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What Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?
An anonymous reader writes "Dr. Robert Zubrin has some interesting ideas about what it costs to have an astronaut on the payroll. He says if you’re going to 'give up four billion dollars to avoid a one in seven chance of killing an astronaut, you’re basically saying an astronaut’s life is worth twenty-eight billion dollars.' He wrote about the same subject earlier this year for Reason magazine, saying, 'Keeping astronauts safe merits significant expenditure. But how much? There is a potentially unlimited set of testing procedures, precursor missions, technological improvements, and other protective measures that could be implemented before allowing human beings to once again try flying to other worlds. Were we to adopt all of them, we would wind up with a human spaceflight program of infinite cost and zero accomplishment. In recent years, the trend has moved in precisely that direction, with NASA’s manned spaceflight effort spending more and more to accomplish less and less. If we are to achieve anything going forward, we have to find some way to strike a balance between human life and mission accomplishment.'"
As long as the kind of people you need keep queuing up to become astronauts, reduce costs. They are the ones whose asses are on the line, so if they're OK with it, do it.
I recently saw a show on 'what if we were going to build hoover dam today', and while they touted all the new technology that would be used, and the safety measures that would prevent any loss of life (compared to the ~100 people who died building the dame), the estimated cost of the project grew by 10x, from around $10B in todays money to around $100B, and it would have taken an extra 10-20 years to build
so this would put the value of each person's live at ~$9B
zero tolerence of risk just doesn't work
I'll give you a fiver for one.
Let me be the first to come with a car analogy: What is a driver's life worth?
I'm pretty sure it was Burt Rutan that said, at the beginning of the X-prize, "If no-one dies in this next space race, we're not trying hard enough" It's just like road safety: we can have 0 accidents, but only with a speed limit of 0 mph, and it seems many politicians want to go in this direction to appease the "concerned mothers" segment of society. I think the solution must lie with calculated risk. let the astronauts understand the systems they will be riding, and decide for themselves whether they are willing to stake their lives on it.. only with time, and the occasional catastrophic failiure will we get the hang of what is "safe enough" Everybody dies, doing so in the pursuit of a cherished goal must be one of the better and more meaningful ways to go.
NASA is a shadow of its former self through no fault of its own. The political climate in the US of the last decade has been increasingly against funding things for the benefit of all. We've just ended up with an agency that has been dicking around in LEO for the better part of four decades with not that much to show for it. The russians aren't that much better for their own set of reasons.
Private companies and China are the ones who are going to make the giant strides in the coming decades. The side benefit of China progressing in space is that it might arouse some half patriotic half paranoid 'reds under your beds' movement within the US to beat them at whatever they aim for that the US hasn't done.
If after a decade, China said they were establishing a base on the moon would the US public have a renewal in the interest in progression in space or is it too far gone?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Ro Bots.
An astronaut life isn't worth shit, now that the u.s. government has privatized everything to the British royals.
That gives me a great idea. Send the Royal Family into space. That way if they don't come down it saves a fortune on the honours roll to the UK, and we'd probably have as many tourists visiting Buckingham Palace as the French do to the Louvre.
Those guys don't cost $28,000,000,000 each.
Also, possibly why we lose so many (afterthought).
This assumes NASA's #1 priority is manned spaceflight - a premise I do not accept.
From New Horizons to Cassini and Messenger, the amount of non-manned spacecraft visiting Mercury, Saturn, and Pluto to expand our knowledge of the solar system in just this decade has been extensive. (Oh yeah, and the Mars rovers - the asteroid mission, etc. etc.)
He is being a bit of a blowhard to say we've nothing to show for the money NASA has spent.
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/main/index.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/
Dance like no ones looking and love like it's never going to hurt.
I'd got through all that training and go up and risk my life for free.
Since there are plenty of others who'd do the same, then I guess that makes an astronaut's life free.
Such bad analysis...
It's not just the life of the astronaut, it's the pride of a nation, the combines life of ALL crew and machinery. You can't just multiply the costs out like that when many of those costs apply to more than one individual.
The likelihood of a single astronaut death is next to zilch. Actually it probably is zilch. The likelihood of all astronaut's dying and loss of vehicle are much greater...
Unmanned spaceflight is the ultimate test of everything from sensors to real time operating systems. It advances the state of the art. Putting astronauts on board could actually the pressure to produce 100% systems reliability because, hey, you can make in-flight repairs.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I for one would happily volunteer for any kind of missions where there would be 'reasonable' measures of safety, meaning they gave a good thought about it.. that would be ok to me, seriously. On the other side , I won't agree on doing a mission that is not pushing the boundaries of human colonization in space, or testing really extreme concept for starships, etc..of course there could be shades in between. That's it. I think this should be the attitude, you know it's a kind of job that has danger in it, you want to enroll? fine...
Say what you want about the Queen but watching this year's State Opening of Parliment, you've really got to give her some credit. I mean, how many heads of state could sit on a gold-plated throne, in a €1m hat and give a speech about austerity whilst keeping a straight face?
-- Viz
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
How so? Is Prince Charles a coding superstar in his off time?
Yeah, great idea. Lets make a big spectacle of something that will end in tragedy 1/4th of the time. That will show everyone the value of human life. I think this guy's just setting up nasa to have their funding cut.
He says if you’re going to 'give up four billion dollars to avoid a one in seven chance of killing an astronaut, you’re basically saying an astronaut’s life is worth twenty-eight billion dollars.'
