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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
Let me be the first to come with a car analogy: What is a driver's life worth?
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!
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.
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'll give you a fiver for one.
Uh, five what, exactly?
Ostmarks (obsolete) and Zimbabwe Dollars (obsolete) are no good, Vietnamese Dong are inadequate (1/20000 US$), but if you're talking Uganda Shillings (1/2400 US$) or better, I'll take it. Can I interest you in a quantity discount - my associates in Nigeria have millions of astronaut lives to trade...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The unattractive tradeoffs one is force to make (safety vs. accomplishments vs. costs) with manned spaceflight is very compelling argument for unmanned missions. Accomplish more at lower costs with no risk to human lives.
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!
If soldiers cost $28,000,000,000 each, the nukes would come out much quicker.
The Hubble telescope wasn't useful?
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.
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...
I'd got through all that training and go up and risk my life for free.
Would you do it if it were 100% certain that you would be immediately killed without accomplishing anything? I doubt it. And if you would, then you are so insane that you are worthless as an astronaut.
So it's a trade-off. How much must risk be reduced to make it possible to hire top quality astronauts? The claim of TFA is that less can be spent reducing risk.
There is already serious risk involved. So my gut feeling is that you can't reduce it much. But if NASA hasn't already done so, I agree that it would be worth spending some money to get a science-based estimate of how much risk is really tolerable.
Would you do it if there was a 100% chance of the vessel rupturing a few minutes after takeoff? Probably not, that would be suicide without any gains.
So NASA must spend some money to make sure that the mission succeeds, and that you stay alive long enough to collect useful data. Preferably to stay alive for the next mission too, because training a new guy might be more costly.
Perhaps they could state that there is an N% chance of survival, then see who's willing to go up.
c++;
Putting astronauts on board could actually the pressure
And then they'd accidentally a space ship.
Not good, nooo.
"we're still a very, very long way from being able to replace astronauts with robots"
Since you make that assertion, I'm interested in hearing what astronauts have done that robots couldn't have done better.
"you might be able to cut down on safety measures, but you wouldn't really be saving that much anyways"
Everything I've read suggests the opposite: that manned spaceflight is hugely more expensive that unmanned, and I've never seen any evidence that suggests that any space flights had to be redone to correct robot error. (Human error, OTOH... *cough* Hubble *cough*) I'd like to see anything you have that suggests differently. (j/k about the Hubble telescope, btw, since they waited until the first regularly scheduled servicing mission to fix it, rather than making a special trip)
Can I mod something +1 Scary if it's true but I wish it weren't?
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.
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".
So it's a trade-off. How much must risk be reduced to make it possible to hire top quality astronauts? The claim of TFA is that less can be spent reducing risk.
I agree with Zubrin in principle: in a rational world we'd accept a reasonable amount of risk, mourn the dead if and when they perish in our quest for knowledge, and keep exploring as long as the risk remained reasonable. But of course, our world is not rational.
Back in the 1980's, NASA announced that with the Space Shuttle space travel was now perfectly safe, and to prove the point, they selected a female, good-looking, mother-of-two teacher, and invited the world to watch as they put her in the space craft and launched it. Challenger exploded and Christa McAuliffe and the other crewmembers died, with hundreds of millions watching on prime time television.
It's difficult to put a monetary value on trust, and we don't know how NASA funding would have developed without the Challenger accident, but I think it's safe to say that NASA lost a good deal more than $350 million in that event, and that the consequences were much more severe than they would have been had the astronauts died in traffic accidents. Irrational as it is, the more public a (potential) death, the bigger the risk and the more expenses are warranted. And it doesn't get much more public than an exploding space craft.
I think the only way forward for NASA is to loudly and publicly accept that space exploration is inherently dangerous, and that they were wrong in thinking that they could make it safe enough to fly school teachers. And then ask the astronauts how much risk they'd be willing to accept, and work accordingly. But in reality, I think the SLS needs to fail first, and then they'll either start from scratch and taking more risks, or leave crewed space flight to the private sector entirely. I'm not expecting too much from NASA in the coming decade.
[..] 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.
I bet you're fun at parties...
No sig today...
Back in the 1980's, NASA announced that with the Space Shuttle space travel was now perfectly safe
Sorry but they shouldn't let dumbasses make public proclamations simply because they sound good. It leads to the kind of disappointment you mention. Look at the number of traffic injuries and fatalities. We can't even make it perfectly safe to get groceries. To proclaim space travel perfectly safe is ridiculous and no thinking person would have believed it. It's shameful to see this kind of feel-good propaganda coming from an agency that performs so much hard science.
Anybody remember being a little kid and regarding astronauts with awe and wonder? They were like heroes who explored the greatest frontier imaginable. It was understood that they took risks. They were like fighter pilots except even more badass than that. Space travel was about two things: knowledge and plain ol' balls. I remember being little and thinking that if they can go to the moon years before I was born, imagine what they'll be able to do by the time I'm an adult!
The answer? Absolutely nothing. Sure, there's the ISS but NASA is stagnant and has been for a while now. The ISS isn't new and interesting the way going to Mars or creating a lunar base would be. When did we get so worried about risk that we don't try anything anymore? We send people who are barely considered adults to die for no good reason in the Middle East and we can't send people into space for similar (if not lower) cost? Something's fucked up in this picture.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Everything I've read suggests the opposite: that manned spaceflight is hugely more expensive that unmanned, and I've never seen any evidence that suggests that any space flights had to be redone to correct robot error. (Human error, OTOH... *cough* Hubble *cough*) I'd like to see anything you have that suggests differently. (j/k about the Hubble telescope, btw, since they waited until the first regularly scheduled servicing mission to fix it, rather than making a special trip)
How would you define robot error in this case? We have unmanned missions that have failed spectacularly in many ways. However, of course you can attribute them all to human error. Even if an independent navigation program fails, or whatever, you will not blame the machine, but the development team. When AI has reached point where it would be relevant to blame robot error, then manned missions are truly unnecessary.
