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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."
The shuttle is quite reasonable, and I hate when people insist otherwise. In terms of deaths per mile traveled, it is probably the safest form of travel for which we have enough empirical data to accurately assess its danger.
The shuttle caused 14 deaths in over 200 million miles (well over 100 flights, and using a deliberate underestimate of 2 million miles per flight. Most flights are travel 6 million miles.) compared to 13 deaths per 100 million miles by car in the US.
If you count miles traveled as being from departure to destination, the Shuttle only goes a couple of miles per trip (Unless weather makes them land in California.) That probably makes the Shuttle the *most* dangerous per mile form of transport ever devised.
Maybe that's not a fair assessment, but neither is counting all the miles logged coasting in pointless low-orbit circles as some kind of accomplishment.
You can't take a war out of context to prove your case. If a Hitler tried to takeover Germany today the CIA would probably take him out before we even heard of him.