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Shuttle Politics
TheLoneCabbage writes "Texas Rep. Joe Barton has been quoted today in an AP article saying that he is in favor of grounding the remaining fleet of shuttles. 'If we have to stop manned spaceflight for five or 10 years, then so be it.' The fine gentleman from Texas displays his outstanding grasp of statistics and engineering stating that 1 failure in every 62.5 flights is NOT acceptable. According to OpenSecrets.org this may have more to do with Joe's friends than how much attention he paid to his math teachers." There's also an interesting piece on testimony given by the first Shuttle program manager.
The odds may be against the astro/cosmonauts when they go on their missions, but how is this much different when European explorers went out onto the Atlantic? There were many lives lost as well.
Exploration has always been a risky business. I don't believe for a second that the ladies and gentlemen who volunteer for a space mission are not aware of the risks associates with it.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Just wondering, what do people here feel is an acceptable risk?
/. writeup, is this just another DC windbag looking to make some cash for his cronies?
I would easily say that 1/62.5 is acceptable. In fact, I'm quite impressed that it's not 1/2. It's a really amazing accomplishment to do it at all. Back in the early days (even well into the Apollo program) it was pretty much given that this is a major risk to the lives of the astronauts.
Could it possibly be that we've just gotten soft, and started to take space flight for granted (which would be good in it's own way)? Is it just that the fucking baby-boomers have no spine? If so, will this only get worse in time? For example, I just heard on Howard Stern this morning that the average person doesn't really consider someone an adult until around 26 years old. Are we just becoming less and less responsible and, consequently, less willing to accept the consequences of our actions (including death)?
Or, as stated in the
In any case, 2 crashes in 20 years is a very very good record. You'd be hard pressed to make the airline industry perform so well. Sure, the people on board the shuttle are worth more than those aboard commercial flights and the shuttle is worth more than a plane... still, it's quite impressive.
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
"The fine gentleman from Texas displays his outstanding grasp of statistics and engineering stating that 1 failure in ever 62.5 flights is NOT acceptable." I don't think there's any need to call him stupid just because you disagree with him. That is, the fact that he thinks 1 / 62.5 is too big does NOT mean he thinks that it's not small.. it just means he either places less value on space exploration or more value on human safety than you do. 1 death per 62.5 roller coaster riders is much too high... I'm not sure where I stand on space exploration right now myself - I think it's very interesting, and there is certainly the possibility of it being essential to our survival as a race - but the fact is that people are dying and whenever that happens we have to consider our priorities in terms that cannot, perhaps, be described with things you learn in high school math.
Columbia and Challenger were not destroyed because of an O-ring or a piece of foam... they were destroyed because NASA as an organization failed [astron.berkeley.edu]. We need to fix NASA before we continue to launch shuttles... which have become glorified construction and grocery delivery vehicles as opposed to exploratory or R&D craft.
There is obviously not a shortage of astronaughts wanting to go up in the space shuttle. It is not like we are strapping space monkies into the shuttle and sending them up against their will. These are smart educated people, who train hard to be astronaughts and are willing to give their lives to go into space and be pioneers. If they choose this risky business then so be it, I applaud them.
I'm not saying there is no room for improvement in the shuttle program, but some bozo politician from Texas should keep his word hole shut, when it comes to issues like this. When people are probing the frontiers some are bound to die. He should look at the history of the state he represents, it was not a bunch of sissy frontiersmen who wanted to stable the exploration and charting of Texas.
Face it, the US population doesn't care about soldiers lives.
If you die, in service, your family might get enough for a funeral.
If you happen to be in an office building that is the target of a high profile attack (Sept 11) your family will get millions.
It's sickening.
But how is it that we have had troops (US gov. employees) all over the world doing the most dangerous things for decades but 7 astronauts are unreasonable losses?
An excellent point. The answer is I guess, some people are more important than others. It's like when a pretty white schoolgirl gets kidnapped, it's frontpage news and the country is in shock. But if the same thing happens to a coloured guy, then nobody gives a damn. Or when you read how successful the war with Iraq was because there were only 200 fatalities, and you realise that they're just counting the Americans.
Every one of those astronauts that died understood the risks. They understood the engineering behind the shuttle, and knew full well that they could pay for the experience or chance of being in space with their lives. Last time I checked, NASA was an all-volunteer organization where people fought like hell to get accepted into the astronaut ranks. Those 14 people volunteered, and not a one of them would want his or her memory reflected by the cancellation of something they spent their entire lives to achieve. (with the exception of McAuliffe, but I don't think she'd want it cancelled either)
We shouldn't remember them as some goddamn statistical casualties, we should remember them as people so dedicated to the cause of human space exploration that they willingly laid down their lives for the furtherance of human knowledge. This guy's statements bring those 14 brave people down to the level of a goddamn statistic, and I hope
Keep the shuttles flying as long as there are volunteers to crew them, and make every effort to bring them home. We have the technology now, we had it in the 1970's, all we need is the national will to do it right.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
You're doing a risk-benefit analysis without looking at the benefit side. The risk to the astronauts would be acceptable if there were actual science being accomplished. I am not one of those profiteers who disdains "pure science," but any reasonable assessment of the shuttle program's scientific accomplishments has to conclude that sending old people into space and observing spiderwebs in zero gravity is not worth the tremendous cost in money and lives.
