A very sad day...
A very, very sad day for Scaled Composites, Burt Rutan and the familes. I am sure we all wish them the best.
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Responding to Paul's comments. I can remember way back when I was a kid watching the movie "Marooned'. It was a fictional account about three astronauts who were stranded in orbit in an Apollo spacecraft. One scene portrayed the NASA flight director as being asked by a reporter, "Was this flight worth the lives you lost?" to which an angry Gregory Peck shoots back, "You're d*mn right it was! If it weren't for the sacrifice of this crew, we never get off this planet..."
I suppose why that was a big movie scene was that somehow it touched a nerve in the American psyche that makes us think that yes indeed what we are doing is so important that it is worth taking risks and losing lives. We want to justify those awful dangers by saying that what they (the astronauts) do is so important that we can justify an occasional loss of a crew. We treat them like heroes because they face the risks so that we can have a space program.
But is spaceflight (or for that matter any flight) really worth all this? Perhaps you would respond like the NASA movie character, "You're d*mn right it is!" I do not wish to be insensitive or stir up controversy here, but is it really worth it? To the wives of those lost? To the sons? To the daughters? What would really have been better, a young boy who lost a father who was developing a spacecraft or a middle-aged man who lived to see his father grow old having never made a spacecraft or flown in space?
We want desperately at a time like this to be able to say it was worth it in order to ease the pain of the moment. To justify the loss. But the bottom line is that there is not a justification, just a loss. We want so much that there be a balancing of the profit to the loss in the flying equation that we glorify the attempt of flight far above the nobility of even life itself.
For me, it just doesn't work and it never will.
I don't think space flight, or any flight, including my own little RV is worth that risk. But do I think we should end the manned spaceflight program? No. Do I think we should stop trying to develop commercial space flight? No. And do I think I should stop building my RV? No. But is any of this worth losing lives over? No. Not any of it, not ever. A tragedy is a tragedy is a tragedy. No great reach of flight will ever change that.
But yes, we all will going on flying. Flying and building. And having some fun along the way. And, as long as we don't die doing it, it will be well worth it. But we need to do everything we possibly can to fly safe because a lost life will never come up as worth it.
Fly safe my friends
NM
