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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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.