If you're willing to spend $4 billion on a 1/7 chance of killing an astronaut you're saying that his life, while in taking part in a mission (and involved with a whole load of expensive equipment, and the publicity, and the effect on morale, and recruitment, and their training and a whole lot more stuff I can't even think of) is worth $28 billion.
A lot of that is probably due to budget - do NASA think that they'll continue to get funding for putting people in space if the public think those people might die?
Interestingly that concept also works in reverse if the government REALLY wants to put people in space (like when it was against the damn reds, and America had to win at all costs). The loss of a life could be used to bolster funds instead, and therefore the life could be worth negative amounts (if you were so sociopathically inclined).
All in all though the $28 billion includes a whole lot more than that guy getting hit by a bus on earth.
The more usual measure of safety is probability of fatality per trip. (Air craft, driving etc). It would be interesting to know the $ cost of matching the safety of driving a car. I guess its pretty high because rockets are not that safe and the hazardous environment of space and other planets.
http://youtu.be/bhyYgnhhKFw
The British government actually makes a substantial amount of money off of the Royal family, not the other way around :p
Rubbish - this is royalist propaganda based on assumptions that nobody would visit castles if there wasn't a royal family (in fact 8.5 million people visit the Louvre compared to 1.8 million visiting Windsor castle so there could be a substantial increase if it was fully open) and that all the fisheries, farms and businesses owned by the royal family would be completely unused.
The only perfectly safe rocket is the one on the ground. As an astronaut you sit on top of what's practically a controlled explosion travelling thousands of miles per hour and where being slightly off course means you'll either crash and disintegrate or disappear into deep space with no hope of return. That said, I think the way SpaceX is going about it is the right way - build reliable rockets that are used for satellites and cargo, then put a human capsule in it. The #1 criteria for any human launch vehicle should be a proven track record, tighten all the tolerances a notch and increase the inspections so your manned flight isn't the one out of spec and let it fly. How should we land on other planets? The same way we've landed probes and if humans can't survive that then make a probe that lands like a human mission would.
That said, a better question is if astronauts are cost effective anymore. Yes, people are quick to point out all the things humans could do that our current robots can not but with the budget of a human mission we could build more robots and make them more complex too. I don't think many people understand exactly the constraints probes and rovers operate under, for example Spirit and Opportunity has a power budget of about 0.6 kWh/day and has been down to under 0.1 kWh/day in winter. You'd need massive insulation which means a large, unmovable structure you can't leave and a power budget orders of magnitude higher just not to freeze to death. I doubt life on Mars would be very glamorous.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It will always for each of us be possible to increase health / reduce health risk / get better treatment by spending additional money.
You can always do some more checkup to identify a possible desease earlier, you can try to completely rely on "bio"-food. And there are probably cases where the health ensurance company has to decide if they spend millions to treat a complicated desease of a single patient or if they rather spent the millions treating hundreds of simpler cases, saving hundreds of lives.
The decisions on how valuable a single live is has to be taken in many different places.
The main problem is that discussions about the financial value of human live are not held in the open, because they are considered unethical for most people, but instead these decisions are taken in some backroom discussions where they are not supervised by the public.
Trolling is a art!
Stop defending NASA. Yes, part of it is indeed all the politicking around. No, that's not all of it. They're also a rotten organisation with far too much middle management and no clue --as an organisation-- how to get around to actually achieving anything useful, despite all the engineering smarts they had around. Feynman already made that one clear. It's been busy toying with overpriced spit-and-baling wire toys, it hasn't consolidated and hasn't made its gimmicks cheaper. Nothing of that has been fixed in the meantime. So that needs fixing too. Just as most senate- and congress critters need "fixing", badly.
The safety measures were not only to protect the life of the astronauts. They were to protect the whole project. Because if you had a major disaster, there was a strong chance that the project would be pulled. And then everyone's job was at risk...
The Russians had the same problem, and solved it is an different way - by making each launch a secret until it had been confirmed as successful. I suspect that both the Russians and the Americans valued the actual life of their Astronauts/Cosmonauts similarly - they were expensively trained, but there was no shortage of volunteers.
National pride was also involved - but I think the main driver was ensuring that the projects continued. Look at what's happened to NASA since it started having disasters - it's being wound down in favour of private enterprise.
During the heydays of Cold War, the rule chief designer Korolev set for the soviet space programme was: three successful dummy / monkey "Vostok" launches in a row, before a human (Gagarin) gets into the capsule. After he died in 1966, the the USSR leadership relaxed testing requirements for the never generation "Soyuz" capsule and that resulted in the death of Komarov (Soyuz-1) and then the three member crew of Soyuz-11. After that big disaster, the russians learned the lesson and Soyuz continues to serve safely to this day.
Royalist hogwash. That's usually based on the fact that the "Crown Estate" brings in revenue for the government, only a smallish fraction of which is given to the Royals. But it's a fact of history that George III gave that all income and debt from the Crown Estate to Parliament in exchange for Parliament also taking over the funding of the military and civil government, which was previously funded by the monarch out of his Crown Estate income.
Seeing as the cost of civil government and the military far exceeds what the Crown Estate makes, it's nuts to say that we make money out of the Royals. That's counting the income and not counting the outgoings.
And of course, people visit the Louvre because it was once a royal palace, not because of all of the art exhibited there. It's not like London already has comparable venues for art so any similar use of the Palace would end up in competition with existing venues.