Okay, point taken. You're right about the autonomous navigation one, I forgot about DART. And yeah, true, it's a matter of perspective, but I'll concede that one as robot error. Basically, they get to a certain age, and you have to let take responsibility for their own actions... And okay, yeah, Clementine, while not a failure, probably would have observed Geographos had there been a human aboard. So I'll concede that my statement was a bit of a sweeping generalization and scale it back.
*But* a lot of the failures in unmanned flights were simple mechanical failures. And a number of them were definitely human error, like a failure to convert units or a part incorrectly installed.
But, okay, I'll concede your point about AI --- so let's put that budget into AI! :D
Can I mod something +1 Scary if it's true but I wish it weren't?
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?
Would you do it if there was a 100% chance of the vessel rupturing a few minutes after takeoff?
I think you just came up with my new business plan: Extreme Assisted Suicide.
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This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
What the purpose of astronauts is these days?
Disclaimer: I've met one- we were having lunch on the same table together, about two months ago.
As he puts it, they are "nothing more than glorified lab managers"- his type, I guess, since he is not running any classified military errands. A crew of three working in shifts around the clock is needed to maintain the ISS ("glorified janitors"), and that leaves room for three more people for extra tasks. Typically, when no tourist visitors are present, the remaining three of the crew work on a 'regular' 8-hour shift, formally complete with days off (e.g. during weekends). Tasks mostly include running experiments on board for third parties and, in theory, once their shift is over they can retire.
In practice, though, they do not get much free time since they do tend to feel a bit extra responsible for work, dedicating more time than it is asked for them to the experiments. Also, nobody on board misses an opportunity to get more hands-on experience on the interworkings of the ISS itself, since that can prove life-saving in case of an emergency. On top of that of course they need to excersize and, according to the one I met, the Russians are the best on maintaining their excersize routines, sometimes 3+ hours a day (also the smokers!)- other nationalities seem to not be prioritizing their work-out time much.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
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."
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!)
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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make install -not war
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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make install -not war
They didn't announce it was perfectly safe. They merely let someone not as expendable as previous astronauts take the risk. McAuliffe's schoolteacher status didn't contribute to the Challenger disaster.
The amount of risk mitigation isn't inversely proportional to an astronaut's bravery (or recklessness). It's determined by the value of the mission and the programme to the government. "Volunteer for a suicide mission" isn't the basis for funding NASA.
Neither is NASA denying that space travel is inherently dangerous. Indeed, its extensive risk mitigation, and followup missions after disasters, are proof it embraces that danger. But embraces it as a challenge, while reducing the danger. Which is what, after several decades and many hundreds of $billions, has produced the only viable private space industry in the world. It's what is putting humanity, not just a few rich governments, into space in the brief time it took the global car industry to give automatic transmissions to the masses.
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make install -not war
McAuliffe's schoolteacher status didn't contribute to the Challenger disaster.
Mostly true, but at least a little arguable. The decision to launch Challenger, despite the low temperatures was heavily motivated by political pressure, and one of the reasons there was so much political pressure was because it was a high profile launch. The reason it was such a high-profile launch is because of the teacher in space publicity stunt. It's certainly possible that they might not have postponed the launch if it was a regular crew that wasn't so high-profile, but there's at least a reasonable argument that they might have postponed if everyone weren't so worried about losing the TV spot.
That is a foolish statement coming even from a second-rate moron. Nothing is perfectly safe, especially your bed. It is statistically true that more people die in bed than anyplace else. Therefore, bed is the most dangerous place to be. Don't go to bed tonight!
Just for fun, google for "deaths falling out of bed". Apparently 450 cases in the USA, and comparable numbers in many other countries (it didn't say which time frame though, which makes the number worthless),
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
On the contrary, the O-ring issue was quite well known, just not to the general public. The Rogers Commission report was pretty clear on that. Feynman was pretty scathing about the contractors concluding that the O-rings burning 1/3rd of the way through on previous flights constituted a "safety factor of 3". There was a flurry of concern about whether it was safe to launch in such cold temperatures before the launch precisely because of the known O-ring safety issue on the morning of the launch. It was essentially quashed for political/managerial reasons rather than engineering ones. Deciding to just risk conditions that were beyond those already known to be unsafe is not an engineering decision.
As a result, when Challenger took off, the O-ring didn't expand fast enough to fill the gap in the tang and clevis joints joining the sections of the solid booster as the joints flexed from internal pressure. Oxides from the burn filled the gap, but then were blown out during a moment of turbulence a little later in the launch. The jet of hot exhaust gases then made short work of the side of the liquid booster tank, which ruptured and ignited.
Not every part of that possible failure mode was understood before the Challenger disaster. What was known for sure is that the O-rings didn't seat properly and experienced severe damage in many previous launches and that the temperature of the O-rings at the time of launch was lower than the O-rings had been tested under. Also the fact that the O-rings and the (apparently largely useless) putty at the joints were what prevented superhot gas from spewing out of the joints.