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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."
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?
IMHO, a big reason why NASA spends so much time on risk aversion is the fickle, uneducated, uninformed and misinformed nature of who they get their funding from aka Congress. I offer into evidence the fact that McGovern wanted desperately to kill off Apollo after the Apollo 1 fire. Traditional market-based sources of funding can evaporate after a major disaster but there will always be people who believe in the mission statement and they don't change with the political winds.
American society is risk averse to pathological levels in general.
After reading about some of those guys, if you made the program too safe, they'd take up free climbing or something else to get the rush. The possibility of dying early gives it that rush.
We're such a death phobic society - no wonder terrorists can just flinch and send us into girly girl panics.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
The only way to be sure to "kill em all" is to nuke them from orbit, but that requires a Space Program.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Attributed to an old test pilot: "Come on. My job is to get in an airplane that's never flown before, of a design that's never flown before, usually with lots of parts that've never been used in an airplane before, and go up and find out what it's performance limits are, usually by going past them. This is not an inherently safe activity.". I think most astronauts would agree with that sentiment. They know it's a risky activity, and they're there because they want to be there doing this strongly enough to outweigh the inherent risks. They'd probably rather not take stupid and unnecessary risks, but if it's a choice between taking the risks and never seeing space, well, to quote from Leslie Fish, "And before you take my dream / I will see you in Hell.".
I think that western society has correctly reassessed the value of life. When you consider that it costs roughly 200k to raise a child in the United States, trading that human's life for certain goals is not necessarily worthwhile now, while it would have been worthwhile 200 or even 100 years ago.
On the other hand, there can be too much of a thing. Exploration, be it arctic, submarine, or interplanetary, is inherently dangerous. Nevertheless, it needs to be done. We need to get off of this single basket and onto other planets or our species is done. That is not generally considered in the life value equation and it needs to be.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
>>"I think that western society has correctly reassessed the value of life. When you consider that it costs roughly 200k to raise a child in the United States, trading that human's life for certain goals is not necessarily worthwhile now, while it would have been worthwhile 200 or even 100 years ago. "
If what you write is true, then Western society will be (is?) in decline. Others who make a different valuation will take the risks. They will reap the rewards - as well they should. We'll be the poor spectators.
If manned space exploration is too dangerous...What about all the spectator sports and events that risk human life for no reward other than the thrill?...and maybe a lot of money. NASCAR racing is incredibly dangerous...Skydiving is dangerous...What about "the running of the bulls?"...People get killed playing baseball!...And none of the people taking these risks is getting us any closer to the moon or any other celestial destination... Men and women climb mountains and dive deep into the seas looking for adventure...Why then is manned space exploration too dangerous? It is expensive and dangerous going somewhere faraway in a new way first...No matter whether it's on the Earth or in the sky...The explorers who "found" the new world knew this...How now can it be so hard for us to accept?
I think that western society has correctly reassessed the value of life
Life is valuable but our efforts to protect it have gone too far in the other direction. We spend inordinate amounts of money trying to build a risk free world rather than accepting the fact that some activities/professions are inherently dangerous. We've created a society of sheep that scare easily and run crying to the nearest lawyer and/or politician whenever some reminder that life can actually still be dangerous smacks them across the face. To borrow one of the best /. sig's I've ever seen: If you spend all your time childproofing the world you aren't going to have any time to worldproof your child.
Some things are worth risking your life over. Would you volunteer to go into space if the opportunity presented itself? Would you volunteer to test an experimental AIDS or cancer vaccine? Would you assist a fellow citizen who was being victimized by some thug? Would you jump into the ocean to save a drowning person? Would you intervene if you saw someone being attacked by an animal?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I find it most astounding that once it comes to manned space missions governments start whining about the risk for life and limb of the volunteers and the enormous costs involved. Whereas the same governments have no problems whatsoever to put close to half a million citizens at risk in various wars around the globe (remind me please, what is the purpose of the Iraq War again?) The campaign in Iraq alone would have paid for missions to moon and mars and back again including a hot spa and an acre of green grass for the various habitats. Add to that all the money that is poured in smart weaponry and the next best way to blast a target from (or in) orbit and a sizable population could live on Mars before the century is over. Somehow the world is upside down and we have totally lost our bearings. Let the terrorists rot in the holes they dug for themselves and lets do something useful for a change. Heal the planet, feed the people, solve the energy problem and lets colonize our own back yard. That should keep us happily occupied for the next 200 years. OUR future is out there not that of bunch of tin cans with shiny wheels and solar panels.
