SafeNotAnOption

The Twitter account for the book Safe Is Not An Option: How a Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive is Killing Our Expansion into Space.

[SafeNotAnOption @SafeNotAnOption]

@KawanaJane How many of the women planned to actually go to the Moon do you imagine are unhappy that they didn't instead just get to simulate going to the Moon in LEO, as the four men selected are going to do?

[Peter Hague @peterrhague]

If anybody is bummed about there being no women on Artemis III - bear in mind that anybody who flies on this mission won’t get a landing mission any time soon. So by not flying women on this mission, the female astronauts can still get places on IV and V…

[Rand Simberg @Simberg_Space]

I think the dam has broken on being able to look at alternatives to the previous insane mission architectures imposed by the legal necessity of using the ridiculous SLS.

[Not-So-OK Boomer @Rand_Simberg]

I fervently await the day that who is going to the Moon is not an event worthy of a national news conference and press release, and that no one gives a rat's patoot other than their friends and family.

[Rand Simberg @Simberg_Space]

The Dem corruption in CA is not new. Back in the 90s I registered Libertarian and it came back Democrat.

[The Random Recruiter @randomrecruiter]

You want to know why everyone in Corporate America hates HR?

Here's why.

Working with one of our Fintech clients to extend an offer for an AI Engineer.

This candidate's background is ridiculous. Coming out of one of the hottest startups, degrees from IIT and Carnegie Mellon.

He's got a competing offer, so the hiring manager and director decided to bring him in at Principal level to beat them on title, beat them on comp.

Done deal, right?

Wrong.

Enter HR.

They rejected it. "Doesn't have enough experience."

This is an AI Engineer. From IIT and Carnegie Mellon. With a competing offer. And they're saying he doesn't have enough years of experience although he has amazing skills.

Now a week has gone by. More people need to sign off. The manager has zero backup candidates. And the candidate just let me know he's leaning toward the other offer. This whole thing left a bad taste in his mouth.

So to recap: HR just cost a team their number one candidate, wasted a week of everyone's time, and killed a hire that the actual business wanted to make.

But sure, tell me how HR "adds value."

[SafeNotAnOption @SafeNotAnOption]

@itsajinkyaraj @sethbannon That was not the premise of the Internet.

[Nature Unedited @NatureUnedited]

At an aquarium in Japan, after closing time, some clever little otter pups help their grandpa tidy up their toys. As a reward, he gives them ice cubes

[SafeNotAnOption @SafeNotAnOption]

@g_kinney @CharlesMullins2 @elonmusk Not practical.

[Handre @Handre]

The South Sea Company demonstrates how government creates the very financial disasters it later claims to solve.

In 1711, the British government handed the South Sea Company an exclusive monopoly on trade with South America. The company received the right to manage £10 million of government debt in exchange for annual interest payments of £600,000. You already see the problem: politicians picking winners and losers, creating artificial scarcity through legal barriers to entry.

The company's directors understood their position perfectly. They held a government-backed monopoly with guaranteed income streams. Why bother with actual trade when financial engineering offered better returns?

By 1720, company insiders had perfected their scheme. Directors received stock allocations at below-market prices. They leaked hints about fictional trading opportunities in Peru and Mexico. Share prices exploded from £128 in January to over £1,000 by August. Company secretary John Blunt personally made millions while ordinary investors mortgaged their homes to buy shares at peak prices.

The government made everything worse. Chancellor of the Exchequer John Aislabie secretly purchased company stock while publicly endorsing its financial soundness. King George I became governor of the company. The Bank of England competed directly with South Sea for the privilege of managing more government debt, driving both institutions toward increasingly reckless promises.

You can see the disaster coming from a mile away. Legal monopolies breed rent-seeking parasites. Politicians who become business partners with their supposed regulatory targets make corruption inevitable. Monopoly privileges combined with government debt management guarantee fraud.

The crash came fast. By September, shares fell to £175. By December, they hit £124. Thousands of families lost everything they owned.

