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."

Comments

Misses the point

[Ancient_Hacker]

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?

Re:Misses the point

[2.7182]

If you read Feynman's book he actually interviewed on exec. or engineer at NASA who said the chances of catastrophic failure were 1 in 100,000. Feynman pointed out that that this was like flying the space shuttle every day for 300 years without an accident.

Re:Misses the point

[PIBM]

Well, you missed the small text at the bottom of the page that said "*** per component" !

Re:Misses the point

[S.O.B.]

amazingly, Columbia and Challenger launched on the same day in February like 20 years apart...go figure

I'll assume you were repeating something someone else said but next time try a quick internet search before passing it on.

Both missions where Challenger and Columbia were destroyed were launched in January not February.
The launches were 17 not 20 years apart.
They were not launched on the same day. (Challenger launched on Jan 28, 1986, Columbia launched on Jan 16, 2003)

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/archives/sts-51L.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/archives/sts-107.html

Re:Worst of both worlds

[Waffle Iron]

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.

Re:Depends on the "Purpose"

[snuf23]

"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