
NASA not ready for dangers of deep space, auditors say - ddeck
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/federal-eye/wp/2015/11/23/nasa-not-ready-for-dangers-of-deep-space-auditors-say/
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jessriedel
Of 135 shuttle missions, 2 resulted in the death of all crew, giving a
confidence interval of something like 1-4% for the mortality risk of each
flight. Any sane assessment of the first Apollo landing missions would put the
subjective mortality risk at 10% at the very least. (Later landings were
somewhat safer, subjectively, since the equipment was proven.)

I can't imagine the _in-mission_ mortality risk of a Mars mission would
realistically be less than 5%, and 15% would not be unacceptable to me. A 10%
in-mission risk equates to something like 5 years of lost life in expectation.

In comparison to this, the risk of cancer seem small or comparable. Yes,
you'll need to provide sufficient shielding to prevent aggressive cancers from
probably developing during the mission, or ones that will reliably lead to
death before 60. But I'm not at all surprised that we may need to accept a
much higher cancer risk than we would for a normal occupation. This doesn't
strike me as one of the key challenges.

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patio11
_I can 't imagine the in-mission mortality risk of a Mars mission would
realistically be less than 5%, and 15% would not be unacceptable to me. _

Thus the rationalist Mars mission: send a drone to Mars. Give your five
favorite NASA crew members one shot in the head apiece with a fairly spun six
shot pistol with one bullet chambered. This accomplishes all of your
objectives, is cheaper, and minimizes the danger that the mission architects
are underestimating the risk.

~~~
jessriedel
"Rational" is not a property of ends, it is a property of means (and beliefs).
All ends are arbitrary.

The robots sent to mars are not useful for any reasonable economic reason.
Even insofar as you count speculative basic research as economically useful,
there are _vastly_ better ways to spend that money on speculative basic
research on Earth.

So why go to Mars? Because either (1) you find the basic research being done
about Martian geology particularly compelling or (2) you want to see it
explored by humans for its own sake. If you really actually believe in (1),
then by all means; send more robots. But I'll bet 100:1 that you personally
have no appreciation for the basic science questions, which are mostly very
technical and boring. (Hint: grand-seeming questions about life are promoted
for publicity and funding reasons, but these are not the ones that actually
drive the science, and we are not learning more about the origin of life from
going to Mars.)

Rather, I think you'll have to admit we want to go to Mars because it is
_awesome_. You may think sending metal under our control is just as awesome as
sending flesh and blood humans, but ultimately this is an aesthetic judgement
which is not grounded in rationality. Personally, I would like to see humans
walk there, and I'm happy to pay my citizen-share of $100/year over the next
decade to make it happen.

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dmfdmf
>"Rational" is not a property of ends, it is a property of means (and
beliefs). All ends are arbitrary.

So let's just skip the trip to Mars and spend the money to build high-tech
pyramids in the Nevada desert and sacrifice virgins.

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anigbrowl
Isn't that the whole point of Las Vegas?

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JamesBaxter
_" the astronauts chosen to make at least the initial forays into deep space
may have to accept a higher level of risk than those who fly International
Space Station missions."_

Is this surprising to anyone? It's a far greater challenge?

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DamnYuppie
The world is not moved forward by those who seek the safety of their current
existence. It is those who dare to throw caution to the wind and embrace the
challenge of the unknown.

Just because there is a danger of dieing doesn't mean that it shouldn't be
attempted or that there are not those willing to attempt it.

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PaulHoule
A realistic near-term goal is to establish a space station at the earth-moon
L1 point such as

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_Gateway_Platform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_Gateway_Platform)

The answer to radiation is that you want 6 feet of rock, ideally all around
you, but particularly between you and the sun on solar flares. That can be
harvested from the moon or an easy asteroid.

A presence on the moon is a lot more realistic, and if commercially useful
water can be found at the pole and converted to fuel, it would make it
affordable to send astronauts to mars with radiation protection. At that point
we would have extensive experience with "living off the land" in space and
won't be doing it on a planet with toxic soil.

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sevensor
Exactly whose safety are they concerned for? The volunteers who would gladly
accept the risks of death, disease, and injury for a chance at glory? If we'd
had this attitude to risk in the 1960s, the Apollo program would have ended
after Apollo 1 burned up.

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codingdave
Yes, that is exactly whose safety they are concerned with. People who are
willing to give their life for a cause may be too willing to do so. There is
nothing wrong with making a project as safe as possible, even if you can find
volunteers with higher risk tolerances.

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BatFastard
"There is nothing wrong with making a project as safe as possible"

This is crazy, it will leave us with space projects that will never be
finished. Didn't mars one prove that people are willing to die on Mars to get
there first? The cost of getting people to mars is trivial compared to the
cost of getting them back. We spend so much time on safety we have become
totally immobile in space. The whole NASA budget should be given to the
private sector!

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codingdave
OK, fine, what if we changed it to "as safe as practical"?

The point is that those who are willing to die should not set the safety
standards. We should surpass their personal risk tolerances, and make it safer
than that.

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BatFastard
As a parent, I found that what I considered "as safe as practical" was
considerably different than what my wife considered safe.

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CIPHERSTONE
This is what I don't understand, can someone ELI5 it for me:

"Even nutrition, the report said, could be problematic, because any Mars
vehicle will likely be significantly smaller than the International Space
Station, and astronauts will be too far away to receive the regular resupply
missions they now get on the station."

Why does that have to be the case? Why are we limiting the size of the
spaceship to what can be launched from Earth? Wouldn't it be better to
construct teh ship in space so it could be a behemoth that had ample supplies,
etc. and in effect could be a semi-permanent space station in Mars orbit that
could be launched from to the surface with smaller ships?

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david-given
The short answer is: launch costs and crap rockets.

Building a big ship, right now, means lifting lots of mass into orbit and
assembling it there. That in itself will be stunningly expensive. But then you
want to actually send it to Mars.

Earth orbit to Mars orbit costs about 6 km/s (see
[http://i.imgur.com/SqdzxzF.png](http://i.imgur.com/SqdzxzF.png)), which is
comparable to the 9.4 km/s needed to get from the surface of Earth to low
earth orbit. Now, we are in space, which means we can use slow, efficient
burns rather than the fuel-belching behemoths you need for a launch... but
right now we're limited to inefficient chemical rockets, which means a hell of
a lot of fuel.

The ISS masses about 400 tonnes. Assuming hydrazine as a fuel, with an isp of
about 350, that means that the wet mass of your vehicle has to be (dry mass) *
e^(deltav / isp _9.8) = 400e3_ e^(6000 / 350*9.8) = 2300 tonnes. So you'll
need 1900 tonnes of fuel. That's 380 Falcon 9s full of rocket fuel. (Assuming
my maths are right.)

So you try to make your spacecraft as small as possible. That way you don't
need to carry the fuel needed to move the fuel. The rocket equation is a
bummer.

(Of course, nuclear engines, are vastly more efficient, change all this. Shame
we don't have any. If you were willing to wait long enough, an ion thruster
with an ISP of 20000 would require only 12 tonnes of fuel. But you wouldn't
live that long.)

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fredgrott
Yes, but realistically one could mine the Moon poles and develop the fuel
there...

Better yet expand it grow food on moon and refuel and load up on food in moon
orbit.

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gizmo686
Does growing food on the moon actually help? Unless you can mine the nutrients
for the food, you still need to bring up all of the mass that would go into
the food, at which point you might as well just bring up already processed
food (which would also be denser in value/weight). The main benefit of growing
food in space is that it lets you recycle nutrients. (I am including the
atmospheric gasses as nutrients in this).

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david-given
Yes, you'd have to mine the nutrients there for this to be effective. As you
say, there's no point lifting it all from Earth.

Organic life is largely made out of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (the
so-called CHON). There's not much carbon or nitrogen. This is one reason why
people are so interested in hypothetical ice deposits at the poles. There's a
reasonable chance that there'll be stocks of this elements there (in the form
of ammonia or hydrocarbons).

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ddeck
From the source report:

 _" Although NASA continues to improve its process for identifying and
managing health and human performance risks associated with space flight, we
believe that given the current state of knowledge, the Agency’s risk
mitigation schedule is optimistic and NASA will not develop countermeasures
for many deep space risks until the 2030s, at the earliest."_

[https://oig.nasa.gov/audits/reports/FY16/IG-16-003.pdf](https://oig.nasa.gov/audits/reports/FY16/IG-16-003.pdf)

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tslug
Humans were evolved to survive in a razor-thin sliver of Earth's atmosphere
and nowhere else. We aren't designed for and don't belong in deep space.

We should genetically engineer smart creatures that can fare better out there,
creatures with enormous capacities for cancer resistance, stupefyingly
impressive energy efficiency, and staggeringly long lifetimes. They don't need
all of our gravity-influenced skeletal structure and musculature. The fact
that we're air-breathers is a particularly worrisome liability for being a
space-faring critter. Little holes in our tin can atmospheres can lead to
explosively bad results.

I'd start with something closer to an octopus and then throw (even more)
intelligence at it.

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tomelders
surely it would be easier to build better robots?

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tslug
Maybe, if the robots can self-replicate and/or self-repair and have that
creative spark, but that's asking a whole lot of tech that we haven't sorted
out yet.

Life has the replication shit already worked out, so if the goal is really to
put intelligent life in deep space in a sustainable way, a genetically
engineered super-bright octopus species in a space-faring aquarium with
environmental selectors for intelligence built in might actually be more
effective.

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macmac
New auditor's report say that humankind is not ready to leave the cave. We
should all stay in the cave.

~~~
gaius
It was a mistake to leave the trees even.

~~~
simonh
Arguably, becoming air breathing has turned to not be all it was cracked up to
be.

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jedberg
Anyone have historical audits of NASA from 1960? I'll bet they were saying the
same thing about moon missions back then.

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avar
I've often seen two things conflated when it comes to cancer & Mars.

The first is that if we send people on a one-off return mission their lifetime
risk of cancer will increase by X%. This is obviously a concern, but as others
here in the thread have mentioned we could get people willing to accept the
risk.

The second is that if people stay on Mars for generations you have the risk of
cumulative damage to DNA over generations. Now it's not just a problem that
instead of living to 80 you die of cancer at 60, but rather that after N
generations the population's DNA might be damaged past repair.

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mapt
The only real _hard_ limit is likely to be specifically the radiation acquired
from Galactic Cosmic Rays.

There is, to a first approximation, nothing you can do about this; And it is
in fact up there around our thresholds for dose limit, unless you're satisfied
with increasing the mission mass by a factor of a thousand. The only practical
thing to do is to adjust our thresholds.

But screw it - we're talking about landing on another planet, about millions
of man-years of time investment, about activities plenty of people would
donate DALYs to accomplish; About activities they will usually have to donate
their entire career and their marriages to accomplish anyway, where the
unknown unknown risks of sudden death are expected to be of a higher magnitude
in the first place. Thresholds are silly in that context.

For comparison:

Flight attendants who have been on the job between five years and their whole
careers have ~600% of the breast cancer (and likely other cancer) risk of the
median person.

Regular smokers have 2600% the risk of lung cancer as people who have never
smoked.

Pay a smoker a million dollars to sign a contract stating they will never
smoke again, send him to Mars, then pay a private investigator to follow him
around for the rest of his life ensuring he does not start smoking, and he
will have a vastly lower rate of cancer at vastly lower monetary outlay than
if he had been rejected at the first astronaut screening and NASA had
attempted to mitigate radiation risk from GCRs.

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aturek
In case anyone else is puzzled: DALY = "Disability-adjuseted life year", i.e.
a year you're alive and not disabled.

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imgabe
Ok, exploring space is risky. How does it compare to the risk of previous
exploration? I don't imagine that sailing off into uncharted waters in a
wooden boat with whatever provisions you could carry was a particularly safe
endeavor either. There are more important things than maximizing safety.

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maxst
At the very least, ISS should have a module or two dedicated to growing food.
Right now. I don't understand why they're neglecting this technology.

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prodigal_erik
Just as an experiment? ISS would have to be much larger to be self-sufficient
in food. On earth it would take around 4,000 m^2 of solar power and 900,000 kg
of topsoil (one acre-furrow-slice) to feed each of the six crew.

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thescriptkiddie
Hydroponics and aeroponics don't require any soil. Using red/blue grow lights
instead of full spectrum roughly halves that solar power estimate, and in
space they have no atmosphere to block the sun. The ISS certainly couldn't be
self-sufficient as is, but it could be with relatively modest expansion.

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noselfrighteous
Would be interesting to see how the lack of gravity affects growth.

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thescriptkiddie
They're working on it:
[http://spaceflight101.com/iss/veggie/](http://spaceflight101.com/iss/veggie/)

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Glyptodon
Lately I've been seeing NASA and NSA swapped with each other on a subliminal
level once in a while and it always leads to some amusing double takes.

