there are people dying and being born every day. It is just the lead time from birth to being an astronaut is longer than replacing a rocket. This is why the Empire needs to implement a cloning program right away. That way we can have new generations of troop.. err astronauts ready to replace any that are lost in missions for the Empire. Long Live the Empire!
Exactly. Putting safety before profits is extremely anti-semitic.
Depends…
The problem I see with comparing car statistics to rocket statistics as in this video is that cars typically have one person in them, average probably somewhere around 1-2 per. Most rockets carry at least 3 people every single time. And starship could carry 100 to LEO according to SpaceX. You would have to at least double the risk for the rockets since twice as many people on average are involved. A better comparison may be buses or trains, but even better would just be a per passenger adjustment to any stats used. (Successful round trips without injury/ per person)
I believe that automobiles can be much much safer, IF driver license works like pilots license, a lot of regulation and people checking in on operations, which is impractical, it is why there is a lot of work to do. What we can clearly see is the approach to licensing, in safer countries, drivers got a lot more education and testing, unlike unsafe places where getting license is pretty easy.
in order for a space launch to be safer, the complexity of rockets should decrease and the vibration due to combustion gases should be reduced
Fair to say, NASA nailed it with Apollo.
Early rockets: Bad gaskets...
As good as always.
That is why Robert Truax design pressure fed type Rocket 🚀 😊. Simple and cheap.
There is an intrinsic minimum catastrophic failure rate with conventional chemical rocket propulsion. SpaceX promises cheap space tourism, Mars colonies, and point to point hypersonic air travel. But this comes off like the hubris and promises of the space shuttle program if the 1980s.
If they don't come up with scramjets or compact fusion drive or antigravity, it might be for a very long time an at best .5/1% fatality rate per spaceflight. LOX turbopump rocket propulsion might always have a risk factor that never permits anything near airliner like safety and economy.
Could they create some sort of lunar program using some number of Falcon Heavies?
Unlikely, as, although the three boosters provide an impressive lot of power, the second stage is just the standard F9 second stage and doesn't have the kick to get large payloads much further than LEO. It would need a new second stage and that involves so much more development and testing that it rapidly loses the advantages (such that they are) of 'just' strapping three F9s together. In the long run, it's better and cheaper, to build a new, more powerful rocket - hence the Starship.
Sure... Falcon Heavy isn't as capable as Saturn V was, but it's by far the most powerful operational rocket today, and it's certainly capable of sending payloads to lunar orbit. It couldn't send a crewed vehicle all the way to the surface and back from one launch, but there's no reason to do that these days - if you were designing a mission with FH in mind, you'd launch several pieces (e.g. capsule and service module on one launch, lander on a second), and rendezvous in orbit.
@@simongeard4824 maybe a "Plan B" arrangement could be concocted. Such that they could send up a "Tug" into orbit with one Falcon. Then some other Falcon could send up maybe "Bezos" lander, or whoever, if needed, maybe? Such that Artemis still goes it alone, arriving with the actual astronauts while Falcon(s) provides a trip to the moon for the lander, which ever lander that ends up being, if not Starship type.
The over dramatizing VPN add is a bit off. It is nowhere near as dangerous as you picture it...
It's more accurate to say that Falcon 9 has had two failures. One in-flight and one pre-flight.
Three if you count CRS-1, which lost an engine on launch, and was unable to deliver the secondary payload. But that was F9 1.0, which was arguably a completely different vehicle given how much changed with 1.1
@@simongeard4824 Yeah, that would be a partial failure.
Running pure oxygen anywhere poses an extreme risk. Patients on oxygen die over and over again in house fires because they are smoking on aren't paying attention. And that just a tiny increase in atmospheric oxygen. Both the Gemini and mercury programs were very lucky to not have had fires.
Interestingly at the time a pure oxygen atmosphere was seen as having some safety benefits. The fire risk would be low on orbit because of the lack of convection in zero gravity which is what primarily drives fires here on Earth. Meanwhile breathing pure oxygen had the benefit of purging nitrogen from the bloodstream, reducing the risks of getting the bends if there was a sudden decrease in cabin pressure. Also it was believed that the low 5 psi pressure in the cabin would help mitigate any fire risks. Also maintaining a proper oxygen/nitrogen ratio required sensors that could measure this. There was a concern that if these sensors failed the results could be lethal. Whereas with pure oxygen they simply needed to measure the air pressure, something which was much more simple and reliable.
The problem on Apollo 1 was that to approximate the differential in space of 5 psi pushing outwards onto a vacuum, they pressurized the capsule on the ground to 16 psi of pure oxygen. Made worse by the fact that the fire retardant materials that NASA was beginning to use inside the Apollo capsule only made it into the operational vehicles then under construction, whereas the Apollo 1 capsule had already been built using flammable materials and it was considered too late to change this.
Even after the Apollo 1 fire they continued to use pure oxygen on orbit, the oxygen/nitrogen mix was only used on the ground.
i love this man.
Video starts at 3:20