Parliament's response reveals the true nature of government monopolies. Instead of eliminating the system that created the bubble, they passed the Bubble Act, restricting corporate formation for ordinary entrepreneurs while preserving existing monopoly privileges for connected insiders. They prosecuted a few scapegoats while the political class kept their profits.

You still live with this pattern today. Governments grant exclusive licenses, patents, and regulatory privileges to favored companies. Politicians invest in the same firms they regulate(See: The Pelosian class). When the inevitable crashes occur, authorities blame "market failures" and "insufficient regulation" rather than their own interference.

The South Sea Company operated for another century after the bubble, earning modest returns from actual trade. Without government debt schemes and monopoly privileges, it functioned as a normal business serving real customers.

The lesson remains unchanged: markets work when entrepreneurs compete freely for consumer dollars. They fail when politicians pick winners, grant exclusive privileges, and mix public finance with private profit. Government creates the monster, then offers to slay it for a fee.

[SafeNotAnOption @SafeNotAnOption]

@EadrictheWild @peterrhague It's a useful technology, but it was never going to be SSTO (which is highly overrated, other than for equatorial launch to equatorial LEO). SpaceX has shown that staging works just fine, with much less sensitivity to off-nominal destinations.

[Joel C. Sercel, PhD @JoelSercel]

I agree that this is a serious concern. Many people minimize the problem suggesting that space is big so collisions are unlikely, but you need to do the math to understand. In LEO objects are moving so fast (nearly 8 km/s) that they travel about 700,000 km per day, so there are a huge number of opportunities for collisions. When they do collide it breed tens of thousands of pieces of debris new debris that can breed more debris.

This is NOT the end of the world, we can solve it, but we need to work the problem ! The solution is multifaceted and involves things like:
- Orbital debris cleanup of about 100 derelict satellites and orbital stages that are basically out of control creating navigational hazards.
- End of life disposal of hundreds more satellites current operational without good end of life disposal plans.
- Careful navigation and data sharing between satellite operators.

[Rand Simberg @Simberg_Space]

@SciGuySpace Someone needs to tell Jared that the notion that there was no commercial demand for LEO facilities was utter BS.

[SafeNotAnOption @SafeNotAnOption]

@Beckathenz @Simberg_Space NASA had no choice in that regard, and the expensive expendable Saturn V was not our space future.

[Rand Simberg @Simberg_Space]

And we haven't been back in over 53 years. Thanks to stupidity from Congress like SLS/Orion.

[Rand Simberg @Simberg_Space]

@Monkeybane_DC We are rapidly approaching the time at which we will think that launch-escape systems are in fact dumb, as dumb as parachutes on an airliner. They add tremendous cost and significantly reduce payload mass, against an event that is increasingly unlikely.

[Not-So-OK Boomer @Rand_Simberg]

Moreover, while a lot of people naively say "Space is hard" because they've heard the "experts" say it a lot, a lot of people say it to justify what a pigs breakfast NASA's human spaceflight program is, in terms of high cost and slow progress, when the real reason is that the harder NASA and its cost-plus contractors make it seem, the more money they get from the taxpayer to continue the grift.

And no, I'm not going to name names, but they know who they are. I've lost work and been blackballed in this industry because I've had the temerity to point it out for decades, but I'm not going to stop. Because unlike them, I actually give a damn about humanity's future in space.

[Stevie J. West @StevieWestAgain]

Last time I needed a non emergency MRI my ortho was like, "hey let's get an MRI" and I was like "okay for sure, let's" and then about 15 minutes later I went down the hall and got an MRI.

[David C Lowery @davidclowery]

The job this guy imagines he gets in the post revolution command economy: Director of a theatre in a midsized coastal city.

The job this guy is actually assigned after the revolution : stripping out rare earths from old computer mother boards with toxic chemicals and a blowtorch in a non climate controlled metal shed in Valdosta GA for the local mafia syndicate which is run by the half brother of the local internal security director.

[Rand Simberg @Simberg_Space]

One of the deepest of root causes of this was hubris on the part of Boeing, aided and abetted by NASA's assumption that SpaceX would fail, and thus the former was overfunded and the latter underfunded. And "Starliner" is a great metaphor for that hubris.