
How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth? - johno215
http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/26/how-much-is-an-astronauts-life-worth
======
DanielBMarkham
This is about 25 years too late, but good.

The problem here is that NASA is a political agency, not a scientific one.
Each year, elected politicians sit down and decide how much they're going to
get.

This means the number one rule is _don't make us look bad._ You can't waste
too much money, you can't go making a bunch of controversial statements, and
good grief, whatever you do don't have astronauts getting exploded on TV.

The analogy with the mission-centric military was a good one. Unfortunately,
as we involve the U.S. military in more and more missions that look highly
political, we're going to end up with a badly broken military, for exactly the
same reasons.

NASA should have but one mission: lower cost to orbit. If they can reach a
1000-fold reduction in cost to low-earth orbit, a lot of scientific research,
exploration, and commercialization can take place.

~~~
jordanb
NASA _is_ a political organization, but that's why the manned space program
exists. It long ago ceased to make sense from a cost/scientific-benefit
perspective. Manned flight continues only on the argument that it excites the
public and fuels interest in space.

Bearing that in mind, the entire thing is showboating on TV, and it's pretty
silly to angst if over this, that, or the other bit of it is compromised by
politics.

~~~
VMG
It amazes me that on a tech site you are getting downvotes for this.

Human space travel _is_ a waste of money from a scientific standpoint. Why a
libertarian magazine like reason.com supports _human_ space travel at all is a
mystery to me.

~~~
_dps
I would ask: a waste of money over what time-scale?

I agree that the ROI over the next decade or two seems low. But at some point,
if we plan to ever get humans to other planets, we're going to have to do the
low ROI slog of figuring out the basics. I don't think we will reach a point
where getting people to other planets will suddenly become low-hanging fruit.

So I think the only real options are:

    
    
      1) do some low ROI exploratory work to enable higher ROI efforts down the road
      2) never send humans beyond earth orbit (seems short-sighted to me over a 
         century-long timeframe, but who knows)
      3) hope that somehow it will become much cheaper through windfall technology 
         developments in other fields (not impossible, but certainly not one that I 
         would bet on)

~~~
ansible
I think we're looking at option 3.

With advanced technology, we can modify humans to more easily survive in
space. With sufficiently advanced technology, we can just upload them into
robot bodies. That will make space missions as cheap as they are now, and
without the risk. Because instead of sending up bags of meat that have to be
protected from vacuum, radiation, freezing, boiling and dehydration, we can
send up AIs or uploaded humans running on rad-hardened processors.

It goes back to the discussions about terra-forming. Is it better to adapt an
entire planet (which is big, by the way) to human needs, or is it better to
adapt humans to just live in that environment as-is?

Oh, and this sufficiently advanced technology gives you some other side
benefits, including practical immortality, so that is worth pursuing by
itself.

~~~
Jach
While I agree that 3 is the most optimal solution in the sense that "all these
other problems are solved given 3", we still don't have a firm time frame on
it. It could be 1 year, it could be 50 years. (I wouldn't put it at 100 or
above personally, barring global catastrophe.) So we do things in parallel and
hedge our bets. Could we get a self-sustaining colony on the Moon (or Mars, or
somewhere else) within 50 years if we tried? I think we could. And that
instantly protects modern humanity from many existential threats while we
continue to work on problem #3.

~~~
ansible
Time frame is always a tough one. Let's try to bracket it with what we know,
and be clear about the goal.

First, if we're talking about running an uploaded human-equivalent AI, we've
got the processor power for that now, but it takes up a large server room. So
I'd say we need to shrink stuff by at least 2 orders of magnitude to launch
that into space. With corresponding gains in efficiency. So for that I think
we're looking at 10 years at current rates of progress. Tack on another 5 for
radiation hardening, because that estimate was based on commercial-grade
hardware, which is almost as fragile as meat.

After you have that, it is a small matter of programming :-)

------
tokenadult
This article ended up being more interesting than I expected. Particularly
noteworthy is the point that if a program sets an unusually high value on
human life, it diverts resources from other programs also intended to protect
human life, and thus brings about LESSENED protection of human life through
that drain on resources. This provides thoughtful perspective on policy trade-
offs. As Thomas Sowell has written, "The first lesson of economics is
scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it.
The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."

~~~
benwr
I did find the policy of rejecting proposals with costs higher than $3MM/life-
saved very interesting. If saving lives made up the entire extent of the
federal budget, that sort of thing would clearly be appropriate. But as it is,
is the money saved by the rejection of such proposals always redirected back
into other lifesaving efforts?

If not, that would also seem to imply that a life's value is significantly
less than $3MM. The author does specify that that figure is an upper limit.

~~~
jessriedel
>But as it is, is the money saved by the rejection of such proposals always
redirected back into other lifesaving efforts? >If not, that would also seem
to imply that a life's value is significantly less than $3MM. The author does
specify that that figure is an upper limit.

No, it would just imply that we value other things. Also, it's crazy to think
we can infer a consistent set of societal preferences from government actions.
Individual humans aren't even consistent, much less when they get into groups.

~~~
benwr
Of course I was referring to the apparent value based on the metric used in
the article, and not any socially normative value.

------
noonespecial
Space is dangerous. We should stop pretending it can be made "safe". It just
gives politicians something to wag their tongues at when something inevitably
goes wrong.

If you go to space you might not come back. That's why explorers rock and
everyone else watches TV.

The article also misses an important variable. How much is discovery worth?
Once that's added to the plus column, all of the other costs seem
insignificant.

~~~
kscaldef
It also misses things like: What's the cost of a million schoolchildren
watching a space shuttle explode?

~~~
maratd
I reject the notion that we should coddle our children. The _teacher_ is there
for a reason. To provide _context_ to what the child is being exposed to. And
_that_ can make all the difference.

Yes, you can die. Yes, it is dangerous. Yes, these brave men risked their
lives and they lost. And if they had to do it all over again, they would risk
their lives again.

Because if it wasn't for men like them, we would still be sitting in a cave
poking a fire with a stick.

~~~
jaredhansen
>brave men risked their lives

>men like them

It wasn't just men:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Resnik>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christa_McAuliffe>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalpana_Chawla>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Clark>

Language has power, and using "men" in this context makes invisible the
contributions and bravery of these women and others like them. Sorry to seem
PC, but it's important to get this stuff right if we want our kids to grow up
in a better world.

~~~
verroq
That's ridiculous. When people use men in this context, they refer to humanity
as a whole. Don't confuse your lack of English understanding as being PC.

~~~
jleader
So "women" is a collective noun for a group of humans all of whom are female,
and "men" is a collective noun for a group of humans who are some mixture of
males and females. There's no collective noun for a group of humans all of
whom are male? Doesn't that strike you as a bit asymmetric?

I understand that "men" is sometimes used in the way you describe, but I
believe that people who do so consider male the default gender of humans.

~~~
maratd
Brevity is the soul of wit. You certainly lose accuracy, but honestly, nobody
wants to read a wall of text.

If you want to presume some sort of conspiracy sexist default supremacist
undertone in what I wrote, fine, but I think that says more about you than
about me.

------
mechanical_fish
_Mars is key to humanity’s future in space. It is the closest planet that has
the resources needed to support life and technological civilization._

... well, except for air, and food. But there's water! Which we can detect
with sensitive instruments!

This whole article has no point. As everyone in the military knows full well,
if the benefit is great enough humans will happily risk other human lives,
even _expend_ lives, by the thousands and even millions.

The "problem" is that there's nothing for humans to do in space that is worth
so much as a single human life. This isn't 1937 anymore; the transistor and
the IC have been invented and we know how to build robots. These days even the
military pilots on _Earth_ spend more and more time in chairs on the ground,
steering robots, often from halfway around the world.

~~~
javajosh
"...there's nothing for humans to do in space that is worth so much as a
single human life"

Wrong. In the long run, even if we achieve some sort of utopia, all life will
be destroyed by natural catastrophe. The only way to avoid this fate is to
find other places to live. Mars is one of those places; so are the various
exoplanets we are finding.

Indeed, this is humanities greatest challenge. Can we harness the incredible
energy density of oil to get off planet and learn to live sustainably before
the oil runs out?

There is no doubt that it will be difficult. Humans are so fragile, and the
universe is extraordinarily harsh. It's a problem that will demand careful
study, creativity, and great personal risk.

And I think we can do it.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Why? I have never understood this argument. What's so special about "humanity"
that it needs to be preserved?

You're born, you live, you die. A species arises, it has its time on Earth,
then it's extinct. Why are humans so special that we should bother about
eventually going extinct in hundreds of thousands of years?

~~~
stinkytaco
Biology? Because billions of years of evolution have made us all think: "We
should have kids and hang around long enough to make sure they have kids too.
That way we can keep this caravan rolling."

That's a pretty big motivator.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Sure, I get that. That's my I included the "hundreds of thousands of years"
modifier. I want my kids to grow up, be happy and have their own kids if they
want to, but I really don't care about what happens 100 generations down the
road.

That's the perplexing part.

~~~
CamperBob
_I want my kids to grow up, be happy and have their own kids if they want to,
but I really don't care about what happens 100 generations down the road._

Stop trying to think 100 generations ahead -- that's pointless, no one can do
that. Instead, think 100 generations back. What if the people alive at the
time had been happy with their lots in life, content where they were living,
and/or too afraid to try anything new? Where would you be now? Do you really
feel good about being part of the generation that finally dropped the ball?

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
As I said in my response to your other post, you're still not answering the
question I posed. Sure, you're answering other (unasked) questions, but those
answers I already understand.

So long ago that it seems almost like someone else's life, my constant lonely
trips to the beach just to stare at the sea and wonder what lay over the
horizon made me realize that I had to cross oceans. So I went to school to
become a Merchant ships officer. In an earlier century I would have been one
of those idiots hanging around the docks trying to get on a ship sailing into
the regions "where there be dragons." In future centuries that version of me
would be hanging around spaceports dreaming of venturing into the unknown
regions where riches would be found.

I said the above to illustrate that I understand wanderlust and the joy of
exploration for its own sake perfectly well. What I don't get is this need to
"preserve the species."

~~~
CamperBob
_What I don't get is this need to "preserve the species."_

Read some Dawkins.

------
mlwarren
"We are going to have failures. There are going to be sacrifices made in the
program; we've been lucky so far. If we die, we want people to accept it. We
are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will
not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life." —
Virgil 'Gus' Grissom.

It seems like most of the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo era astronauts felt like their
lives came second to mission success. I'm sure there are plenty of astronauts
that feel the same way today.

With a pool of astronauts willing to take reasonable risks to advance space
exploration, it's the NASA management that has been responsible for
disallowing the more dangerous missions. On the one hand that's tragic, but on
the other it makes sense from a PR perspective. With each spaceflight tragedy
there has been a backlash from taxpayers and Congress. Politicians will use
spaceflight accidents to push agendas that cut funding, etc.

NASA has to walk a fine line between keeping the program safe enough to
maintain funding and adventurous enough to make gains in space exploration. I
think in early NASA it was easier to justify the human cost of accidents
because of Cold War pressure, but now there is a harder time with this
justification and thus the huge emphasis on safety.

~~~
jessriedel
Either you decide you want to do something worthwhile, or you eliminate manned
spaceflight. But right now we're spending billions and getting nothing
worthwhile accomplished. It's not tight-rope walking, it's the worst of both
worlds.

------
SudarshanP
What is the risk a mountaineer or fighter pilot or car racer facing? Should we
ban these people from taking calculated risks? Are there some stats about how
risky various adventure sports are compared to Space Exploration?

Another question is what is the worth of revisiting the moon to set up a hyper
expensive tourist camp there? Should it not be NASA's job to focus on research
that lays the groundwork for entrepreneurs like Elon Musk to expand human
presence beyond Earth?

------
chernevik
Apollo was a national security project -- demonstration of our system,
exploration of technology of potential military importance.

Fixing Hubble was really important. I'm not sure how much the shuttle's work
was of the same magnitude, or couldn't have been done with automated gear.

BUT bureaucratic and political imperatives called for continuation of the
space program, at scale, and that called for justification of the costs. The
money is no big deal, but if those justifications aren't that good, the
collision of those weaknesses with the human risks will cause cognitive
dissonance. If the people concerned haven't the will to rethink the whole
thing -- and there are many examples of much, much larger failures -- you're
going to see some strange behavior along the way. Shuttles failed twice in 100
missions, is the milestone of first senator in orbit really worth a 2%
fatality risk? No, but rather than admit that and cancel the mission the
response is to imagine that risk can be driven down to negligible. And if that
isn't possible, the standard is going to shift from "known but justifiable
risk" to "we're doing the best we can / no expense has been spared".

Of course it doesn't make sense. But if they recognized that, they wouldn't
have flown such missions in the first place.

~~~
CamperBob
_Fixing Hubble was really important. I'm not sure how much the shuttle's work
was of the same magnitude, or couldn't have been done with automated gear._

Although a staunch supporter of Zubrin and his Mars strategy, as well as a
supporter of the HST maintenance effort, I think he shot down his own
proposition in this particular article. He points out that Hubble cost $5
billion, while elsewhere, he casually mentions that each of the 125 Space
Shuttle launches cost $3 billion.

So for the price of just one additional Shuttle launch, we could've simply
launched a new (and potentially improved) copy of Hubble instead of risking
anything at all to fix the old one. That's what I call a no-brainer.

~~~
jessriedel
You misunderstood. The total value of the physical Shuttle itself is $3
billion. The average cost per trip is $450 million. The marginal cost per trip
isn't available, but it is undoubtably less. Probably around $200-300 million.

~~~
CamperBob
Re-reading, it looks like you're right; I withdraw the comment.

------
joshuahedlund
This article answered for me one of those things I'd always wondered but never
took time to figure out: why no one has been back to the moon even though our
technology has advanced exponentially in the last 40 years. An irrational
emphasis on risk makes perfect sense.

Still doesn't explain why no other country has done it, though. Well, except
for the boring explanations about high costs and no immediate benefits besides
bragging rights...

~~~
huxley
How about moon dust that eats away at your equipment, sticks to everything,
and can cause iron poisoning (and possibly a lung disease similar to
silicosis)?

“The dust was so abrasive that it actually wore through three layers of
Kevlar-like material on [Apollo 17 astronaut] Jack [Schmitt]’s boot,” Taylor
says.

That abrasion happened over 3 moonwalks (each lasting a bit over 7 hours).

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080924191552.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080924191552.htm)

~~~
bitwize
Makes a great portal conductor, though.

------
vannevar
The article is thought-provoking, but marred by an enormous and unsupported
leap of logic at the outset:

 _Yet despite vastly superior technology and hundreds of billions of dollars
in subsequent spending, the agency has been unable to send anyone else farther
than low Earth orbit ever since.

Why? Because we insist that our astronauts be as safe as possible._

Safety concerns undoubtedly carry a cost at NASA, but they are hardly the
central reason there have been no manned missions beyond Earth orbit. During
Apollo, when presumably the agency wasn't so safety conscious, NASA's budget
(adjusted for inflation) was _twice_ what it is today, and as a percentage of
the Federal budget it was over _5x_ today's level.

~~~
jessriedel
> as a percentage of the Federal budget it was over 5x today's level.

This is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the absolute budget,
adjusted for inflation. In addition, given the greatly improved technology, we
should be able to get to the moon for far cheaper. In fact, _all the R &D has
already been done_. It should be a cake walk on half the budget.

~~~
Duff
The question is... Why?

If going to the moon is 75% less than it was in the Apollo days, that is cool,
but what do we accomplish by going there?

