Astronaut Sacrifice

Source: https://pitchblack.thecomicseries.com/comics/233

44 comments

Well shit.
- My head canon is that he knew there was an update available to fix it, he just wanted to get away from the other astronauts. I might be biased having spent the day hiding from my family.
  
  I recall the story of the guy that told his wife he was working new years so she went to his office just to prove he was cheating. Dude was in the office. he just hates his wife that much.
  Also knew another guy that came in at 6 and left at 8 daily. I swear dude did not want to be home.
  
  You okay? Do you need a hug or just some chips and to be left alone?

I love the totally illogical idea of self-destruction in space travel.
Like we don’t have self-destruct bombs on ships or planes or research stations on earth (I’m sure there’s an exception or two, but they prove the point), why the fuck would we have them in space, which is a much more fragile environment to exist within..?
Computer shutdown procedures sure, but what possible use is a bomb that’s made to blow up your own vessel? Just so silly.
- I always though the point was "This is secret/must not be given to the enemy" so destruction is a better option than having it seized
  
  That would make sense for a cutting edge spy plane, but it's a little weird for something like the Nostromo, which is just a standard cargo ship. I guess if you sometimes carried secret cargo, though, you would want that equipment standard, since otherwise installing it custom for one trip would be a dead giveaway that there was something secret on board.
- We have them in missiles. Oh, and on civilian rockets too.
  We put them on things that are dangerous and must be stopped is something goes wrong.
  
  I don't think you can even make missiles without self destruct. If you can, what's the point?
- Most of the time it seems like it’s not a bomb, but triggering some kind of uncontrolled meltdown of a reactor that’s powering the vessel, or maybe blowing up the fuel.
  
  In some cases sure, but even then, like.. why is that so easy to do? And why are there countdowns? And why can it be intentionally triggered? That’s the real weird one. None of those things are even remotely realistic. There should be layers upon layers of safeguards to prevent the super expensive ship that took years to build from blowing up.
  I mean we already have auto-shutdown processes for all sorts of explody and dangerous energy sources on earth; we even have auto-shutdown processes to prevent damage to the generator/facility. I’d assume those used to power ships would be among the safest, especially if we’ve made it to real manned exploration technology.
- Didn’t German u-boats get sunk by their crew rather than allow that tech to get into the hands of the Allied powers?
  I would think self destruct is the same concept.
  
  Many naval vessels have been sunk by their own crew rather than be captured by the enemy. It's called scuttling.
- A naval ship can't destroy an entire planet with orbital bombardment.
- Protomolecule
- There are flight termination systems (explosives) on rockets, but not spacecraft
- Scuttling purposes or of its far enough in the future/sci-fi enough you might not want the data/object surviving if you can't have it