Trolling, or cutting edge insight? I'm genuinely intrigued- what has the US government sold to British Royalty?
"you’re basically saying an astronaut’s life is worth twenty-eight billion dollars"
Such a simplistic way of looking at it.
What is the price that is needed to pay for human exploration? what has it always been? Blood of course; a astronauts death is tragic, but the reward for that is much bigger than any one person and astronauts are very much aware of this.I dont think that anyone one of them think, 'they spent 28 billion dollars to save me' So so shallow.
They are heros because they do something that is highly dangerous and they will really never directly benefit from it other then status and even that is hardly anything anymore, instead this country worships athletes, movie stars and singers, the more drugged out and retarded, the more news time and celebrity status, its sickening. While i am sure astronauts make good money, its not CEO money....but it should be. Romney should pay 15% taxes directly to them simply for the privilege of being in the same country, that spineless fake.
I don't think Spain's president would have any trouble doing that. He could probably do it from a tropical island surrounded by bikini babes and lighting a cigar with a 1000 Euro note.
No sig today...
About tree fiddy.
He says if you’re going to 'give up four billion dollars to avoid a one in seven chance of killing an astronaut, you’re basically saying an astronaut’s life is worth twenty-eight billion dollars.'
Only if you ignore the other costs a disaster entails, e.g. fewer candidate astronauts, less qualified candidates, a perception of the program as being a failure which could end up in reduced funding, etc.
It's not just the astronaut's life, it's also the fact that an exploding spaceship which kills an astronaut is a severe blow to the space program. So the space program is really protecting itself as much as its astronauts.
If your astronauts bite the dust, so does your mission. If you start saving on safety measures and something goes wrong, it will probably mean that you will also lose the transport vehicle along with all the equipment that the astronauts were supposed to use/deploy on their mission. Killing the astronauts is merely a corollary, albeit a tragic one. If you rig everything up so that the mission can go on in case of e.g. just a life-support equipment malfunction, then you would surely be on the cheaper side if you sent an unmanned mission in the first place.
Besides, I can surely imagine that the life of an astronaut is worth a lot of money, even if we neglect the value of human life per se. The life of an astronaut on the ground is worth, I would say, as much as his education and training, which is probably the most expensive a human being can receive in our culture. The life of an astronaut in space is all that, plus every dollar spent to manufacture every bit of equipment that he/she is carrying with him/her, because if he/she dies during the mission all that will just be a pile of junk in space. To that you may also want to add the cost of the next mission that will be sent to do what the first one didn't manage. And if you are still so stubborn and choose the cheapo life-support system to save a few bucks (compared to the total cost), you will have to factor in the cost of the next mission, and the next, and the next... In the end all that matters is "we spent X billion $ to manage Y". The more missions you spend on trying, the higher X will be.
In another tone, I don't really understand why it "doesn't count" to send unmanned missions in our stead. To the people that say that "we haven't been on mars", I just reply, "I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords".
the space program is not about putting people into space. it is about inventing amazing things that we really can use as a byproduct of putting people into space. 28 billion per astronaut or 28 billion to come up with a ton of new useful technologies, as well as to protect an astronaut as a side effect.
Couldn't said costs be viewed as upfront costs of a very, very long term investment in the human race? The more we spend on astronaut safety for a small number of astronauts in the present, the cheaper it'll be in the future for a large number of astronauts and the sooner we'll be able to send large numbers of them. If we wanted to think in the long term, we'd remember that our population is growing and will continue to do so. Investing in solutions on where to put people and how to feed them now will save us a lot headaches compared to waiting until it really is a problem. (granted there are plenty of potentially habitable spaces here on the globe to explore, such as floating on/under the ocean, re-greening the deserts, or perhaps carved out of the icecaps, but eventually those spaces will run out as well).
Name-calling, insults, and general rudeness do not increase the chances that someone will suddenly agree with you.
When he's stuck here, not "earthbound" but bound to the Earth, training endlessly for missions that will never happen so long as people who AREN'T astronauts hold all the purse strings and make all the decisions.
[..] and lighting a cigar with a 1000 Euro note.
There is no 1000 Euro note.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
That's the wrong question. The correct question is: How much is the bad PR from an avoidable accident that kills an astronaut worth? Especially when you're funding comes from the public.
Not really being a troll, promise, but I don't even really understand what the question being posed is here: Military test pilots (or all military really), oil rig workers, deep sea divers, trawlermen etc etc are all paid a bit more because there is a very real chance they will die in the progress of their work. So, don't we measure this "value of human life" all the time? Why are astronauts so much more special? Is it just that they're more visible in the media? Because they are somehow, by default, treated as "heroes"? Or is the question just: "We've done enough to make it safe enough, can we stop already and send people into space some more?"
I bet you're fun at parties...
No sig today...
I lost the word "reduce" somehow. And your point is?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
...just introspect a bit for your answer: put a pricetag on the utilities you are consuming and the systems that keep you safe and sound, and weight them against mankind's benifit from your research.
Then, do the same for the rest of the humans, and for your family, if you have any- it shouldn't be hard because apparently everything is taggable with a price, using your methods.
In that way, you can get a pricetag for everybody's life, do more statistics, and find your answer there somewhere.
