Godspeed, Elon Musk

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It’s getting so a poor blogger can’t catch a breath around here. No sooner do I write about NASA considering sending the first Orion mission around the moon than along comes Elon Musk to say, never mind, we’re going next year. While fellow billionaire Richard Branson struggles to shoot a few tourists on a crummy sub-orbital toss, Musk’s SpaceX is going straight for lunar orbit with a couple of paying passengers. This guy is giving ambition a bad name. We can only hope he’s able to keep hubris at bay.

The SpaceX press release said the two passengers—the word “astronaut” was pointedly not used—”will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind, driven by the universal human spirit of exploration.” Please. They’re a couple of profoundly rich people who paid SpaceX a huge undisclosed sum to fund the thrill ride of a lifetime.

And also, as I said, what, just yesterday, it’s a very risky trip indeed. It was risky when Apollo 8 flew it in 1968, it will be risky if NASA attempts it with relatively unproven hardware next year and it will be just as risky for SpaceX with equally unproven hardware. The fact that the system comes out of Silicon Valley magic thinking doesn’t lower that risk, although recent history has shown that the private sector launch industry has lowered the cost to orbit—or is at least on the way to doing that. But launching people into space is less about cheap and more about not killing them in the process.

NASA funding was used to develop the Dragon 2 capsule that SpaceX will use, while the Falcon Heavy booster was developed with SpaceX internal funding, or whatever outside capital the company obtained. Apollo astronauts used to joke that the system that got them to the moon was built by the lowest bidder and that is exactly the opposite side of the same coin SpaceX is flipping. Ultimately, because they’re a for-profit company, what SpaceX builds has to make money—there has to be margin. Profit margin and ultimate safety are antagonists. That doesn’t mean you can’t have both, but this isn’t a Beta rollout. If you don’t get it right the first time, you might not get a second.

In aviation, we understand that risks must be taken to achieve any kind of progress. Sometimes people die in the process and those of us in the industry accept that outcome. We understood it following the Apollo 1 fire and were reminded of it again with the loss of the Challenger and Columbia shuttles, both of which were lack-of-imagination catastrophes. Everyone knew the risks, they just couldn’t imagine that they would actually come together into one vehicle loss, much less two.

Moving as quickly as it is and with impressive successes behind it, I wonder if SpaceX might be falling into that same mindset that caused NASA to reject good technical advice in launching in cold weather and downplaying potential damage caused by loose insulation FOD. Inspirational as SpaceX is with its ambitious lunar announcement, I’m not so sure how I’d feel if it went wrong. Losing a crew in the name of science and exploration is one thing, but it’s quite another if a couple of mega-rich tourists buy it. The cable channels could make a great spectacle of it, but it will still be just that: a spectacle.

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