Slashdot Mirror
Risk Aversion At Odds With Manned Space Exploration
Several readers including tyghe!! sent in a Popular Mechanics piece analyzing the Augustine Commission's recommendations and NASA itself in terms of a persistent bias towards risk aversion, and arguing that such a bias is fundamentally incompatible with the mission of opening a new frontier. "Rand Simberg, a former aerospace engineer finds the report a little too innocuous. In this analysis, Simberg asks, what happens when we take the risk out of space travel? ... Aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan said a few years ago that if we're not killing people, we're not pushing hard enough. That might sound harsh to people outside the aerospace community but, as Rutan knows, test pilots and astronauts are a breed of people that willingly accepts certain risk in order to be part of great endeavors. They're volunteers and they know what they're getting into."
Missing the point.
NASA execs used to claim the chances of a bad Shuttle accident were 1 in 10,000.
That's obviously crazy-- you'd have to shoot one up every day for 30 years to get even an unreliable estimate of that level of risk.
Feynman asked around, and the actual engineers estimated 1 in 100 to 1 in 200.
So a better question is, do the astronauts have a right to hear the CORRECT figures, not the wild wishful-thinking executive estimates?
I think it was Walter Mondale, but nonetheless, you are absolutely correct.
Conservative, mod down for violating
Westinghouse didn't waver when Edison was waging his FUD and lobbying campaign against them. The railroad industry was plagued with disasters and bad press for many years but kept building out their infrastructure and are still around today. The White Star line didn't stop building ships after the Titanic sunk.
There's three examples right off the top of my head. I'm sure others can think of more.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Which is sad because, in the long run, the technology developed from space exploration would be a big boon to the economy. Just think of all the technologies that would have to be developed, or at least further developed, for a Mars mission.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Airliners are probably about 10**8 times less likely to spontaneously explode in flight than rockets.
Maybe the Shuttle designers thought that they had somehow circumvented that fact, but events proved otherwise.
The US Constitution lays out what the US GOVERNMENT's "PRIVILEGES" are, not our RIGHTS as citizens. Anything not laid out in the Constitution (in theory) is something that the government CAN'T do. Sadly too many people have it backwards.
A 1 in 50 risk of a fatal accident is only about twice the lifetime risk dying in a car accident. It's significantly higher than the lifetime risk of dying in some 'extreme sports'.
Pre-challenger the astronauts might not have known but it would be hard not to afterwards, but I can't see it making a difference. The risks are simply *not* that high, considering.
"I agree on the cost issue, though. Instead of spending a million bucks to develop a space pen that writes in zero-G, The Ruskies used pencils. Duh."
Of course that's not true. The designer of the space pen spent a million dollars developing it. The reason for developing it was because pencils could be hazardous in zero gravity and high oxygen environments.
They were sold to NASA for $2.95 a piece. Before the pen was developed NASA used lead pencils.
NASA Space Pen
Sometimes my arms bend back.
You would need significant background in aerospace and safety engineering to be able to conduct such a thing, and most of these folks are not.
Actually, most of these folks are
What do you think astronauts are? Some kind of toilet trained space monkey? They are highly qualified, very smart people.
Picked at random from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronauts_by_name: