Aircraft safety standards and rocket safety standards are totally different!
SpaceX has blown up 7 rockets and advanced ridiculously quickly. On the other hand we are aggressively safety conscious in aviation and that’s great but in the first 60 years of flight we went from the Wright brothers to the 737 and in the next 60 years we went from the 737 to the 737 Max.
As much as people hate to hear you can’t have it both ways, I think the evidence we can take from this is that innovation basically isn’t possible within an aggressively safety optimizing regime.
My point was that the FAA regulates both. So it seems to counter the idea that regulation necessarily impedes progress.
I must say, suggesting that the only progress we've seen in aviation is from the 737 to the 737 Max is very disingenuous. Since the first flight of the original 737 in 1967, we've seen - this is just a tiny and obvious sample - the 747, 767, 777, A300, A380, A350... composite wings and fuselages, glass cockpits, fly-by-wire, high-bypass turbofans, TCAS, GPS, ETOPS, ADS-B... it's a very long list of innovations. It's incredible that you think the last 60 years has been static.
Well, if you define safety as “few deaths” vs “few explosions” then, sure. If SpaceX had to 100% avoid explosions they would make much less progress than they do.
But don’t be silly. Obviously safety is about avoiding harm to humans and avoiding damage to third parties. “Avoiding explosions” is usually a good partial proxy to achieve this goal but not always. In terms of rocketry you can’t reliably avoid explosions. So you do other things like launching towards an ocean, maritime exlusion zones, NOTAMs. Even with manned rockets we usually can’t entirely avoid explosions but instead furnish the manned compartment with some means of an escape system.
Have you thought about why SpaceX a company headquartered in Hawthorne, California is testing their rockets from Boca Chica, Texas? Wouldn’t it be so much simpler to just wheel the rocket out from their HQ and launch it right from there? Of course it would be, but when things predictably go wrong they would rain metal shrapnel on lovely Californian suburbs. The whole reason why they built a launch pad on a coast is safety. Not safety by not exploding things, but safety by making sure that when things explode people and other people’s property will be unharmed.
SpaceX has blown up 7 rockets and advanced ridiculously quickly. On the other hand we are aggressively safety conscious in aviation and that’s great but in the first 60 years of flight we went from the Wright brothers to the 737 and in the next 60 years we went from the 737 to the 737 Max.
As much as people hate to hear you can’t have it both ways, I think the evidence we can take from this is that innovation basically isn’t possible within an aggressively safety optimizing regime.