Re: Boo, hiss
"It's not "making light of", it's saying "WTF are they doing this considering the imperfect safety record!!!". I had assumed that that failure would delay manned flights for many years."
Many years? Both shuttle disasters resulted in Shuttle programme pauses of under 3 years.
Falcon 9 is a much simpler vehicle with far fewer components, and a more vertically integrated supply chain. There's no reason why SpaceX shouldn't be able to investigate the incident, isolate the root causes (both physical and procedural), and return to flight in a much shorter period, especially as the next few flights will be unmanned and they can validate their work before putting meat bags up front.
Moreover, the telemetry showed that the Dragon capsule was responsive until it disappeared over the horizon, which is indicative that in a manned launch, the launch-abort process would have made the entire process survivable (albeit unpleasant). You'd have lost the mission but not the crew.
Dragon remains an inherently safer system than the Shuttle - because you can push a panic button and separate the astronauts from an exploding vehicle very quickly.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
