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NASA Campaigns For Safer Launch Requirements

Posted by Soulskill on from the risk-is-not-our-business dept.

NASA officials will speak before members of Congress this week in an effort to gain support for more stringent launch safety considerations for the space shuttle's successor. Crew safety remains a major concern for lawmakers while they debate NASA's future and the potential integration of private companies into US space flight plans. "The demonstrated probability of a shuttle launch disaster is 1 in 129. NASA's 83 astronauts think those odds can be improved to 1 in 1,000. Independent safety experts agree. 'None of us want to repeat the accident history of the shuttle,' said retired Navy Vice Adm. Joseph Dyer, chairman of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, a group organized to oversee NASA programs after three astronauts died in the 1967 Apollo 1 launch pad fire. ... NASA's Astronaut Office began a re-evaluation of next-generation launch vehicle safety after the loss of Columbia's crew. The guiding principles laid out in a May 2004 report remain current, astronauts said. Launching astronauts into low Earth orbit is dangerous. But an order-of-magnitude reduction of risk is achievable 'and should therefore represent a minimum safety benchmark for future systems,' the report says."

18 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Wow... by nametaken · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I can certainly appreciate that they want to do better, but it still amazes me that we send people into F'ING SPACE with less than 1% failure rate.

    1. Re:Wow... by Baron_Yam · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It amazes me that this is a serious concern. There IS a price for manned spaceflight and if it goes too high, it's over. Astronauts know the risks and willingly take them.

      If 1:1000 is achievable with the same budget as 1:129 then it'd be evil not to do it - but if it increases costs by even 2:1 it is stupid to even suggest it.

      America's losing its balls.

    2. Re:Wow... by smallfries · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What complete idiocy! By the same rational if we could half costs in the space program in exchange for a 1:12 chance of disaster it would stupid not to do so?

      There is a trade-off between risk and price. You are indicating a particular point on that continuum and claiming it is stupid to look anywhere else, but without any justification whatsoever.

      --
      Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
    3. Re:Wow... by tftp · · Score: 4, Insightful

      agree that at some point it is no longer worth it, and that implicitly we do place value on a humans lives. But how much is it worth?

      It is worth much more than it would cost to make the launch vehicle safe. The STS problem - and its death toll - is in deliberate design that made emergency escape impossible pretty much in any part of the launch or descent. Capsule based designs could survive both incidents if the capsule is strong enough to perform a ballistic reentry on its own. The problem is that you can't make such a capsule large enough to hold 7 people. STS design went for capacity and payload, at great risk to safety.

  2. NASA Needs Permission? by jlgreer1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why does NASA have to campaign for greater safety standards? Why can't they implement them without the "politicians" approval?

    1. Re:NASA Needs Permission? by illumastorm · · Score: 3, Informative

      NASA needs some extra funding to implement the changes and therefore has to ask Congress very, very nicely.

    2. Re:NASA Needs Permission? by wizardforce · · Score: 5, Insightful

      more money

      --
      Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
    3. Re:NASA Needs Permission? by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What's even more confusing is that the summary seems to be implying that there's some big debate going on. NASA wants more assurance of crew safety. Lawmakers want more assurance of crew safety. Where's the problem here?

      The problem is that NASA is mentioning this so they can get a bigger budget.

      Congress, on the other hand, is mentioning this so they can justify lowering the budget.

      --

      "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
    4. Re:NASA Needs Permission? by Grygus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Imagine the army, or the navy, organized like NASA is. We'd have 500 soldiers, 500 doctors, 1000 accountants, 1500 medics, 20,000 officer (with at least 1000 flag officers) and 500 hopeful politicians. Not to mention about 50 infiltrators from the competition. Oh, I forgot the 200 embedded journalists.

      If war was run like space exploration, this would be an excellent point.

      Mandatory safety standards will need to be codified whether the effort is undertaken by NASA or private enterprise. This is more or less a "put your money where your mouth is" test for Congress; they will have a hard time justifying tougher standards than they themselves were willing to pay for, after all.

    5. Re:NASA Needs Permission? by SteveWoz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The solution is to make it so that a politician's child has to ride on each trip.

      --
      OK a new size TV
    6. Re:NASA Needs Permission? by Nyeerrmm · · Score: 3, Informative

      After hearing astronaut Mark Kelly speak at a conference a couple of weeks ago, this was my first thought as well. When asked what his opinion was on the possibility of riding something like Dragon to orbit, he hesitated and said a lot about safety. There is the impression that somehow civil servants somehow are able to make things safer than the employees of a private company. I imagine a lot of it has to do with protecting the magic of being an astronaut, as the corps is also concerned that vehicles like Dragon treat them more like cargo than pilots (there was an Orlando Sentinel Op-Ed to that effect about a month ago).