Asshole.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
...that a human life can be so easily monetised. OK, these guys know what they're getting into, that there's a very real risk of something failing spectacularly, and of them dying. That's what they get paid for. However, that should not be reflected in the equipment they're being asked to use. Built by the lowest bidder? I'd want something with a track record of *not* failing; there's a reason why greymarket goods are so cheap. They *do* fail.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Space age or no, the natural modes of our organizations revolve around one or two basic primate behaviors, and tend to gather momentum over time. The only fix is to fire everyone (especially management) and start over.
In the first place, an astronaut's life could well be worth a billion once you factor in how difficult it is to find one who passes the requirements, and how expensive the training is. Then factor in benefits to their dependents, etc., etc.
However, you're dealing with consequences beyond just an astronaut or a team having to be replaced. Every fatality reflects on the entire field of space research in the public eye, and they're the ones paying for it. The backlash from an incident like Columbia will cause politicians to shun space exploration or even exploit it negatively for at least an election cycle. The lost funding could easily be in the tens of billions.
What the purpose of astronauts is these days? I mean I know it's about national prestige and putting on a good show for the other countries, but assuming we're not mentally ill, what is the practical purpose of astronauts? We have better electronics and computers than in the Space Age. Back then we naively thought we'd send people to do a machine's job, I guess that romantic imagery is hard to get rid of, especially when it was all about grandiose gestures in the first place.
It's strange to me that on the same website were people are so gung-ho about technology and how it replaces obsolete jobs, the same people cling desperately to an antique vision of things.
Astronauts, to me, are a bit like the costumed re-enactments of medieval or frontier towns. Everyone puts on their costumes and acts their little part, but it's just a show, it's all a facade.
Our problem is that Apollo is our stereotype of NASA at its best. We forget that in the 60's, astronauts were thought of much like experimental fighter jet pilots, whose lives were understood by everyone to be in legitimate danger. Soviet cosmonauts were even more expendable. At the same time, automation in Apollo times was laughably primitive. The famous earthrise picture was taken by a dude who held a manual focus camera to a window, and brought the film to Earth for developing. We simply needed people in the loop to accomplish valuable stuff back then. Well, no more. If we had never been to the moon and we wanted to learn everything that we learned from the Apollo program (plus more), we could it super cheaply (three orders of magnitude cheaper in real dollars) with rovers. I don't understand why we are even talking about sending people to Mars before robots build for them a beautiful habitat with lush gardens.
he's referring to virgin galactic, i suppose.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
The Anti-monarchist/republicans/what-have-you have countered CGPGray's video with this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2IO5ifWKdw
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
..when confronting factual errors, like the O-rings failure at the Challenger disaster - they actually *knew* that there was an immediate risk - where they ignore it for a much less amount of cost. If they let the scientists and engineers that were involved with the astronauts do the risk/cost management I'm sure we get the most result and the least risk for the cost.
Mundus Vult Decipi
Besides looking at the costs of having a live astronaut and comparing it to the costs of having no astronaut (or a dead one) - we need to analyze the benefits of having a live astronaut - starting with public support for a project that includes an astronaut compared to public support for a project that doesn't include one.
"He says if you’re going to 'give up four billion dollars to avoid a one in seven chance of killing an astronaut, you’re basically saying an astronaut’s life is worth twenty-eight billion dollars.'"
Not at all. The mission needs astronaut’s to succeed. If everyone dies (or even just one or two) the chance of a completely failed mission (as well as a loss of public and monetary support) increases dramatically.
You cannot just hire new guys mid mission.
Also tons of training and testing has gone into there guys, yes you probably could get some illegal immigrant to take the job for half minimum wage if you really wanted to, but you would still have to spend a lot of money and time to get him ready for space-flight.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Send some nazis or commies at terrible odds. Once they are there it becomes a military goal to remove them with military-like safety standards. Problem solved.
in fact 8.5 million people visit the Louvre compared to 1.8 million visiting Windsor castle
And you don't think this anything to do with the fact the Louvre is full of, oh, I dunno, FAMOUS ART?
According to the people who budgetted the Delta Works for 40 years, Dutchies are € 2.2 million apiece (= value to not let them drown):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works#Delta_law_and_Conceptual_framework
Mind you besides André Kuipers and before him Wubbo Ockels, I don't think many Dutchies are astronauts.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
...that a human life can be so easily monetised.
Yes, I know I am supposed to reply something like "human life should not be monetised" and so we both of us can congratulate ourselves for being so sensible.
Reality is, we (you and me) probably have lots of resources that we are spending in things that are non essential(*1) (the latest gadget we bought, this year holiday trip) and we are not going to divert them for more "human" finalities (a vaccination campaing in the third world, or even a donation to the NASA). At that point, we are doing an economical decission that our welfare is more worth that the lifes that donation it could save.
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying you should be donating everything to charities(I don't, either). What I say is that at some point, all the people does a decision of what is someone else's life worth and act accordingly(*2). You do too, so stop trying to look like you don't.
(*1)The fact that you give X $ to charities is not relevant for my reasoning, as long you still get Y $ for those non-esential goods.
(*2)Of course, not everyone's else's life is rated the same. You'd rate your parents higher than what you'd rate mine, for example.
Why can't
The last figure i heard..
4 billion / 2 million = 500.
if the curve is linear, then would translate to an over 100% chance of death.
1/7 * 500 = 500/7ths.
So it's not linear.