My half elven paladin has exactly the same thinking as an astronaut. He knows the risks. He knows that no matter how many elixirs of healing he brings, no matter whether his friend Drugar the Troll Barbarian is sober or not, things might go south. You think you're raiding an underground goblin camp, you open that door and BAM! Red frickin' dragon. Not much you can do about a red dragon at close range except poor some good ol' A1 steak sauce on yourself to make a worthwhile meal.
Sometimes you rummage around in your sack for treasure and it turns out to be a bag of devouring. That's all I'm sayin'.
But this gets back to the "purpose" of manned missions. If manned missions are merely a PR stunt or a prestige tool, then dead astronauts are not going to help that cause. Remote robots are a safer and cheaper way to do science. I don't accept the argument that you need an on-site human to spot rocks. Until the rocks are examined by lab equipment, nobody knows whats really in them anyhow.
I propose that the primary goal be to learn[1] about space colonization, and a perm moon-base is a good place to start. They would be space pioneers, and everyone knows pioneers risk arrows in their backs. This is a role Americans can relate to and would accept risk for because our ancestors faced the same situation. (Even "Native Americans" made a risky migration out of Asia. There are no true "Native Americans".)
[1] We are a long way off from self-sufficient colonies, but you have to start somewhere.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
You've got it backwards.
Mass transit isn't profitable because it's efficient. Solar power isn't profitable because coal isn't properly taxed for the amount of damage it does to the ecosystem, or when a slurry wall fails and kills a few hundred people directly. Batteries are expensive because the cost of maintaining hegemony in the Middle East is hidden in our defense budget, and not tacked on to the price of a gallon of gas.
There are many things that the market is piss poor at valuing. There are many services better considered as infrastructure than as a luxury, like transportation, health care, electricity, and telecommunications. That's why when you look across the world, large state sectors dominate economically. They have spread out the cost and benefits of this infrastructure, and raised the standard of living for everyone. Weak states, where the market has no boundaries, perform very poorly in comparison. They are subject to more devastating economic cycles, corruption, monopoly practices, and so on.
There is no need to engage in philosophical debates. You can simply look at the economic history of the last thirty years, and compare America to Canada, England, France, and Germany. America now has the highest unemployment, worst income inequality, pays the most portion for basic services, transportation, health care, and education. Our savings have evaporated. The dollar only holds value as far as China is willing to lend us money. We have no way to create things that other people want to buy because we don't have a manufacturing sector. The leftover bits of prosperity from the postwar period will not last forever.
This is not progress. In fact, the cost of doing business has gone up so much that there is now "political support" - meaning, some corporate support - for health care reform after 30 years of majority support for a single payer system. A market, properly calibrated by regulation, can do amazing things when it increases competition. Remove the corrective effects of good governance, and it turns into a nightmare.
The fruit cakes who dressed up as dandies to hang around a court yard in some dank castle? Of course not
It was the disinherited - the landless - the second and third sons of the nobility - who ventured out.
The eldest son would have been nailed to the floor if he tried.
The Admiral of the Ocean Sea intended to set up shop somewhere off the Chinese coast and become the funnel for all trade with the West.
The conquisitor was going for the gold.
In 1624 Captain John Smith published a bill of particulars - a shopping list for the prospective colonist. It makes interesting reading:
John Smith's Bill: Then & Now
Capt. Smith was at heart a bean counter and his profession, survival:
At one point, when Newport returned a second time with seventy settlers, among them a perfumer and six tailors, Smith, never one to keep his opinions to himself, penned a Rude Reply to his London superiors:
"When you send againe I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters, husbandmen, gardiners, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of trees, roots, well provided, than a thousand of such as we have. For except we be able to lodge and feed them, the most will [be lost therough] want of necessaries before they can be made good for anything."
