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How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

reason.com

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Re: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

#11

Post by kscaldef »

noonespecial wrote: post #5

Space is dangerous. We should stop pretending it can be made "safe". It just gives politicians something to wag their tongues at when something inevitably goes wrong. If you go to space you might not come back. That's why explorers rock and everyone else watches TV. The article also misses an important variable. How much is discovery worth? Once that's added to the plus column, all of the other costs seem insignifica…

It also misses things like: What's the cost of a million schoolchildren watching a space shuttle explode?

Re: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

#12

Post by vannevar »

The article is thought-provoking, but marred by an enormous and unsupported leap of logic at the outset:

Yet despite vastly superior technology and hundreds of billions of dollars in subsequent spending, the agency has been unable to send anyone else farther than low Earth orbit ever since.

Why? Because we insist that our astronauts be as safe as possible.

Safety concerns undoubtedly carry a cost at NASA, but they are hardly the central reason there have been no manned missions beyond Earth orbit. During Apollo, when presumably the agency wasn't so safety conscious, NASA's budget (adjusted for inflation) was twice what it is today, and as a percentage of the Federal budget it was over 5x today's level.

Re: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

#13

Post by joshuahedlund »

the multi-decade preparatory exercise adopted as an alternative to real space exploration has already cost the lives of 14 astronauts, and will almost certainly cost more as it drags on...

Seriously? Does anyone have more information on this? I like Reason but sometimes they can be a little biased. If there's no missing context and we're literally killing astronauts in safety training then there is no excuse not to just get them in space already.

Re: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

#14

Post by natep »

As he barely acknowledges, the problem isn't necessarily that NASA is too risk-averse when it comes to human lives, it's society at large. After every failure, there is a massive outcry along the lines of "how much money did we give you again? And you still couldn't get it right?"

The argument that the money could be spent elsewhere has been around since the beginning of the space program, I think. Do the people making this argument know that NASA's current yearly budget is around 0.6% of the entire budget (and only ever as high as 4.41%[1])? So really, the question should be flipped around. Think of what we could accomplish if all the money spent inefficiently elsewhere were instead given to a space program (not necessarily NASA, because I won't deny it has its problems)

It also seems silly to me to use large-number probability analysis on what are usually one-time occurrences. If a $2 billion mission fails immediately after launch, and it could have been prevented by $0.5 billion in more testing, then spending the extra money does make sense, especially if the failure would also cause public outcry. And it would not mean that an identical mission would also have the same risk. If the failure was due to bad design or a systemic error in a part (the more likely scenarios than a random failure[2]), then that failure would also happen in the next mission.

So yes, I agree that NASA needs to have a focused goal and shorter timelines, but I think this article might have been better directed at the public, then scapegoating NASA administrators.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

[2] Source: a talk by the founder of AeroAstro, sorry it's not online

Re: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

#15

Post by lutorm »

Interesting, but I thought it sort of built a straw-man argument in that the main premise, that all the delay on a Mars mission is just to lower risk to the astronauts, isn't really substantiated. The calculation that ends up showing that the cost of a Mars mission is a hugely inefficient way of reducing risk to human life assumes the entire cost is to lower human risk. So it's only an upper limit, and there is no way to judge whether it's a useful upper limit.

Besides, the fact that there is a difference between risk to human life and risk of mission success is only relevant if there is a significant probability of mission success. You can only play the game with multiple missions for redundancy if an individual mission has a probability of success reasonably close to 1, otherwise it doesn't buy you much.

Of course, this whole affair assumes that we actually have some hope of a priori estimating the risk of failure of complex systems. I doubt it's possible, and I think that's confirmed by the observed 2% shuttle failure rate compared to what the "acceptable risk" of the mission was supposed to be.

Re: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

#16

Post by hyperbovine »

kscaldef wrote: post #11
noonespecial wrote: post #5

Space is dangerous. We should stop pretending it can be made "safe". It just gives politicians something to wag their tongues at when something inevitably goes wrong. If you go to space you might not come back. That's why explorers rock and everyone else watches TV. The article also misses an important variable. How much is discovery worth? Once that's added to the plus column, all of the other costs seem insignifica…

It also misses things like: What's the cost of a million schoolchildren watching a space shuttle explode?

No, that's exactly what it's not missing. Our fear of catastrophe is costing us hundreds of billions of dollars. Probably no single event in the history of space exploration contributed more to that fear than Challenger (and to a lesser extent, Columbia).

Re: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

#17

Post by sehugg »

joshuahedlund wrote: post #13

the multi-decade preparatory exercise adopted as an alternative to real space exploration has already cost the lives of 14 astronauts, and will almost certainly cost more as it drags on... Seriously? Does anyone have more information on this? I like Reason but sometimes they can be a little biased. If there's no missing context and we're literally killing astronauts in safety training then there is no excuse not to j…

Zubrin is talking about the deaths in Apollo I, Space Shuttle, etc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_acc...).

His point is exactly that, get them into space already. Or rather, give them a mission that is worth risking their life.

Re: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

#18

Post by bwarp »

kscaldef wrote: post #11
noonespecial wrote: post #5

Space is dangerous. We should stop pretending it can be made "safe". It just gives politicians something to wag their tongues at when something inevitably goes wrong. If you go to space you might not come back. That's why explorers rock and everyone else watches TV. The article also misses an important variable. How much is discovery worth? Once that's added to the plus column, all of the other costs seem insignifica…

It also misses things like: What's the cost of a million schoolchildren watching a space shuttle explode?

In my case it was a desire to be an engineer!

Re: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

#19

Post by jessriedel »

joshuahedlund wrote: post #13

the multi-decade preparatory exercise adopted as an alternative to real space exploration has already cost the lives of 14 astronauts, and will almost certainly cost more as it drags on... Seriously? Does anyone have more information on this? I like Reason but sometimes they can be a little biased. If there's no missing context and we're literally killing astronauts in safety training then there is no excuse not to j…

He's referring to the entire space shuttle program as "the multi-decade preparatory exercise adopted as an alternative to real space exploration". There were 14 astronauts killed on the Challenger and the Columbia disasters, 7 from each.

Re: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

#20

Post by jeremya »

kscaldef wrote: post #11
noonespecial wrote: post #5

Space is dangerous. We should stop pretending it can be made "safe". It just gives politicians something to wag their tongues at when something inevitably goes wrong. If you go to space you might not come back. That's why explorers rock and everyone else watches TV. The article also misses an important variable. How much is discovery worth? Once that's added to the plus column, all of the other costs seem insignifica…

It also misses things like: What's the cost of a million schoolchildren watching a space shuttle explode?

The cost of a million school children watching a space shuttle explode is the cost of the million conversations with parents and other adults that occur afterwards. These should be conversations that help develop each child's understanding of the world and the risks, challenges, and rewards of great human endeavors.
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