So, I'll reply here. Sorry about that.
First Anonymous comment:
I assure you this is genuine concern and not concern trolling. I've done some editing since your comment, including cites to Thomas Stafford, retired lt General and former astronaut who is concerned about their fuel loading, and Wayne Hale, former manager of the Space Shuttle Program who is concerned about the lunar mission saying
"Even with today's technology, it's still an extraordinarily difficult, extraordinarily dangerous task to undertake, period — I don't care who you are,"
On the Falcon 9 Block 5, that's an announcement about a future rocket that's not yet flown. First flight towards the end of 2017. So if they fly to the ISS on a Falcon block 5 with the first crewed flight, it's still one of the first flights of the block 5. If the first human flight was say in 2020, then it would be a much more thoroughly tested rocket so long as they keep to that same design for it until then. Whether it is required of them or not, why the rush to send humans so soon? It's not like anyone else is in the running to beat them to it even.
On the quality control - yes they fixed that issue of the strut. But that it happened in the first place shows that they didn't pay attention to a possible failure mode, in that case a problem with a supplier. Is there anything else like that, which they haven't looked at carefully yet?
We have no idea what the chance is of the rocket failing during fuel loading procedures with crew on board. Theoretically the falcon 9 explosion shouldn't have happened - the probability should have been zero. But they missed something, so in actuality the probability of it happening was surely rather high. After all it happened. You can work out probabilities with known failure modes and knowing the quality of the components and on the assumption that the quoted tolerances etc are exact. You can't do the same though with probabilities for unknown failure modes or failure of the quality control system itself. Do read the article again - I raise the same issues with the SLS, especially the idea of launching humans on the first flight of the SLS. I've put a short paragraph of that into the introduction - presumably you didn't read the "Details" section? It's all there. The original article was also a little repetitive - I had some material that occurred in both the intro and the details section which may have made it less clear that the details section went into much more detail. That's fixed now also.
I've also added a sentence near the start, saying "For SpaceX fans, just to say, I'm quite critical in this article but it has an up beat ending. It's not my aim to discourage SpaceX in their human spaceflight ambitions :). Rather the aim is to encourage them to do it safely." which may help.
The main thing is - I think we shouldn't only look at the fun side of things. We need to take seriously what it would be like if this fun but dangerous approach leads to a crash. I think it's too easy for fans to get into a mode where they assume it is going to be like the movies. They may imagine SpaceX astronauts taking tremendous risks but somehow always win out at the end, as in Star Trek, or at least for the heros and heroines, nearly always, in one emergency after another. But this could actually happen, that they all die and I don't think the SpaceX fans are really prepared for that, much as they might think they are.
Part of it may be that many fans are young. Or that they have forgotten the incidents somewhat as they happened a while back, the Challenger disaster was on 28th Jan 1986. The Columbia one was 1st February 2003. Apollo 13 was 11 April 1970 (when I was 15 getting on for 16), and Apollo 1 was in 1967. There were Russian deaths as well of course. And that was with a careful step by step approach, or so they thought at the time.
That's what we are talking about here, a possible Columbia - or an Apollo 13 without the happy ending, everyone dies. After that, if that happens, it's my own view that even to SpaceX fans, Elon Musk's "fun and dangerous" may just seem "dangerous" and not such fun any more. That's not concern trolling. That's just concern. We can't prevent it altogether of course, but spaceflight is risky enough as it is, without skipping steps that could have made it safer such as a "shakedown cruise" or two in LEO before going around the Moon and taking advantage of their unmanned program but finalizing the capsule + rocket not just one launch but several launches before sending the first crewed mission.
It's easy to be keen on a "fun but dangerous" approach - it seems romantic and exciting and brave - until the first crash that kills everyone on board. This is for real, not a movie, and not a theme park adventure ride. After the first major tragedy, which seems bound to happen following this approach sooner or later, there may be less enthusiasm for it and many calling for a return to a safer approach to spaceflight. Perhaps it is easiest to see this right now for those who remember the Challenger and Columbia disasters.
Yes, maybe if we'd done this in, say, the nineteenth century then probably nobody would have thought that much of Challenger / Columbia / Apollo 1 etc. We accept this level of risk even today in a war situation.
But we aren't at war with anyone in space, and we have very different ideas about what are acceptable levels of risk in civilian life. Not just NASA. We all do, it's part of our culture. Calling it "fun but dangerous" doesn't change that and won't change people's reactions after a tragedy when everyone dies. Especially when he can make it a lot safer by taking it more slowly, which is what just about everyone will say he should have done, after the event, if they do all die in this Moon mission.
There would then be many questions asked after a crash, e.g., if the life support fails - why didn't they test it in LEO first? Or whatever the issue is. SpaceX get a reward every time they do an unmanned mission. That's the beauty of their approach, and it could be used to hugely increase the safety of human spaceflight if they played it that way. And they also would earn from each mission to LEO with passengers on board.
So, if they wanted to make it much safer, what could they do? Well mainly, to be in somewhat less of a rush to do spectacular human missions. They aren’t in a race with anyone at present, and