That's just baseless fear from the moment that the system has been designed to be safe.
Plus, you can count on the bazillion scientists working on it to whistleblow any sticks that would have been put in their wheels during the design if the military wanted to middle.
There are only two kinds of projects: secret projects for the military, and civil projects where the design and the safety are pretty much the thing of hundreds engineers not bound by military oaths.
Yes there are newer designs that are suppose to be passively safe. But of course the money and government approval needed to build them, especially an as of yet untested design, are all locked behind political doors and hurdles.
Safety. Back then it was basically part of the Cold War. Today, what are you asking the people to risk their lives for? Making things civilian-safe is expensive.
This is just a recency bias thing. There are gigantic private cars, private ships, private planes and even private rockets used everyday all over the world. Not to mention gigantic mining equipment, huge oil platforms and so on and so on.
Safety is always critical and commercial and non-commercial projects both can have safety issues or engineer something very safe.
Fair enough, I had trouble coming up with concrete examples. I do think there are plenty of engineering situations where safety isn't a major concern though.
I'm sure they know how to build safe systems. But equally important is whether they'll spend the money necessary to make them safe, or if they'll sacrifice safety in the name of profit.
Even if safety has that magnitude of penalty, it doesn't explain years of delays and 2500% over budget. It would've been factored into the original timeline and budget.
And surely after 80 years of improvements in technology, materials, process, etc we have the ability to build in less time AND have no deaths?
I think you're still missing the point. The goal isn't to eliminate any safety regulations. Those are needed and should be kept.
What's being addressed is the situation where various parties in politics, construction, or otherwise related in any way, looking at the project and saying "how can I get my hands on some of that money?". We're looking at all the lobbying that goes into for and against decisions, and how they stall process without any consideration of its purpose.
We're looking at every opportunity for a person or party to distract from the project for their own gain. If those can be removed or mitigated, we could potentially see faster and cheaper projects.
Not safe + 'working' means people will die. When people die due to negligent engineering, the company goes bankrupt at best.
Safe + not working eventually leads to bankruptcy too, but people don't die in that case.
Not to say that advancing aerospace engineering should be totally without risk. But these folks are not building space vehicle or fighter planes, they're building commercial aircraft. In that sector, tolerance for risk is far lower, as it should be.
It’s a great video - thanks! I’m less worried about the safety, than the actual ability to just manage to build the damn things to spec and any kind of budget in the US regulatory environment.
Safety, very much like security, needs to be built in during the design phase - or you're trading off the development cost for an expensive retrofit while gambling with the risk of killing the project (or even setting back that entire class of transportation) by killing people.
You're bringing very fair critiques on costs and construction time to... a discussion about safety.
There's many ways you could be implicitly connecting the dots to this discussion somehow. I welcome you making those clear. I am not going to put words in your mouth, though.
On talking to a few folks I know who work for NASA. Government officials in most areas are VERY averse to risk taking. Managing and sometimes working on a mission with a fatal crash is likely the end of the career. Business as usual and not reaching far enough has no career downside.
And safety is expensive -- getting the system from .99 to .999 P(success) leads to a large increase in complexity and makes developed technologies more difficult to reuse -- the systems designed for high P(success) are usually monolithic, tightly integrated, built for a single purpose things, not modular systems of reusable components.
This has nothing to do with resource constraints; this is pre-conditioning / expectations that are not going to change for a large government organization. Unless there is a highly visible, universally accepted national need.
I am suggesting that other engineering disciplines produce much safer products without opensource and open design. How it is achieved is another question. Bridges are not safe because of any government agency but because mechanical engineers design them to be safe.
The way I'd try and design a fail-safe solution would be not to design it in the first place. No one is forcing us to build these things. But government contracts are lucrative and contractors exist.
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