Cut costs until the chance of death rises. Problem is the incidence is so low that randomness is a heavy factor in the process.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
There is a potentially unlimited set of testing procedures, precursor missions, technological improvements, and other protective measures that could be implemented before allowing human beings to once again try flying to other worlds.
I'm not seeing the point of colonizing other worlds. Earth is home. We should devote more effort in preserving it than seeking a way off of it. I'm not being some enviro-nut, I just see that there might be only a moon or two in our solar system that we might stand a chance of inhabiting. And there seems little chance of us surviving a trip out of our own solar system- time and distance are to vast. Maybe things will change in the future, if we don't kill ourselves off first.
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
>Seeing as the cost of civil government and the military far exceeds what the Crown Estate makes, it's nuts to say that we make money out of the Royals. That's counting the income and not counting the outgoings.
Yes, but you might say this deal gave parliament it's sac. Seems like a pretty good deal for the UK government if you ask me.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Those billions aren't being spent to save an astronaut's life. They're being spent to save face. Space missions that kill astronauts are politically deadly, putting NASA itself at risk, and reflect poorly on the U.S. as a whole. NASA and Congress are willing to spend tons of money to avoid that embarrassment: the astronaut's life is almost incidental.
Some here have asked whether a space program that spends so much money on safety that it can't get off the ground is a good idea. From NASA's perspective, and especially Congress's, the answer to that is an emphatic "yes".
We have thousands of years to explore space, which is best done by the robots we MUST have to interact with the utterly hostile off-world environment.
We need better robots on Earth even more than we need a space program.
The idea of meat tourists is exciting, and they can pay their own way.
Actual exploration can be done remotely and should because the manned tourist program sucks resources we could use to get much more exploration accomplished.
Just as the only reason to send humans to the bottom of the ocean instead of ROVs is personal amusement, so the only reason to send humans to space before robots are perfected is personal amusement.
When wooden ships and iron men were expendable, lost ships anddead crew were accepted.
Now, crew make manned systems monstrously expensive and economies of scale can't happen at our primitive level of supporting technologies. People are a burden, like it or not. They don't need to go early. That's doing it the hard way, and it's dumb.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Treat it as you do a military mission. They are soldiers. Every soldier goes into a situation knowing there is a chance he may die. You make it safe as possible(situation awareness, body armor, weaponry), but you know that part of your mission is, if necessary, to die. I would argue manned space flight, especially for the USSR and US in the 60's, was the same. Your life is at risk, yes; but the thrill of going into space, and the achievement for mankind, outweighs the risks.
It was never the astronauts who worried about the risk, anyway. It was the pussified, weak public, who, raised on the wimpy, never-risked-anything-in-their-lives 60's generation(other than vets and true activists), can't understand the risk-reward concept is necessary not just for achievements, but for the advancement of our species as a whole. They don't get that, if we don't do it, another group will. You can land all the robots you want; but if there are no people there to claim it, they mean nothing. It will be the Chinese astronaut standing next to the flag on Mars that matters, not the American Tonka toys collecting dust.
That was my first thought, kinda. The astronauts go in understanding the risk. Especially since many of them are/were cutting-edge military aviation personnel.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The answer to the manned spaceflight problem is simple: don't send people, send robots. As other here have argued, robots are cheap, robots can do the same jobs astronauts would do with much less mechanical complexity, and nobody cares much if a robot is destroyed.
The Mars Pathfinder mission was an eye-opener for me. It showed that most of the tasks that people had argued required a manned mission to Mars could in fact be done via robot. More slowly and awkwardly, but who cares about speed when the mission costs are negligible and nobody's life is at risk?
But what about the role of human inspiration and aspiration? Astronauts don't just do science, they get people excited about science and exploration, and inspire kids to aim high. How can robots do that? Pathfinder showed the way there too. That mission got more public interest than any of the actual astronauts in orbit at the time. People *loved* that little robot, they anthropomorphized the crap out of it, identified with its struggles, and put their heart into its success. Part of this was its design: with big "eyes" on top of a recognizeable "head", it was definitely cute. But NASA's PR managers also encouraged people to think of it as a person, or at least a pet. More recent Mars rovers have even been given genders.
This is the way forward. You don't need actual humans when people will treat almost anything with two eyes and hands as human, given half a chance. Let's put our souls into our machines.
The trade-off is not between money and life. The trade-off is between time and life. This is typical thinking that throwing money on the problem solves it (or typical reverse of it that throwing money on the problem doesn't solve it). The truth is that in all of the projects engineers do their damnest to avoid loss of life. If you're working on anything, do you really want to have it blow up and kill you, or your friend?
The problem is the deadline. You can't throw 10x the number of engineers and have everything figured out. It simply takes time to tie details together, and the more details, the more time it takes to investigate all possible impacts, tolerances, sensitivies, and so on. A typical rocket is a very tightly coupled systems of thousands of little pieces.
The costs have gone up not because we care about life more than before (if anything routine makes it worse). The costs have gone up because we know more what to avoid. The costs will not come down because we stop caring about life. The costs will come down from rethinking the approach to the problem. Right now a manned launch is approaching infinite complexity problem whether a large number of components interacts with one another, a lot of them include software to make it worse, and every single one can have impact on the rest of the system. So there is a giant web of dependencies and a horrendous list of "what if" scenarios.
