Obligatory, 7/10/15

With respect to current events, my mind is a blank.  What to write about, then?

I was thinking about the Spacex launch failure recently.  How fragile is the space program!  One launch failure like this can jeopardize the entire company, and thus all of its ambitious goals.

After the Columbia disaster during the Shuttle Era, it was proposed that they use solid rocket boosters in order to get crew into space.  It was deemed to be safer, if memory serves.  Indeed, it seems like it is impossible for one of these things to blow up.  You could sit a Dragon capsule on top of it, and it would have a crew ejection option if things went wrong.  Now, with a liquid fueled rocket, an explosion is not out of the realm of possibilities.  When you have an explosion like that, how do you guarantee crew safety?  You can't.

You might make it relatively safe with solid rocket boosters and a crew escape system like the Dragon.  But you lose the economical reuse of the rockets.

There may be a need to recognize that space travel will involve risk, and in order to have a manned space program, you will have to accept some level of risk.  There doesn't appear to be any way to make spaceflight completely safe and economical.

To make spaceflight like flying a plane could be out of the question, unless some new technology comes along.

It's not been a good year, has it?