~~~
rflrob
There's plenty of science still to be done on the moon, and when you combine
the recent discovery of water in the craters and the theory that the moon is
composed of Earth ejecta from an impact, and there's a reasonably strong
science case to be made. Personally, I'm still of the opinion that we should
prioritize Mars over the moon, but that's not based on any studied
consideration of the science.

------
wiredfool
When discussing the 2 rovers with a 90% success rate, the author comes to the
conclusion: <blockquote>The right answer is to go for two rovers, because if
you do it that way, you will have a 99 percent probability of succeeding with
at least one of the vehicles</blockquote>

Which is not exactly right. It's correct if you're looking at random,
uncorrelated factors. However, two rovers from the same program are not going
to be uncorrelated. If one rover is hit by a software blunder, it's likely the
other one will have the same problem. (e.g. using mks instead of english units
in the flight computer, using a 16 bit counter that overflows to name two)

~~~
Symmetry
Or they could not launch the two rovers at the same time and use the failures
of the first rover to make the second work, in which case the errors become
anti-correlated.

~~~
rflrob
The problem with that approach is that given the orbital dynamics of the Sun-
Earth-Mars system, there's a relatively brief window every couple of years
when it makes sense to launch a mission. If there's a crippling error in the
first launch, it's somewhat unlikely that it can be identified and fixed
before the second one hits Mars orbit.

------
natep
As he barely acknowledges, the problem isn't necessarily that NASA is too
risk-averse when it comes to human lives, it's society at large. After every
failure, there is a massive outcry along the lines of "how much money did we
give you again? And you still couldn't get it right?"

The argument that the money could be spent elsewhere has been around since the
beginning of the space program, I think. Do the people making this argument
know that NASA's current yearly budget is around 0.6% of the entire budget
(and only ever as high as 4.41%[1])? So really, the question should be flipped
around. Think of what we could accomplish if all the money spent inefficiently
elsewhere were instead given to a space program (not necessarily NASA, because
I won't deny it has its problems)

It also seems silly to me to use large-number probability analysis on what are
usually one-time occurrences. If a $2 billion mission fails immediately after
launch, and it could have been prevented by $0.5 billion in more testing, then
spending the extra money does make sense, especially if the failure would also
cause public outcry. And it would not mean that an identical mission would
also have the same risk. If the failure was due to bad design or a systemic
error in a part (the more likely scenarios than a random failure[2]), then
that failure would also happen in the next mission.

So yes, I agree that NASA needs to have a focused goal and shorter timelines,
but I think this article might have been better directed at the public, then
scapegoating NASA administrators.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA>

[2] Source: a talk by the founder of AeroAstro, sorry it's not online

~~~
brudgers
> _"the problem isn't necessarily that NASA is too risk-averse when it comes
> to human lives, it's society at large."_

The change in attitude is almost certainly generational. The Apollo era
presidents (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford) were all World War II veterans.
So were most decision makers within the space program.

By the time of the Challenger explosion, American attitudes had changed to the
point where 241 combat deaths in Beirut saw America remove its boots on the
ground - a reaction to troop casualties unlikely during the island hopping
campaigns forty years earlier.

This is not to say that Americans are necessarily placing too much value on
life. Space Shuttle flights - like Beirut - lacked a compelling vision to
underscore the mission; servicing the Hubble is not a giant leap for mankind.

------
lutorm
Interesting, but I thought it sort of built a straw-man argument in that the
main premise, that all the delay on a Mars mission is _just_ to lower risk to
the astronauts, isn't really substantiated. The calculation that ends up
showing that the cost of a Mars mission is a hugely inefficient way of
reducing risk to human life assumes the _entire_ cost is to lower human risk.
So it's only an upper limit, and there is no way to judge whether it's a
useful upper limit.

Besides, the fact that there is a difference between risk to human life and
risk of mission success is only relevant if there is a significant probability
of mission success. You can only play the game with multiple missions for
redundancy if an individual mission has a probability of success reasonably
close to 1, otherwise it doesn't buy you much.

Of course, this whole affair assumes that we actually have some hope of a
priori estimating the risk of failure of complex systems. I doubt it's
possible, and I think that's confirmed by the observed 2% shuttle failure rate
compared to what the "acceptable risk" of the mission was supposed to be.

~~~
lutorm
Sure would be interesting to know what people disagree with so strongly that
it warrants putting me in the negatives. This seems like a noncontroversial
comment to me.

------
moe
Obligatory:

    
    
      "It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and
       realize that one's safety factor was determined by the
       lowest bidder on a government contract." --Alan Shepard

------
ap22213
If an astronaut dies during a mission, there's a lot more indirect cost
incurred than just the astronaut's life. There are the endless investigations
and media coverage and related activities that are hard to put a number on.

Simply put, government funded programs receive more scrutiny than commercial
ventures. If a private inventor dies while experimenting with their own
invention, there isn't the massive, longtime affecting fallout similar to a
government disaster.

Now, sure, I am a proponent of space exploration and its advancement. But,
having worked with the government in the past, I kind of understand why their
risk management is so heavy handed. Few government leaders will take on that
much risk themselves.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
True, but I'd say this is something of the Pygmalion effect en masse. We have
coddled the public into expecting risk-free space ventures and so they react
accordingly when risk-free turns out to be risk-fraught.

 _Few government leaders will take on that much risk themselves_

This is why I support NASA's initiatives to privatise the risk (and
responsibility) of certain missions.

That being said, we accept risk in the military. The solution is to create an
institution that is protected from political whims so it can take the long-run
risks it needs to.

------
tedsuo
Total aside, bug this article caused me to gawk once again at the technical
progress in the US during the mid-20th:

State of the Art, 1945:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:F8F_Bearcat_%28flying%29.j...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:F8F_Bearcat_%28flying%29.jpg)

State of the Art, 1965:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird.j...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird.jpg)

State of the Art, 1971:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apollo_CSM_lunar_orbit.jpg>

After that, I think we hit a technological wall, you can almost see the
asymptote after the mid 70's. Though I think Space X is poised to knock some
things over again if they succeed in their "cheap but reliable" approach,
which basically amounts to attacking the problem as if it were a commercial
airline engine as opposed to a rocket engine, and subjecting it to those
standards of rigor. But that's a different kind of progress.

More on topic, this article completely fails to support it's hyperbolic "costs
thousands of lives" subtitle.

------
waffle_ss
I've also heard this argument used by libertarians such as Milton Friedman to
denounce the FDA, saying that it has costed lives through being overly
cautious by delaying the approval of life-saving drugs. The proposed
alternative is to not have an FDA, but rather sue the drug companies directly
in civil court if their drug ends up being harmful and they haven't performed
adequate testing/trials.

~~~
jpadkins
Actually, most of the FDA costs are created during the effectiveness phases.
If FDA went back to it's original mission of safety, the estimates are drug
approval costs would be 25% of current costs.

Of course the market (doctors and healthcare customers) would have to
determine the effectiveness of the new drugs. So the cost is not eliminated,
just shifted to the more efficient and moral option.

------
pippy
Statistically, the Russian space program is safer than the American. They're
not exactly famed for their health and safety, in a hilariously stereotypical
tradition Russians piss on their rocket (it dates back to Yuri's flight) and
until recently they carried shotguns to ward of bears after returning.

The problem is outlined in the article, but not expanded. Every year
politicians change NASA's goals. If the project you're working on keeps
changing spec it's going to expand the timeline. Didn't Bushes plan call for
us to be on the moon by 2015?

Another problem is the way NASA makes their vehicles. Private companies make
products with the goal of making a profit. NASA's goal is to get people into
space. The space shuttle is an example of this failure: it was overpriced, so
dangerous cutbacks were made which ruined two of the vehicles. In an ironic
twist, the soviet Buran suffered from none of these issues.

------
hartror
_Starting with near zero space capability in 1961, the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration (NASA) put men on our companion world in eight
years._

The whole premise of this article, that we can't send people beyond LEO any
more because of risk aversion, is based on this line and it is wrong. There
are several differences between today and the 1960s that make manned space
flight less feasible. This can be summarised as political and manufacturing,
with the former driving the latter.

Politically the world and the US are different places, the cold war is over so
the need for grand gestures for moral building and propaganda has gone.

However the OP's line of near zero space capability is wrong, ICBMs were being
designed and tested at a furious rate throughout the 1950s. This created a
massive pool of people with first hand knowledge, and a massive manufacturing
base from which to draw upon.

------
uberalex
I like the article but I wonder a little about the figures. He seems to assume
that the extra research measures push the likelihood of a successful mars
mission from 90% to 95%.

I think this underestimates the complexity of the problem. Two thirds of
automated mars missions have failed, with an especially dark period around the
time of the 1980s, when we were to have sent out the first Astronauts.

I think that there is also an issue with the military/contest aspect. The moon
mission had a cold war battle feeling which would be hard to ignite now --
deaths in space just seem tragic and expensive in a way that they did not
before (his description of the finger paints being a good example). Would
people have the stomach to spend billions to kill 5 people on their way to
Mars? How many times before they lose interest?