Also, it's not so much about a loss of life - more about the success of the mission. In a typical mission, humans are there because they are needed. They are part of the mission. If a human "fails" i.e. flat-lines for some reason, or even have an organ failure, it's the same as if the rocket blows up - the mission fails. Most of the time people don't go up there for fun (yet). With rather large costs to produce a vehicle and get it up in the orbit, not mentioning anywhere close to the moon or Mars, cost of human death is just as high as a cost of an engine failure.
We know a lot about how rockets need to work. Now we need to learn how to build them cheaply with the same list of requirements. It's a classic business problem - you start a company, it does something. After a while it gets to the point where the system it builds starts to be so complex that it cannot be maintained anymore. Your choices are to go out of business or to re-engineer the system to reduce the complexity.
The most valuable thing that comes out from NASA is the know-how - the list of requirements on manned and unmanned spaceflight, not the velcro, or exact technical solutions of how to implement those requirements. The technology changes, the requirements don't.
Seeing as the cost of civil government and the military far exceeds what the Crown Estate makes, it's nuts to say that we make money out of the Royals. That's counting the income and not counting the outgoings.
Only because the government chooses to have programs that create budget deficits. Some of these programs are also paid for by the fact that the people have, via their representatives, to give a portion of their incomes to the government.
If you want bring the cost of programs down to that covered by the income front he Crown Estates it's a "simple" matter of choosing to do so. You, via your elected representative, have simply chosen not to.
That is what democracy is about, isn't it? Doing the will of the people via elected representatives?
Really? Do you think NASA as an institution cares about an astronaut's life? People within the organization do, but the institution itself cares only about one thing - staying alive. Killing off astronauts is bad publicity, and enough bad publicity kills NASA. There are a lot of people making good money working for NASA, and these are typically jobs that last a while (I'm not talking about contractor jobs, this is Government employees). If NASA goes away, so does their good thang. So, billions are spent on cover-your-ass, not on protect-our-astronauts.
The Crown Estate is essentially nationalised property- land and business interests owned and operated by the government, the profits going straight into government coffers (except for that inexplicable chunk that gets paid into the Windsor Household bank account).
Are you arguing that government business should be funded by nationalisation of commercial interests?
I'm just spelling it out as I detected a whiff of "small government free-marketism/anarchism" (choose your poison) in your response, and I was wondering if you realised the incompatibility of the two positions.
(Personally- I'm all for that. Nationalise away!)
[..] and lighting a cigar with a 1000 Euro note.
There is no 1000 Euro note.
That's because he already lighted all of them. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It costs a lot to create each astronaut. There are the early costs to the astronaut's family and to themself. There are the costs to society (public education, their residential share of overall national defense, other public expenses). And then there's the very large amount spent on turning a candidate into an astronaut, and ongoing expenses keeping them an astronaut. And then there's the loss to the astronaut's estate of all their future earnings, which can be substantial. Those expenses seem certainly in the hundreds of $millions, and possibly in the $billions (for those who get launched).
But losing an astronaut loses a lot more than the astronaut. It loses all the equipment and vessel lost with them. It loses all the value of the mission that is depreciated by using it for that mission. And then there's the expense of the investigation and other reactions to the loss.
Plus there's the loss to prestige, which is possibly the largest. There's the extra cost of insurance and other finance costs.
By the time you're done accounting all the costs that are higher because of the "lost astronaut", you probably are talking about far more than just $4B. And just because the odds are 4:1 with current mitigations doesn't mean that the costs are multiplied by four.
So even without considering how wrong it is to launch people into space without ensuring you can bring them back alive, the pure economics make spending hte money worth it.
Just another case of a "free marketeer" who's qualified to be Mayor of Sim City, not to criticize actual government operations and expenses. Especially since they don't even consider how wrong it is to launch people into space without ensuring you can bring them back alive. That's why they First Post as AC.
Libertarians are the answer to Somalia's and China's space ambitions, not America's.
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Funny, in America the Republicans are the monarchists. Indeed, in Britain the Republicans are the Tories, who are the monarchists.
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So are the royal's castles. That's why they built castles: to protect the art they stole (or bought with money they stole).
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And when the military dictators ("royals") were responsible for that, they didn't spend on the people enough. Violating the "social contract" (which is why people noticed there is a "social contract"). That's when the people pushed as hard as they could to convert the military dictatorship into a democratic republic - punctuated with civil wars, revolutions, royal executions, etc.
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aren't a lot of astronauts test pilots form cutting-edge military aviation?
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Now that we have private astronauts or are on the verge of having them, NASA should be redefined as having the missione of expanding knowledge, but not via manned flight, at least for a couple of decades. Let the "adventure" be funded by private enterprise, which can best recoup the cost via marketing. That Man can go to space safely has already be proven by NASA and others. The other way of looking at it is that NASAs unstated mission was to subsidize Cold War defense research, to make strong domestic industrial aeronautics industries. If it spent its budget on private space flights it will get a bigger bang for the buck, foment an industrial rennaissance in America at least, and do serious science on its own, with robots. Privatize the risk of human casualties, remove it from the politicians concerns.
Why not use robotics, to first explore, have robotics set up a "camp", enviro structures etc, THEN have man explore if needed. Probably 3/4 of the cost of manned space flight is making sure the delicate humans don't die. Send everything they need, have it setup BEFORE they get there. Still expensive to send a human to explore something a robot can pretty much do, but if you want to use humans, I think it would be better to do it that way.
Shuttle blew up in the morning.
The what?
Did you mean the *civil list*, you ignorant fat cunt?
Let me know when they've finished.
