• Question: How do you feel when you see accidents reported on Earth or in space?

    Asked by EJH.13 to Alice, Bose, Christian, Emma, Steve on 16 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Benjamin Bose

      Benjamin Bose answered on 16 Mar 2016:


      It’s always sad when you hear of accidents, man made or natural, but they are often unavoidable – both types.

      Human’s aren’t perfect and make mistakes – it’s almost impossible to plan a mission as difficult as traveling to space, landing on asteroids, driving droids around Mars, without some things not going to plan.

      When it comes to nature, well, she can be very unruly and hard to predict at the best of times – the number of times I’ve walked home in the rain can attest to that!

    • Photo: Christian Killow

      Christian Killow answered on 16 Mar 2016:


      I watched very nervously last December as LISA Pathfinder launched – the chances of it blowing up on the launch pad were very small due to the huge effort that had been put into every aspect of it. But it was still stressful watching it!

      And that was for an inanimate object, admittedly one I’d spent many years working on, and when the cargo is humans it is a different level. Believe me, there are a lot of procedures in place to try and prevent accidents in space exploration, but you can’t guard against everything. There is always risk.

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