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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?

#81

Post by ctdonath »

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…

If you go to space you might not come back. That's why explorers rock and everyone else watches TV.

http://www.wondermark.com/comics/326.gif

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

#83

Post by mmahemoff »

tokenadult wrote: post #2

This article ended up being more interesting than I expected. Particularly noteworthy is the point that if a program sets an unusually high value on human life, it diverts resources from other programs also intended to protect human life, and thus brings about LESSENED protection of human life through that drain on resources. This provides thoughtful perspective on policy trade-offs. As Thomas Sowell has written, "Th…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Estimates_of_the_...

Various policy setters have to make these difficult decisions.

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

#84

Post by oconnore »

heliodor wrote: post #72
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…

I'd disagree there. Once upon a time, the sea was seen as dangerous. Everything can be made "safe" at some point.

Every year there are between 600 and 700 recorded deaths from recreational boating alone (not counting industrial or military accidents) [1]. No matter how safe we make it, there will always be accidents, and those accidents will kill people.

[1] http://www.uscgboating.org/statistics/accident_statistics.as...

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

#85

Post by moonchrome »

philjohn wrote: post #79
heliodor wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd disagree there. Once upon a time, the sea was seen as dangerous. Everything can be made "safe" at some point.

I think the families of the tens of thousands of people killed in the Japanese Tsunami last year would disagree.

Still it's undeniable that progress has been made. It's incremental and there are trade-offs, in the future we could have protective domes spanning entire cities that would withstand that amount of pressure for eg.

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

#86

Post by mechanical_fish »

rflrob wrote: post #69
mechanical_fish wrote: post #58

Mars is key to humanity’s future in space. It is the closest planet that has the resources needed to support life and technological civilization. ... well, except for air, and food. But there's water! Which we can detect with sensitive instruments! This whole article has no point. As everyone in the military knows full well, if the benefit is great enough humans will happily risk other human lives, even expend lives,…

The problem is, humans are so much more effective than robots at planning and independent decision making, which is critical when there's a 8-40 minute communications round trip time. The two wildly successful MER probes Spirit and Opportunity traveled a combined ~40km in around 4,000 sols. A human areologist could cover that much in a week.

And just how many Spirit probes could one send to Mars for the cost of sending a single human?

Based on a bit of Googling, the answer seems to be on the order of "ten", as a minimum. Numbers of $20 billion or so were being thrown around for a manned mission, and the currently-in-transit Mars Science Lab is up past $1.5 billion after a 30% cost overrun:

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story.jsp?id=news/Bal...

Given that the $20 billion is a pie-in-the-sky planning number and has yet to experience overruns of its own...

Meanwhile, what's the rush? Mars is not going anywhere.

And meanwhile too, is your human really going to cover 40km in a week after a ten month trip in free fall? Not at the present state of the art:

http://www.space.com/8978-trip-mars-turn-astronauts-weakling...

Or are we shipping an SUV to Mars along with the human and all of her groceries? The Spirit-probe-to-human ratio continues to grow.

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

#87

Post by mikeash »

Splines wrote: post #68
nkoren wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Children don't need to watch a shuttle burst into flames in order for science to progress. Yes, they do. Progress with zero risk of failure is no progress at all. To even attempt progress with zero risk of failure is to ensure that: 1.) You will minimize your progress 2.) You will fail anyway ...As the Shuttle all too ably demonstrated.

I think we misunderstand. I'm arguing that children don't need to watch potentially disturbing imagery to ensure that they contribute to furthering science in the future. The argument "we should not coddle children because science" rings false to me. "Coddling children" is a bit of a strawman; there are things we don't tell children because of their innate immaturity. As are most things, it's a spectrum.

I would argue that hiding things from children the way we do only works because we aren't always successful at it. If we were able to hide things from children with 100% reliability, we'd end up with young adults incapable of functioning in society.

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

#88

Post by rflrob »

Symmetry wrote: post #54
wiredfool wrote: post #45

When discussing the 2 rovers with a 90% success rate, the author comes to the conclusion: The right answer is to go for two rovers, because if you do it that way, you will have a 99 percent probability of succeeding with at least one of the vehicles Which is not exactly right. It's correct if you're looking at random, uncorrelated factors. However, two rovers from the same program are not going to be uncorrelated. If…

Or they could not launch the two rovers at the same time and use the failures of the first rover to make the second work, in which case the errors become anti-correlated.

The problem with that approach is that given the orbital dynamics of the Sun-Earth-Mars system, there's a relatively brief window every couple of years when it makes sense to launch a mission. If there's a crippling error in the first launch, it's somewhat unlikely that it can be identified and fixed before the second one hits Mars orbit.

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

#89

Post by _dps »

VMG wrote: post #62
jordanb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NASA is a political organization, but that's why the manned space program exists. It long ago ceased to make sense from a cost/scientific-benefit perspective. Manned flight continues only on the argument that it excites the public and fuels interest in space. Bearing that in mind, the entire thing is showboating on TV, and it's pretty silly to angst if over this, that, or the other bit of it is compromised by politic…

It amazes me that on a tech site you are getting downvotes for this. Human space travel is a waste of money from a scientific standpoint. Why a libertarian magazine like reason.com supports human space travel at all is a mystery to me.

I would ask: a waste of money over what time-scale?

I agree that the ROI over the next decade or two seems low. But at some point, if we plan to ever get humans to other planets, we're going to have to do the low ROI slog of figuring out the basics. I don't think we will reach a point where getting people to other planets will suddenly become low-hanging fruit.

So I think the only real options are:

  1) do some low ROI exploratory work to enable higher ROI efforts down the road
  2) never send humans beyond earth orbit (seems short-sighted to me over a 
     century-long timeframe, but who knows)
  3) hope that somehow it will become much cheaper through windfall technology 
     developments in other fields (not impossible, but certainly not one that I 
     would bet on)

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

#90

Post by sprog »

jaredhansen wrote: post #43
maratd wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reject the notion that we should coddle our children. The teacher is there for a reason. To provide context to what the child is being exposed to. And that can make all the difference. Yes, you can die. Yes, it is dangerous. Yes, these brave men risked their lives and they lost. And if they had to do it all over again, they would risk their lives again. Because if it wasn't for men like them, we would still be sitt…

>brave men risked their lives >men like them It wasn't just men: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Resnik http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christa_McAuliffe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalpana_Chawla http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Clark Language has power, and using "men" in this context makes invisible the contributions and bravery of these women and others like them. Sorry to seem PC, but it's important to get…

Stop trolling this feminist garbage.
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