If we did away with the shuttle program (which over the years has turned into a huge pork barrel for the shuttle contractors), we could replace it with many more cheap unmanned flights plus manned flights with focused objectives. There's no reason to send an astronaut into space, at huge expense, to perform experiments that could just as easily be done on an unmanned craft. Instead, we should be sending those astronauts to Mars, which will never happen through the shuttle program.
Those that go up aren't doing so blindly. They've made their choice as to the relative value of their lives to themselves without going versus the value to themselves of going. We should honor that choice by being proud of them for being braver than most, not by denying the choice to others.
If someone were to come up with a plan for a one way trip to Mars that offered even a glimmer of hope for surviving, you'd have no trouble finding people who would rather live a few months on Mars than the rest of their lives on Earth. Time by itself isn't a reason to live.
Space exploration is why we send 7 people up there on a regular basis. We don't understand what's up there, we want to find out.
Unfortunately, one of the things we don't have a handle on is how to do it safely. That's part of the exploration process. We obviously have a system that works, as we've returned many safely back to earth. In the case of Columbia, an unknown variable was introduced. We've never known what happens if a tile is struck with an object on liftoff. It's never happened before, and we had to react with information we knew to figure out if it was a problem. Sometimes the only way to learn is to find out.
As for the 7 astronauts, this mission was hailed as one of the most successful in space history. The amount of research that was performed and the data was collected surpassed any previous missions. The astronauts love their work, so much in fact that they're willing to risk everything for it. For 7 people to sacrifice themselves for their research is truly an honor, and the world should see these 7 people as heros, not casualties.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
If loss of life really we're the reason, the following things would also be outlawed / shut-down:
Driving
Helicopters
Airlines
Military
Sex for those over 40
Smoking
Drinking
High School (Columbine)
What a crock. This whole thing is politically motivated.
So what, we had an accident and lost an expensive vehicle and some highly trained personnel. I don't want to sound harsh, but we lose highly trained military personnel in helicopter accidents monthly (and usually more than 7 personnel), why not shut down all of that model of chopper?
Just stop fighting already and build a space elevator.
BA
First, one could question how reasonable or unreasonable the size of the US military is. (Or one should be able to; these days even a hint that we should adjust the forcepool brings with it the accusation that you are a traitor.) Second, for me it's not the loss of the astronoauts' lives per se that makes the manned space program unreasonable. As you mention, the risks are concrete, obvious, and difficult to explain away, but people volunteer. The unreasonable loss is the loss of funding and opportunity to do better science, even space science, in the US. The expenditure of cash on the problem of how to keep a manned space program going when every launch makes you cringe with its "make-work" and PR mission content is just scandalous. People who think that *this* kind of thing will help us fight off near-earth asteroids or bring us closer to lunar colonization are really and truly just not thinking very critically. I would go so far as to argue that the people who are most interested in the eventual manned exploration of space should be the people who should be *least* interested in supporting the status quo.
Babar
While one can quibble with the arithmatic, I don't think there's any getting away from the fact that 1 in 56.5 is a horrendous statistic for failure, particularly for a program with a mission cost of $640 million in current dollars.
The story was, with all this expense (though NASA has been lying about the program expense from the very beginning, claiming it would be less expensive per mission than single-use rockets), you would be able to increase reliability and safety.
It hasn't turned out that way. The Russian Soyuz single-use rocket, for example, has a far higher safety rating (no accidents on manned flights since 1971), and costs about 30 TIMES LESS per flight.
There's something obviously wrong here, and you don't have to be an opponent of the space program to see it.
And I'm very much a proponent of the space program as a whole, and want to see a concerted effort towards a mission to Mars. But I don't see how the Shuttle program gets us there. It's a boondoggle only justifiable with really really bad math (read NASA math).
Thus, the biggest reason to be opposed to the Shuttle program: It's astronomic expense crowds out money for any meaningful space exploration.
Even if it means a five to ten years hiatus in the manned space program (though Russian launch vehicles could still be used), I'm all for using the money to build a manned space program that actually makes sense.
More people die from the mistakes of politicians in one year than NASA could kill in the next 30 years of space exploration.
That's just it. These people volunteer. We aren't /ordering/ them to do this. They aren't conscripted. They volunteer to do it. Nobody lies to them about the risk. Hell, you /can't/ lie to them about the risk, it's all right there in our history.
Why should we tell people they can't if they're willing to take on the risk? I would be willing to bet that this is more motivated by the cost of replacing shuttles and crew than it is the potential loss of life. Cynical yes, but sadly enough, probalby true.
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
Today's neoconservatives often disparage the shuttle as high-tech socialism, and I've talked to more than a few different people who regard the whole program as a tax-and-spend legacy of an earlier governmental style. (Low-cost probes like Pathfinder and so on are their usual ideal.) Just goes to show you, the world's not black and white.
Mondale would be practically a liberal dinosaur by today's standards, and generally speaking he was arguing for funding social programs above NASA -- but his objections to cost estimates for this program seem to have been basically right, don't they? You have to respect that. Nixon's got a conservative's rep, but he was a Keynesian in economic terms and he definitely committed to a massive spending program here based on bogus estimates. With his eyes wide open about it, too.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I think you'll find they have their own nukes. That's why you can't bully them like you do most of the world. Who disagreed with the US policy on Iraq? France (nukes) China (nukes) Russia (many nukes). Can you see a trend?
That was classic intercourse!