What Is an Astronaut's Life Worth? 285
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.'"
Market economy to the rescue (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:What is a driver's life worth? (Score:4, Informative)
Let me be the first to come with a car analogy: What is a driver's life worth?
That is actually a very good analogy. At the time of the Apollo space program safety features in cars were largely seen as a waste of money, by both manufacturers and consumers - people all felt that they were great drivers so it wouldn't happen to them.
Re:Market economy to the rescue (Score:4, Informative)
life insurance people put dollar values on life all the time.
No, not exactly.
The purpose of life insurance is to replace the income that person would have received over time had they not died. It's not really the life you're insuring; they just call it that because it's collected when the insured dies. Still, it's the person's earning potential and the loss it would be to the rest of the family that is being protected.
That's why (so far as I know) it makes no sense to get a life insurance policy for children, though they sell that too. You can get a dentist to pull a perfectly good tooth too, for that matter.
Re:Market economy to the rescue (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I'd do it for free. (Score:5, Informative)
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.