alt Hacker NewsI've talked about this a few times before but – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47726133 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47726078 - to repeat myself;
It's because we're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" due to the distances and energies involved.
I will let John Young explain it his way;
> ‘You put some people on top of four million pounds of high explosives, you light the fuse, and in eight and a half minutes they are going eight times faster than a rifle bullet. What part of that sounds safe to you?’
He test flew the shuttle. They put an ejection seat in the shuttle – which was obviously insane. And a reporter asks him about ejecting while the solid rocket motors were burning, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLU4CK7UHd4
(I'm deeply saddened that I will never get to meet the man and ask him the secret to his magical heart rate.)
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"very primitive" - primitive in relation to who? As a species we control the planet, we rule every other species currently known to humans, how is that primitive?
We might well be the most advanced species in the universe. Seems unlikely, but we really don’t have anything else to measure against at the moment.
why did you preface this with how many times you've made your point to deaf ears in the past? Am I supposed to follow your opinions across the site?
and the forces involved here are genuinely new
I remember growing up with things proudly advertised as "space-age technology"... which largely meant the 1950s and 1960s, and of course it's what got us to the moon, multiple times. Yet more than a half a century later, new rockets just don't seem that impressive in comparison.