On Wed, 22 Oct 2003 03:15:01 -0500, John Carmack <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>I'm not sure I agree with this. I don't see why a suborbital flight can't >be closer to an amusement park ride. Your customer training standards are up to you, assuming HR 3245 passes; AST will merely require you to have some and stick to them. You could screen and train your customers to amusement park ride standards, but IMHO if you do that, your insurance company will want you to demonstrate that your "ride" is as safe as an amusement park ride. Amusement park rides have an amazing safety record; their fatality rate in this country is less than one per year, among many millions of customers. We're going to have a job reaching that good a safety record with the general public, let alone our customers. Many billions of dollars have gone into amusement park ride design, construction, and maintenance. It's not much less mature an industry than general aviation, except that its regulatory requirements are different from state to state. So a suborbital flight can be close to an amusement park ride, in theory, and a couple vehicle generations down the road, we should get there in practice. But for now, it's much more akin to high altitude (7000+ meters) mountaineering, extreme skydiving, technical diving, or other sports that puts their participants at significant risk. And it's in our best interest to tell people that. (Sample customer disclosure: "This vehicle has a demonstrated safety record of 91%. It's never crashed, but we haven't flown it enough to get the safety figure higher than that. So there's a 1 in 11 chance that you're not coming back. Unless you've summited on Everest, this is the most dangerous thing you've ever done. Still want to go?") It's the only way to pass the obituary test. -R -- Every complex, difficult problem has a simple, easy solution - which is wrong. [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