No, I take that back - let me know when they get anywhere near.
What I see is largely the same old inherited wealth and privilege but without the noblesse oblige which at least caused some of the gentry to care for their peons a little bit.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Not yet.
If they don't sort out the dagoes and wops there soon will be, and it'll be worth less than a match, let alone the cigar.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Unless I've missed something, Richard Branson isn't actually royalty...
I understand the British Government owns almost $1T in national debt. Perhaps it's that?
There's a classic book, "The Making of an Ex-Astronaut", which discusses risk from the point of view of someone in the program. He was willing to accept the risks of space flight. He was worried about being killed flying around in a T-38 jet trainer. Four astronauts were killed in T-38s in the 1960s. He figured there was a 1 in 5 chance of being killed that way.
That wasn't an exaggeration. In the 1950s and 1960s, about 1 in 5 US fighter pilots died in a crash without any help from the enemy. (Jet fighters have improved a lot since then. So have ejection seats.)
Spacecraft still have terrible reliability compared to aircraft. The US shuttle had 2 crashes in 135 flights. Commercial launches to geosynch orbit are still only about 95% successful. (2 fails in 35 launches in 2011, 3 fails in 36 launches in 2010. No fails in 19 launches so far in 2012; it's a good year.) There's progress; that number was in the 80% range in the 1980s. But it's a long way from aircraft-type stats. The current numbers are barely acceptable for unmanned satellite launches.
I am sure that, while government may sometimes be inefficient, there would be management types asking these sort of questions already.
Look at the bigger picture...
Costs of failure:
Loss of equipment
Payout to astronaut's family
Retraining fees
Loss of (quality) applicants
Loss of trust/ reputation
Loss of political support due to negative coverage
Loss of funding due to loss of political support
Also they are not as fortunate as other establishments who can deflect blame/ hatred on some opposing group (eg military - terrorists, law enforcement - criminals, etc)
All of those Royalist income maths ignore the transport and the cost of the policing which is immense. Every time the Idiot Prince takes a train ride, it costs us tens of thousands of pounds per hour.
Why? Spain had a balanced budget. It was their banks that required rescuing because they had lent too much to the construction bubble in Spain.
What what really gets to me is the math he uses. Maybe it makes more sense in the article he wrote for Reason, but where did he even take those numbers from? His formula seems to be obvious:
(give up four billion dollars) / (a one in seven chance of killing an astronaut) = (astronaut’s life is worth twenty-eight billion dollars)
That seems to be based on some cost risk management accounting formula - but does it make sense to look at it that way? Does it even make sense to consider the probabilities in the calculation? Wouldn't it make more sense to say (one astronaut’s life is worth) = (total money spend to keep astronauts alive) / (sum of astronauts send into space). Because that is what it's actually worth to NASA to get one astronaut send up back down again alive (and healthy). In his example $4B.
It's famous because it's "beautiful" art (whatever the fuck that means)...in other words, it panders to the lowest common denominator. You think even the 1% of those 8.5 million visitors even KNOW what Art is? Hint: it has shit-all to do with beauty; in fact, if the common folk like it, you're doing it wrong.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
You don't know what a military dictatorship actually is. The US has a lot of problems. Crimped freedom and police state problems among them. But it is not a military dictatorship.
Thailand is a military dictatorship. Egypt was until last year, and likely will be again. Syria is now. Most officially Muslim states are, though the military is a tool of the theocracy, and sometimes the dictatorship is by church committee. Many African states are, especially Somalia. The tribal states studded around South Asia are. Plenty of counties throughout Latin America are, under the local warlord. Russia is heading back into military dictatorship, after a century with different styles. North Korea. Many more, especially if the "military" is solely an internal police force.
The US is far freer, far more a republic, far more democratic, than any of those countries.
No, we're not finished. And indeed we've had ups and downs. But even the US has had more military dictatorship than it has now. Lincoln overruled habeas corpus - so did Bush. FDR sent people to concentration camps by racial profiling - so did Bush. In fact we just backed away from some of the most severe military dictatorship through 2008 than we'd had in generations - possibly more than during Vietnam (eg. Kent State).
Keep some perspective. Don't accept the talk that we're in a military dictatorship, because that just lowers your standards. The military dictatorship is always out there trying to come back. Apathy gives it the way in.
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First, to prevent morons who are unable to distinguish the difference between culture and race labelling me as racist, I am speaking about culture.
IMHO and experience, Russians and the PRC are far more willing to take risks with human life than Western Europeans and North Americans. Add this to their desire and know-how and you have a better environment for advancement.
The Russians and PRC will be slugging it out over the Moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt while NASA is still dithering over the shuttle replacement.
Americans go to Paris in droves, which are a type of small dog-pulled cart. Around 5 million tourists (that's a lot of droves) visit Versailles each year. The dowdy English main palace, Westminster, gets fewer than 2 million, and that's with a royal family living there. Face it: the French have more style than the English, along with world-famous prostitutes, and have never invaded the United States and burned our Capitol. There's also French kissing. Which do you want: English kisses or French kisses? Thought so!
You can get a dentist to pull a perfectly good tooth too, for that matter.
Yet surgeons refuse to cut off an otherwise physically healthy limb that the brain doesn't accept as part of the person. Even self-proclaimed Christian hospitals disregard Jesus's stance on the issue: "And if your foot makes you stumble, cut it off" (Mark 9:45, NWT).
