Risk Aversion At Odds With Manned Space Exploration 371
Several readers including tyghe!! sent in a Popular Mechanics piece analyzing the Augustine Commission's recommendations and NASA itself in terms of a persistent bias towards risk aversion, and arguing that such a bias is fundamentally incompatible with the mission of opening a new frontier. "Rand Simberg, a former aerospace engineer finds the report a little too innocuous. In this analysis, Simberg asks, what happens when we take the risk out of space travel? ... Aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan said a few years ago that if we're not killing people, we're not pushing hard enough. That might sound harsh to people outside the aerospace community but, as Rutan knows, test pilots and astronauts are a breed of people that willingly accepts certain risk in order to be part of great endeavors. They're volunteers and they know what they're getting into."
Misses the point (Score:5, Informative)
Missing the point.
NASA execs used to claim the chances of a bad Shuttle accident were 1 in 10,000.
That's obviously crazy-- you'd have to shoot one up every day for 30 years to get even an unreliable estimate of that level of risk.
Feynman asked around, and the actual engineers estimated 1 in 100 to 1 in 200.
So a better question is, do the astronauts have a right to hear the CORRECT figures, not the wild wishful-thinking executive estimates?
Re:Misses the point (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Misses the point (Score:4, Informative)
Well, you missed the small text at the bottom of the page that said "*** per component" !
Re:Risk aversion stems from funding sources (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Risk aversion stems from funding sources (Score:3, Informative)
Westinghouse didn't waver when Edison was waging his FUD and lobbying campaign against them. The railroad industry was plagued with disasters and bad press for many years but kept building out their infrastructure and are still around today. The White Star line didn't stop building ships after the Titanic sunk.
There's three examples right off the top of my head. I'm sure others can think of more.
Re:Risk aversion stems from funding sources (Score:3, Informative)
Which is sad because, in the long run, the technology developed from space exploration would be a big boon to the economy. Just think of all the technologies that would have to be developed, or at least further developed, for a Mars mission.
Re:Worst of both worlds (Score:4, Informative)
Airliners are probably about 10**8 times less likely to spontaneously explode in flight than rockets.
Maybe the Shuttle designers thought that they had somehow circumvented that fact, but events proved otherwise.
WHAT?!!? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Misses the point (Score:5, Informative)
I'll assume you were repeating something someone else said but next time try a quick internet search before passing it on.
Both missions where Challenger and Columbia were destroyed were launched in January not February.
The launches were 17 not 20 years apart.
They were not launched on the same day. (Challenger launched on Jan 28, 1986, Columbia launched on Jan 16, 2003)
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/archives/sts-51L.html [nasa.gov]
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/archives/sts-107.html [nasa.gov]
Re:WHAT?!!? (Score:3, Informative)
This is exactly why the Bill of Rights faced heavy opposition, as it turned the whole idea of things on its head and set a precedent that the Constitution had to forbid the federal government from doing something.
Then again, it's far better than the precedent some have tried to set by using an amendment to prevent people from having certain rights.
Except the part of the Bill of Rights that specifically states the federal government only has the powers delegated by the constitution (10th amendment)
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The founders were very careful not to set such a precedent.
Re:Misses the point (Score:3, Informative)
Of course they are aware of the risks, and I can assure you, they *don't care*. I am sure they would object to any specific item that was clearly dangerous, but as an overall statistical risk, it's not even on their minds. There were *plenty* of volunteers to launch critical national payloads right after the Challenger incident.
Brett
Sorryâ" it's you thats missing the point (Score:1, Informative)
A 1 in 50 risk of a fatal accident is only about twice the lifetime risk dying in a car accident. It's significantly higher than the lifetime risk of dying in some 'extreme sports'.
Pre-challenger the astronauts might not have known but it would be hard not to afterwards, but I can't see it making a difference. The risks are simply *not* that high, considering.
Re:Misses the point (Score:3, Informative)
Just the other day I saw a figure of 1.4 traffic fatalities per 100 million miles driven. At that rate a 3000 mile trip would generate 0.000042 deaths, or 1 in 24,000 odds. Supposedly the odds of dying in an airliner are just under 1 in a million per flight hour. It comes out to 1 in 140,000 for an eight hour cross country flight by my calculations. So according to those figures a cross country flight is almost 6 times safer than a cross country car trip.
Yes you can rightly argue that interstate driving is safer per mile than the rush hour commuting that the traffic fatalities is undoubtedly biased toward. But I doubt it's enough safer to make up the difference. But I'd love to hear the figures if anyone has them.
My original point was to compare plane flights to long car trips, not average short car trips that probably have million to one odds of a fatality. Even on interstates, the further you drive the more likely something is going to happen. Haven't we learned anything from Clark Griswold in "Vacation"?
Re:Depends on the "Purpose" (Score:4, Informative)
"I agree on the cost issue, though. Instead of spending a million bucks to develop a space pen that writes in zero-G, The Ruskies used pencils. Duh."
Of course that's not true. The designer of the space pen spent a million dollars developing it. The reason for developing it was because pencils could be hazardous in zero gravity and high oxygen environments.
They were sold to NASA for $2.95 a piece. Before the pen was developed NASA used lead pencils.
NASA Space Pen [snopes.com]
Re:Misses the point (Score:1, Informative)
...and if they'd stuck to the original design specs and not tried to push the limits, neither tragedy would have happened. Challenger blew when a weakened O-ring let go after a sub-standard cold launch, and Columbia's heat shield was damaged when an air pocket blew a chunk out of the REFORMULATED tank foam. Not too cold? No SRB burn-through. No air pockets? More CFCs released to the air, but I think the level pales to the amounts of chemicals released on Columbia's disintigration.
Re:Almost certainly not true (Score:2, Informative)
You would need significant background in aerospace and safety engineering to be able to conduct such a thing, and most of these folks are not.
Actually, most of these folks are
What do you think astronauts are? Some kind of toilet trained space monkey? They are highly qualified, very smart people.
Picked at random from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronauts_by_name [wikipedia.org]: