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Space

Life Insurance Restrictions For Space Tourists 68

Posted by Soulskill from the lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-uninsured dept.
RockDoctor writes: Reuters reports that there are changes afoot for life insurance contracts, which will require additional premiums for "space tourists." While not likely to be a disabling issue for the industry — the statistics for astronauts dying in flight are not that bad — it is an issue that people considering such a jaunt will need to address. Obviously this has been brought to the fore by the unfortunate crash of the Virgin Galactic craft under test. Relatedly, an article at IEEE Spectrum explains why SpaceShipTwo's rocket fuel wasn't the cause of the accident.
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Life Insurance Restrictions For Space Tourists More

Life Insurance Restrictions For Space Tourists

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  • Dammit! (Score:5, Funny)

    by NotDrWho ( 3543773 ) on Friday November 07, 2014 @12:38PM (#48334419)

    Just found out my policy only applies to earth. Fucking rip-off!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Now imagine all the actuaries sitting around the table for lunch discussing exciting new developments, and then one of them drops their sandwich and is silent. He just realized all their models assume an earth bound situation, and when he tells his colleagues a quiet hush slowly comes down around the table. Then one sits back in her chair, nodding her head, and quietly says, "dammit."
      • Flying SpaceShip WhateverNumber is still an Earth bound situation. Until they escape Earth's gravitational field we can consider them bound to the Earth. No judge will rule against that argument after hearing experts.
        • Well, you technically can't escape Earth's gravitational field, it stretches to infinity. Or doesn't it?

          • If you define "escape" as "earths gravity has absoloutely no effect anymore " and you assume that relativity will perfectly match reality in all scenarios then you are correct.

            On the other hand if you define "escape" as "the impact of earths gravity negligable compared to the impact of other cellestial bodies" or even "the impact of earths gravity is too small to measure" then "escape" is certainly possible.

            • Well, again, technically, we've been calling that region the Hill/Roche sphere, so it's simpler to just say what you mean instead of saying something you don't mean.

        • "if the ship's in or-bit, then you must acquit"
          - Space Johnny Cochrane

    • So, you aren't covered when you go to the hospital to fix what the visitors do with their anal probe.

  • with ET.

  • Doesn't the submitter even RTFA?!?!? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 07, 2014 @12:47PM (#48334475)

    The submitter, passed by the "editor":

    Relatedly, an article at IEEE Spectrum explains why SpaceShipTwo's rocket fuel wasn't the cause of the accident. [ieee.org]

    Not.

    It says this:

    The company’s larger suborbital vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, also employs a hybrid rocket, which at the time of this writing did not appear to have caused October’s tragic accident.

    "wasn't" != "does not appear to be".

    Q - What's the best decade of a Slashdot editor's life?

    A - Third grade.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The engine (and rocket fuel) wasn't the cause of the crash because it was found intact.

      • Well, one way of how an intact engine could still be a cause of a crash would be if it simply flamed out. ;-)

  • Gawd. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by i kan reed ( 749298 ) on Friday November 07, 2014 @12:50PM (#48334501) Homepage Journal

    All I want to do is get on a giant pile of explosives, accelerate at several G's, go many times the speed of sound, up into a place utterly lacking in oxygen, sit in unfiltered ionizing solar radiation for a few hours, plummet rapidly to the ground, and go home.

    What's so dangerous about any of that?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jovius ( 974690 )

      It's nothing like exposing oneself to long and short wave radiation, oxidisation, radioactivity and telomere self-destruction for some 100 years and then dying because of that. Who would do that?

  • Almost meaningless (Score:4, Insightful)

    by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 ) on Friday November 07, 2014 @12:51PM (#48334515)

    Anyone inclined to become a "space tourist" is, pretty much by definition, rich.

    In other words, he or she almost certainly doesn't need life insurance to make sure the spouse and rugrats can afford the lifestyle to which they've become accustomed when the breadwinner gets splattered all over the desert.

    • Life insurance vs life expectancy (Score:4, Informative)

      by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Friday November 07, 2014 @01:10PM (#48334685)

      In other words, he or she almost certainly doesn't need life insurance to make sure the spouse and rugrats can afford the lifestyle to which they've become accustomed when the breadwinner gets splattered all over the desert.

      "Need"? Strictly speaking you are correct. But people who are rich generally actually do have life insurance policies as a part of their estate plan. Violating the terms of these policies could cause them some fiscal heartburn. These policies have a price and payout terms that are based on certain expectations of the policy holder's lifespan. Things that could radically alter this expectation may void the terms of the policy or necessitate a material change in underwriting charges. Spaceflight is one of those things that falls into the category of radically adjusting risk.

      If you apply for a life insurance policy of any real value, they will ask you to take a physical and you will be asked questions like whether you have a pilot's license or have flown in a non-commercial aircraft in the last 5 years. The insurance company will adjust their price accordingly if they are willing to underwrite the policy at all. Lie about it and the policy can be null and void to the detriment of you or your family.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by u38cg ( 607297 )
        Half right. You must be upfront about what you do and intend to do at the time of underwriting, but if you then take up chain-smoking while surfing on a shark, that's your business. The insurer absorbs that as normal mortality. To put it in perspective, the biggest life policies are on the order of GBP50-100m (Warren Buffet types), and the industry absorbs one or two claims of this size every year. The real risk here is aggregation risk, the fact that you'll have a dozen millionaires on these flights.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 0123456 ( 636235 )

      Anyone inclined to become a "space tourist" is, pretty much by definition, rich.

      As far as I'm aware, VG is intending to charge around $200,000 a ticket. Plenty of people could afford that without being considered rich. That would barely buy you the cheapest house around here.

      • $200k is FOUR TIMES the median annual family income in the United States, and that's before taxes. Yeah, if you have $200k to spend on a discretionary jaunt like this, you're rich, by any reasonable measure. Doesn't mean there aren't millions of people who could afford it (it's a big country, and a big world), but they're without a doubt rich.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by khallow ( 566160 )

          $200k is FOUR TIMES the median annual family income in the United States

          Which isn't very much. The real problem is that anyone who can save that kind of money and isn't on the rich side, generally has a strong reason not to burn their life savings on a one-time trip.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by 0123456 ( 636235 )

          So I'm rich? Hmm, doesn't feel like it. It's not like I can quit work and live for the rest of my life on $200k... as you say, it's only four years of the median income, which is not a lot of money.

          Besides which, Branson has talked about reducing the cost to more like $50k within ten years of operations beginning, which is, I believe, around the same price as a cruise to Antarctica.

          • So I'm rich? Hmm, doesn't feel like it. It's not like I can quit work and live for the rest of my life on $200k... as you say, it's only four years of the median income, which is not a lot of money.

            Besides which, Branson has talked about reducing the cost to more like $50k within ten years of operations beginning, which is, I believe, around the same price as a cruise to Antarctica.

            It's not like you can live the rest of your life on €51,000, but that doesn't mean that the people who can afford to spend that on Patek Philippe watches aren't rich.

            $200k is more than the net worth of 70% of US households, even if they sold everything they owned, including their houses.

            Also, Antarctic cruises are more like $20k/head - $30k gets you very top end. Again, while there are millions of people who can afford this, that doesn't mean they're not rich, unless you want to define rich as "no pos

          • Having $200k doesn't make you rich. Having $200k in discretionary spending does. If you can afford to meet the basic bills of life and still have that much money left over to spend on recreation, then you're rich.

      • Anyone inclined to become a "space tourist" is, pretty much by definition, rich.

        As far as I'm aware, VG is intending to charge around $200,000 a ticket. Plenty of people could afford that without being considered rich. That would barely buy you the cheapest house around here.

        Answers like this are why the term "space nutter" exists.

        Totally divorced from reality.

    • he or she almost certainly doesn't need life insurance to make sure the spouse and rugrats can afford the lifestyle to which they've become accustomed.

      The business and professional obligations of a man or woman in this class come into play as well.

      In theory, no one is irreplaceable. In practice, the loss of a CEO, senior partner, major investor, etc., at a critical moment can do a lot of damage.

      • In practice, the loss of a CEO, . . . at a critical moment can do a lot of damage.

        No, not really. Study after study has shown a CEO has little impact on a company's performance. In fact, the higher the pay the CEO receives, the worse [pbs.org] the company performs.

        • In fact, the higher the pay the CEO receives, the worse [pbs.org] the company performs.

          In 2010, PBS President Paula Kerger earned $632,233 [thinkprogress.org]. I doubt that has decreased in the last four years. I'd call that rich.

          Further, NPR former President Kevin Klose $1.2 million, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting CEO Patricia de Stacy Harrison earned $298,884, plus $70,630 in additional compensation.

          Now, the link downplays those numbers because other CEOs are paid a lot more, but we're still talking about three non-profit organizations.

  • Quick tell the OP this applies to Skydiving too... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Friday November 07, 2014 @12:53PM (#48334527)

    Quick tell the OP this usually applies to skydiving too. (Check your policy - it might be explictly listed, or just covered under a general "if you die while engaging in a risk sport you're SOL" clause.)

  • Makes sense, for now (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Many health- and life-insurance policies ask if you engage in high-risk activities on more than an occasional basis. They build in the cost for occasional skiing, but they will charge you extra if you are a professional skier specializing in the world's most dangerous places to ski.

    Space tourism is so new that it's not a risk that's already "baked in" to insurance rates. Until space tourism companies get a decent-sized track record of safe flying, expect to see life insurance coverage exclude this from th

  • How big are the out of network charges for health insurance for space tourists?

  • Lawyer food.

  • impossible (Score:4, Interesting)

    by slashmydots ( 2189826 ) on Friday November 07, 2014 @12:59PM (#48334589)
    Insurance companies need a giant base of numbers to determine probability. When they don't, you get month-after-ACA type prices. Humana had no idea what would happen when they picked up 10 million very unhealthy people under the ACA plan so all ACA plans were about 4x the price of my identical non-ACA compliant plan. So in other words, when insurance companies gamble on something without enough data, they guess. When they guess, the price skyrockets.
  • This is easily solved with a one-time bond. Insurance companies work with secondary insurance all the time. If you're buying a $250,000 ticket, it's easy to throw on a $3000 one-time bond for space-travel related issues. People do the same type of thing all the time for international travel.

    • Not really. One time bonds are still based on actuarial data. To believe Elon Musk, the most safety conscious regular transportation organization in the world has a 3% failure rate on returning occupants alive. Your ticket cost is irrelevant; its your insured amount that matters. So for a one-off, you might double the acturial number. A $1M life insurance policy might cost 6% ($60,000), 8%($80,000) if Musk is deemed less reliable than NASA. If you had a statically significant sample, say hundreds or thousa

  • If I have the 20 million dollars it costs to be a space tourist in first place the increase in life insurance premiums is irrelevant. Even if I have the $250,000 sitting around to blow on a one time vacation they claim the price might come down to life insurance costs are not going to stop me from going.

    • If you have $20M what are you doing wasting your money on life insurance? Unless you have some reason to believe that leaving behind $20M will not be enough for your beneficiary to carry on, it's a pretty poor financial choice.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bws111 ( 1216812 )

        The rich buy life insurance to pay the estate taxes so their heirs do not have to liquidate assets to pay the taxes. For instance, if most of their worth is in a family business, they may not want the heirs to be forced to sell the business to get the cash to pay the taxes. Or, if their money is in other assets they may not want the heirs to be forced to sell at what may be poor market conditions.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Keep in mind this is exactly who you will be emulating http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]. You do nothing, you achieve nothing, you are just along for the ride as well as post ride egoistic poseur status. I can understand living, working and exploring up there, out to the moon and even further. Just being ignorant meat in a shipping container being sold marketing illusions is really rather lame.

  • SpaceShipTwo - not good news (Score:3)

    by gman003 ( 1693318 ) on Friday November 07, 2014 @01:39PM (#48334951)

    If it had been the engine, it would have been forgettable. Rocket engines explode all the time, because they're funneling huge amounts of extremely volatile fuels and oxidizers into a high-pressure, high-temperature chamber. SS2 was also testing a new design - new engines are particularly failure-prone, because there's still stuff rocket scientists don't know. While it would have been worse than "not exploding at all", if the problem had been the engine, they could fix it and move on.

    The news that it was the wing, and not the engine, that caused the failure is, in my mind, worse. It means they fucked up on a relatively simple, well-understood problem. Part of the blame can be assigned on the pilot disabling the safety early, but it still activated spontaneously and catastrophically. That makes me suspicious of what other simple things they've screwed up.

    • Nono, an engine explosion would've been disastrous. It probably would've meant the end of the program.

      Virgin Galactic program did things backwards. Normally you would start with a proven engine and build a spacecraft around it that's appropriate size and weight for the engine. But Virgin went the other way, they build the spacecraft to their specs first and then went searching for an engine that can lift it to the required altitude.

      After 10 years of trying they gave up and discarded the Sierra Nevada rubber

      • They did do things backward, but switching engines would be much easier if they hadn't settled on such a tiny craft. If they could deal with larger fuel tanks, they could use an RD-0124 - higher thrust (290kN vs. 270kN), and I can't see how it can have lower specific impulse. The only hurdle I can see is that liquid fuel takes up a lot more space than solid fuels, and they've got a pretty small craft.

        However, you missed an important part of the feather problem. The pilot erroneously unlocked it, but DID NOT

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by 0123456 ( 636235 )

          It could have literally been Space Jesus shooting it with lightning - they're in the tourism business, and rich tourists are pretty risk-averse. Any failure is probably going to be enough to kill the business.

          Real, actual rich tourists pay $50,000,000 to fly to ISS in a Soyuz. They're not risk-averse when it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience that few people have had.

          But, yeah, they're probably not taking a War Tour in Iraq right now.

        • However, you missed an important part of the feather problem. The pilot erroneously unlocked it, but DID NOT deploy it. That is clearly an engineering problem.

          It could be that I'm being too hopeful and trying to put the best light on things, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a major engineering problem.

          It's possible they never did a simulation of what would happen if the feather was accidentally unlocked during early phase of the ascent stage because... it simply never occurred to them. Or maybe they did simulate it, but got a different result from real life (as in, the simulation showed aerodynamic forces weren't enough to move the feather, when in real life

    • The news that it was the wing, and not the engine, that caused the failure is, in my mind, worse. It means they fucked up on a relatively simple, well-understood problem. Part of the blame can be assigned on the pilot disabling the safety early, but it still activated spontaneously and catastrophically. That makes me suspicious of what other simple things they've screwed up.

      Unfortunately, as with so many other things in life, there's more going on here than meets the eye....

      Disabling the safety fairly early

  • Add it to the list (Score:3)

    by tomhath ( 637240 ) on Friday November 07, 2014 @02:31PM (#48335471)
    Smoking, sky diving, hang gliding, scuba diving, racing pretty much any motor vehicle...all are generally called out on a life insurance policy. Adding another exemption for space tourism is not really news worthy.
    • I pay extra because I teach people to fly. I would pay more for flying experimental aircraft and I assume more again for spacecraft. Issue is I can look up the fatality per 100,000 hours for production aircraft, but not for experimental aircraft and REALLY not for rarely flown new spacecraft. Right now the fatality per 100,000 hours for Virgin Galactic is about the same as parachuting into an active volcano if you extrapolate it out. In contrast, the airplanes I teach in are about 1 fatality per 100,000 hou
  • I don't like the recent fear-mongering discouragement of continued advancements in space travel development because I understand that human progress in that arena demands brave, bold persistence. I also understand that due to potential liabilities, no space tourism company will take the general public to orbit in unproven technology.

    But this makes sense anyway.

    Those who can current afford space tourism can afford the additional insurance for whatever interim time before their flight. It's not as if

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