• MartianSands@sh.itjust.works
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    24 days ago

    Nobody was hurt. As a general rule nobody fuels a rocket without planning as if it’s going to explode in exactly this fashion. The pad didn’t survive, but nobody was anywhere near this thing when it blew up

    • Gonzako@lemmy.world
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      24 days ago

      Well, there’s “as a general rule” and then there’s “A billionaire wanted to save a negligible amount of money”, I personally assume the latter when talking about these parasites

      • atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works
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        24 days ago

        Luckily in this case, the people who build the rocket aren’t allowed to launch them for this very reason. Even NASA has a completely different team of people who launch rockets (in Florida) than who build them (Alabama, Mississippi, and others) or run the mission (Houston).

        The actual launch range is run by the Space Force and they have the final say on when and where you can launch and where you can’t be during launch (officially called an exclusion zone).

        • Gonzako@lemmy.world
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          24 days ago

          So its not the same people that do everything but why does this not encourage being cheapstakes at any of these steps? Im glad there’s oversight but I can’t grasp how it works just yet

          • atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works
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            24 days ago

            Well there’s always going to be penny pinching and greed, but because each team‘s job is singular and siloed, their success or failure is based on their only job. So there is a separation of pride. The launch team’s only job is to launch the rocket, they have no vested interest in the mission or how well it was built. So a cost saving move that would help the mission but hinder launching the rocket isn’t one that would be made by the launch team.

            That being said, nothing says that this won’t change as soon as more privatization happens in this sector.

      • MartianSands@sh.itjust.works
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        24 days ago

        Yes, and they have a plan for what happens if the rocket explodes. It wouldn’t be completely safe against an explosion this intense, but the dragon capsule (like all manned vehicles, aside from the very notable exception of the space shuttle) can eject itself from the rocket to protect the crew from explosions

        • atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works
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          24 days ago

          Fun fact: the Shuttle was intended to have ejection capabilities, they were removed by the request of the Department of Defense. They provided extra funding for the Shuttle on the stipulation that it reach very specific orbits including a polar orbit that was only achievable by an extreme weight reduction. In fact later Shuttles also had to be modified to even make it to the ISS with a valuable amount of cargo. Columbia, the first Shuttle to fly to space, was always too heavy to make it to the ISS. The reason this happened is the president at the time, Jimmy Carter if I remember correctly, made some interesting and specific threats about their own capabilities to the Russians. These modifications were to make good on those threats.