The US has far more deaths per flight than any other nation. There have been 19 astronauts that have died during spaceflight. [1] 14 of them have been American, with the US and USSR/Russia having a comparable number of total launches. The USSR/Russia's most recent fatality was in 1971.
NASA is paradoxical, because in terms of how they are perceived they're seen as this ultra risk averse safety-first organization, but in terms of actual behavior - they keep doing the exact same thing which has left 14 astronauts dead, and now these astronauts stranded. There just seems to be a extreme disconnect between the actual engineering staff and the managerial layer, probably exasperated by the fact that political appointees head the organization.
"NASA is paradoxical, because in terms of how they are perceived they're seen as this ultra risk averse safety-first organization, but in terms of actual behavior - they keep doing the exact same thing"
This paradox is easily resolved. As risk aversion goes to maximum, the only acceptable solution is to do what was done before. Anything we deviate from doing before is something that could fail in a new and unknown way, possibly bigger than before.
This isn't a NASA thing, this is one of the basics of large bureaucracies. It is one of the major drivers of their inertia and inability to change course. When the penalty for slightly more failure than before (in anything except money spend, that's OK as long as it's done by high level people) is expulsion and scapegoating and the reward for doing slightly better is a pat on the back and a denied request for a salary upgrade/slight promotion, you converge on having an organization full of people where this is the only path forward, no matter how much acknowledgement there is that the current situation is broken by every last person involved.
To take a really big diversion, one of the deeper aspects of the "move fast and break things" philosophy isn't just about directly moving fast and breaking things; it is creating a culture where people have permission to fail at least a little before being evicted from it. Your biggest successes will always involve some failures on the way, so if you rigorously eliminate all failure from your organization, all but the smallest, most basic of successes will go with it. It's not that you literally want to break things or that managers should necessarily create a "broken things" metric and try to keep it in some band above zero but below catastrophe, it's about making avoiding breakage not calcifying and paralyzing your company by making it the absolute number one priority above all else.
When is the last time that China or Russia tried testing an entirely new launch vehicle? It is my understanding, aside from upgrades, they have not really built anything new.
Edit: also looking at your list of accidents, China has one with 6-100 deaths.
And USSR has 120 deaths in 1960.
I think you need to look at deaths beyond just Astronauts here.
China, at least Modern China is extremely risk averse. Basically if anything bad happens (not necessarily a death) the whole team would go through a lengthy close-looping quality management process. It is only after the success of SpaceX that things seem to loosen up a bit.
somenameforme|1 year ago
NASA is paradoxical, because in terms of how they are perceived they're seen as this ultra risk averse safety-first organization, but in terms of actual behavior - they keep doing the exact same thing which has left 14 astronauts dead, and now these astronauts stranded. There just seems to be a extreme disconnect between the actual engineering staff and the managerial layer, probably exasperated by the fact that political appointees head the organization.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...
jerf|1 year ago
This paradox is easily resolved. As risk aversion goes to maximum, the only acceptable solution is to do what was done before. Anything we deviate from doing before is something that could fail in a new and unknown way, possibly bigger than before.
This isn't a NASA thing, this is one of the basics of large bureaucracies. It is one of the major drivers of their inertia and inability to change course. When the penalty for slightly more failure than before (in anything except money spend, that's OK as long as it's done by high level people) is expulsion and scapegoating and the reward for doing slightly better is a pat on the back and a denied request for a salary upgrade/slight promotion, you converge on having an organization full of people where this is the only path forward, no matter how much acknowledgement there is that the current situation is broken by every last person involved.
To take a really big diversion, one of the deeper aspects of the "move fast and break things" philosophy isn't just about directly moving fast and breaking things; it is creating a culture where people have permission to fail at least a little before being evicted from it. Your biggest successes will always involve some failures on the way, so if you rigorously eliminate all failure from your organization, all but the smallest, most basic of successes will go with it. It's not that you literally want to break things or that managers should necessarily create a "broken things" metric and try to keep it in some band above zero but below catastrophe, it's about making avoiding breakage not calcifying and paralyzing your company by making it the absolute number one priority above all else.
practicemaths|1 year ago
Edit: also looking at your list of accidents, China has one with 6-100 deaths.
And USSR has 120 deaths in 1960.
I think you need to look at deaths beyond just Astronauts here.
philwelch|1 year ago
markus_zhang|1 year ago