I'm not from the US. Fail!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That gives me a great idea. Send the Royal Family into space. That way if they don't come down it saves a fortune on the honours roll to the UK
Actually, the honours system is one of the few aspects of the whole shebang I agree with. Family member pointed out once that it's a way of giving recognition to someone without any money changing hands. A quick knighthood or OBE (example: Jamie Oliver, say) - he goes to Buck house, presses the flesh, gets a 'job well done' by HRH and that's it. On the way out the door, he flashes the gong to the tabloids, gets the envious stares of others who want to wear the same decoration, and ... life goes on. We're all assuming that the gongs go to people that the country needs of course - but that's another issue.
... was it Tom Paine who said that a hereditary ruler was akin to a hereditary mathematician?
I have problems where some of the titled aristocracy get to run the country
BTW, same sort of thing in the States? 'Key of the city of New York', etc...?
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
You can get a dentist to pull a perfectly good tooth too, for that matter.
Yet surgeons refuse to cut off an otherwise physically healthy limb that the brain doesn't accept as part of the person. Even self-proclaimed Christian hospitals disregard Jesus's stance on the issue: "And if your foot makes you stumble, cut it off" (Mark 9:45, NWT).
I think it's safe to say that Jesus was talking about priorities in life, that nothing should be more important than "not stumbling" (i.e. having a strong and healthy relationship with God). "Better to go to Heaven maimed than to go to Hell whole" to paraphrase from memory the rest of that passage.
It's figurative language used to make a point. Anyone who read that and wanted to remove their own limbs has utterly failed to understand the meaning. The hospital is right to refuse such a request. If I were the doctor I would refuse too.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Reason Magazine = the Koch Brothers.
This has nothing to do with astronauts. That's just the framing device. This is about YOU. The Koch Brothers don't think there should be any workplace safety regulations, and they use their many sockpuppets, including "Reason" magazine, to make this argument in various forms. They think your employer should be able to subject you to any dangerous conditions he/she wants.
Follow the money. Koch Industries is the second largest privately held company in the United States, and it is wholly owned by Charles and David Koch. Everything they do, and I mean literally everything, is about stuffing more money in their pockets.
yup, i misread the word 'royals'. and even then it does not make any sense :/
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Comparing to other organisations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Estimates_of_the_value_of_life
"
In the US, the following estimates have been applied to the value of life. The estimates are either for one year of additional life or for the statistical value of a single life.
$50 000 per year of quality life (international standard most private and government-run health insurance plans worldwide use to determine whether to cover a new medical procedure) [5]
$129 000 per year of quality life (based on analysis of kidney dialysis procedures by Stefanos Zenios and colleagues at Stanford Graduate School of Business)[5]
$6.9 million (Environmental Protection Agency)[6]
$7.9 million (Food and Drug Administration)[7]
$6 million (Transportation Department)[7]
$7 million (median value for prime aged workers) [2]
The income elasticity of the value of statistical life has been estimated at 0.5 to 0.6.[2] Developing markets have smaller statistical value of life.[2] The statistical value of life also decreases with age.[2]
"
NASA is pretty good.
Saab made really safe cars, but the company was run like crap. There are good reasons why they failed.
That said, the upside-down drop test on Top Gear was pretty impressive.
It's also a 1in7 chance of ruining the entire mission...
If the payload costs a billion, you loose that too.
If the rocket costs a billion, you loose that too.
If you blow up the launch pad, that's really expensive...
If you hit a populated area, that's really really expensive...
And there are multiple astronauts....
The astronaut training isn't cheap either.
Also, I take it that 4billion basically includes development costs to reduce the risk for all future astronauts, and would be applicable to other areas of society too... especially a more complicated trip, where the same risk may be encountered many times, and be significantly safer.
Still, I don't think a single astronaut is worth 4billion.
Wait, who started that about Camelot back in the 60s?
Just another day in Paradise
Deaths in the manned space program are political problems. The reason costs have risen is in part the level of deaths in the program was at a level that was not politicaly sustainable. Robotic missions can do almost all the things a manned mission can and are cheaper. How many lives are you willing to lose to take 6 th grade designed science experiments into orbit. The manned space program is in no small part a propoganda exercise. Deaths are realy bad PR
There is no 1000 Euro note.
Not yet.
The dowdy English main palace, Westminster, gets fewer than 2 million, and that's with a royal family living there.
I don't think you mean the Palace of Westminster (i.e. the Houses of Parliament). It's not a royal residence, nor is it in any sense the "English main palace". Finally, I could see how people could find its neo-gothic architecture hideous or beautiful, but I don't see how it could be described as dowdy.
I think you meant to refer to Buck House.
Jeeze - 500 Euro note then...
In case you're interested (I was) - "The most valuable banknotes in current circulation are:
10,000 Singapore Dollar note (US$7,900)
1,000 Swiss Franc note (US$1,000)
1,000 Singapore Dollar note (US$790)
500 Euro note (US$610)"
Source - http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_Highest_value_banknote_in_current_general_circulation_in_the_world#ixzz20txaZw4t
Note: figures are re-converted at today's rates, rounded to 2 significant figures
Yes, but you'd need that with an elected head of state as well (unless you're proposing not having a head of state at all).
Actually, in the long term, an elected head of state could be more expensive as you would have to re-work your protocols ever 4/5-8-10 years (depending on term limits), plus you'd be starting with more normal houses (well, mansions probably) and fewer castles.