Was John Smith a Liar?
The actual unemployment rate for the US is nearly 17%. The 10% figure we are at now doesn't consider prisoners, those who are underemployed, and those who have given up on looking for work more than 6 months ago. France is around 10%, and as far as I can tell, they do include these numbers.
If you look more closely at the numbers, it gets even more interesting. Look at "working age" unemployment, between 22 and 55, and the numbers look even worse for America. That's because most people are allowed to have an education for free, so they don't work until they graduate. And once they have reached retirement age, Europeans actually retire. They haven't been bankrupted by an illness. They have kept their pensions, since they demand accountability from their corporations. And there's no data to suggest they weren't as productive as an American worker, even though they have three to five weeks of vacation every year. The desire of my fellow countrymen to continue working harder for less never ceases to amaze me.
As far as social medicine goes, it takes only a moment to realize that early treatment for everyone is far cheaper than emergency treatment for everyone. So, unless you can get hospitals to be more blunt about letting poor people die just outside their doors, and start denying accident victims with their guts hanging out entry into the ER, you aren't really solving the problem. You're just pretending.
So your argument is we need to artificially raise the cost of energy. That sounds like an economic winner.
That's not artificial. There is a real cost that SOMEONE will have to pay eventually. These are called externalities. You cannot allow an industry to externalize the expense associated with their product to the point where there's no competition.
>What does "hegemony" in the Middle East have to do with the price of a gallon of gas? The bulk of our imported oil comes from friendly Western hemisphere sources. Europe and China are much more reliant on Middle Eastern oil than we are -- perhaps we should let them try their hand at stabilizing the region?
Well, there are several political realities here. First is that we are in the middle east precisely to have veto power over other nations. It's a political power play that's been going on since the British navy switched from steam to diesel.
However, if you cut out the availability of Middle East Oil, you would see prices as they were in the 70s. The simple fact that we are reliant on an external entity for our cheap transportation means it isn't cheap. It's just cheap right now.
All countries that don't have to pay the full cost of their own national defense, by virtue of being under the American umbrella. How much would England, Germany and France have spent on defense in the latter half of the 20th century if they had to build up the forces on their own to deter the Warsaw Pact?
They may have spent more. I doubt they would have refused to defend themselves. It's difficult to extract the guns and butter question from the Cold War, I can agree, but that ended 20 years ago. If the cold war was really the driving force behind our military expenditure, whey didn't it dramatically fall after the CCCP collapsed?
The market can value every one of those things just fine if people would stop interfering with it. The reason we have a piss poor last mile telecommunications infrastructure in this country is because of Government granted monopolies.
It's because corporations were handed the keys at all. If they have 95% coverage in an area, they do not give a shit about the last 5%. The only entity that would sanely care about 100% saturation would be a highly regulated non-profit or county level telco. If there were no regulation, the US would look just like Latin American countries where the rich suburbs are wired, sewered, watered, and the rest of the country is left to their own devices.
One of the reasons our health care system is in shambles is because a huge health care customer (Uncle Sam, via Medicare) pays below-market rates for services rendered, thus leading to the rest of us being charged more to make up the difference. I want to scream at the TV every single time somebody mentions Medicare as a model because it has "lower costs" -- it's easy to have "lower costs" when you don't even pay a break-even price to the provider of the services you receive.
America pays 16% of GDP for it's healthcare. The rest of Europe pays less than 10% of GDP, and they are just as healthy, and they all have coverage. You're going to have to overcome that fact before you have a persuasive argument.
Medicare is an interesting example. It works so well that when they allowed private corporations to compete, they couldn't. Private Medicare providers receive government subsidies just to stay in business. I don't see any reason to create a profit motive where the need for one doesn't exist.
Transportation would also work better if Government would stop picking winners and losers. Why don't trucks have to pay full price for the damage they do to the roadways? Perhaps if they did other methods of moving goods around (trains, waterways, etc) would be more competitive. Instead we effectively subsidize the trucking industry with our taxes that