      Protecting jobs at the manned spaceflight centers, particularly Marshall, where they develop the rockets most at risk of being killed by private development, is another obvious goal. Senators from Alabama fought tooth and nail to keep kill funding for CCDev, since it could eliminate the necessity for MSFC to be crucial for each and every portion of manned space flight.

  3. We really need to get Commercial space going by WindBourne · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Seriously, Rutan had it right when he said that we are not killing enough. The simple fact is, that to be cutting edge WILL involve loss of life. Yet, NASA is talking all about safety rather than designing/building new rockets.

    --
    I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
    1. Re:We really need to get Commercial space going by Kaboom13 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      NASA can not afford accidents, not because of the sanctity of human life or any nonsense like that, but because it will kill NASA and probably manned spaceflight in this country in general. Colombia very nearly killed the shuttle program entirely, before a successor was even on the drawing board. People are willing to accept that being an astronaut is dangerous, but a lot of people look up to them, and when a bunch of them explode in a ball of fire over Texas in an entirely preventable accident, the PR impact is catastrophic. Even privately funded spaceflight will get shut down (in this country at least) if it has too many high profile accidents. Even if in reality the cost in lives is minuscule compared to what we lose daily in car accidents or lung cancer from smoking, a few big accidents in a row and the politicians will see "stopping the reckles endangerment of human lives" as a way to score some cheap votes. If human beings were rational and logical, you'd have a point, but we aren't, and too many astronaut funerals on TV will inevitably cause a kneejerk reaction.

    2. Re:We really need to get Commercial space going by 0123456 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      NASA can not afford accidents, not because of the sanctity of human life or any nonsense like that, but because it will kill NASA and probably manned spaceflight in this country in general.

      Nasa can't afford accidents because Challenger cost about $2,000,000,000 to replace and Columbia was essentially impossible to replace; lose one more shuttle and there aren't enough left to get anything useful done.

      Lose an Arse launch and it's just a matter of replacing a capsule and hiring a few more astronauts.

      Of course if NASA really cared about making it safer, they wouldn't have built an expensive, complex and rarely flown new launcher of their own rather than using a cheap ELV whose reliability is already known combined with an escape system designed to cope with what accidents may occur.

    3. Re:We really need to get Commercial space going by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 3, Interesting

      How many people here would go on the shuttle today - given that failure rate - under 1%.

      Me. In a hearbeat. I'd go to Mars if the odds were at least 4:1 in my favour (20% or lower chance of failure), and stay there as long as the odds were better than 50-50 in any given decade.

      --

      "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
    4. Re:We really need to get Commercial space going by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Lose an Arse launch and it's just a matter of replacing a capsule and hiring a few more astronauts.

      Don't forget the training costs. Astronauts cost between $25m and $1bn to train, depending on whose estimates you use. Less than the cost of replacing challenger, but still a large chunk of money.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    5. Re:We really need to get Commercial space going by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Me. In a heartbeat. I'd go to Mars if the odds were at least 4:1 in my favor...

      Hell, I'd go even if I knew I'd probably die en-route. It would sure be more interesting than being a sysadmin/programmer for the next N years. Plus, you'd be in the history books as "the guy who died trying to get to Mars". OK, less of a "plus", but still...

      --
      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
  4. Re:Unpopular by Marcika · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I realize this view is mighty unpopular, yet I am going to express it. While science is very important, so are social issues. I would like to see the NASA budget considerably shrunk but for only a short period of time, say 12 - 18 months. We have to get our country healthy again and space flight really only effects a small sector of the economy. It will create jobs but only at the most educated levels. A healthy country is a more efficient and productive one. Now, you may feel free to mod me but are you willing to join the censors?

    I don't have an opinion one way or another, but I am quite sure that it is infeasible to cut NASA's budget in half for 18 months and then expect them to continue as if nothing happened...

    What does a "shrunk budget" mean? Firing reseachers, firing engineers, cancelling projects with industry... And if you as an engineer got fired, you would presumably look for another job with more security and better pay in the private sector and not come back after 18 months into a shitty job where they will eliminate your position at a whim... In short, they can't just mothball manpower, because it won't come back.