~~~
learc83
>He seems to assume that the extra research measures push the likelihood of a
successful mars mission from 90% to 95%.

He doesn't assume that at all. That was just a hypothetical situation, he
never implied that those were actual figures.

------
svmegatron
Lost me after defining the worth of an astronaut to be $50 million, and the
value of scientific knowledge obtained from a longer-lived Hubble to be
incalculable.

Even though I think the author makes a point worth considering, I found that a
really sloppy justification.

~~~
chillyconker
Indeed. I would say that in truth an astronaut's life and a bunch of money are
incommensurable.

The value of the article lies in showing that if agencies _pretend_ to assign
a certain value to a human life then they can become less inconsistent. (And
if in this case it serves Zubrin's laudable aim of getting to Mars _now_ , so
much the better.)

For Zubrin himself to be consistent, OFC, he should have tried to assign a
value to, say, another decade of Hubble data. Omitting that was, as you say,
sloppy.

BTW I find it quite shocking that neither the article nor the other comments
so far consider the relevancy of the _astronaut's opinion_ of what is an
acceptable risk for him. It is, after all, _his_ life, and he remains a
taxpayer like everyone else.

I guess in the future where things like life extension and legal suicide are
commonplace it will be considered strange to ignore a person's wishes in this
way

~~~
tikhonj
There is a simple reason why we can ignore what the astronaut wants: if any
particular one is too risk-averse, there are many other similarly qualified
ones that are less risk-averse and NASA can hire them instead.

Additionally, I would not be surprised at all if the average astronaut is
willing to put up with much more risk than the government or general public is
willing to put him or her in.

------
ctdonath
It's worth exactly what the guy is willing to risk to go out there.

------
dennisgorelik
That's a wise policy:

=== To avoid such deadly waste, the Department of Transportation has a policy
of rejecting any proposed safety expenditure that costs more than $3 million
per life saved. ===

------
joshuahedlund
_the multi-decade preparatory exercise adopted as an alternative to real space
exploration has already cost the lives of 14 astronauts, and will almost
certainly cost more as it drags on..._

Seriously? Does anyone have more information on this? I like Reason but
sometimes they can be a little biased. If there's no missing context and we're
literally killing astronauts in safety training then there is no excuse not to
just get them in space already.

~~~
sehugg
Zubrin is talking about the deaths in Apollo I, Space Shuttle, etc
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-
related_acc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-
related_accidents_and_incidents)).

His point is exactly that, get them into space already. Or rather, give them a
mission that is worth risking their life.

~~~
jessriedel
(We posted at the same time.) No, he's just talking about Shuttle programs. He
considers the Apollo programs to be real exploration.

------
emmelaich
Oddly enough I think one of hackernews's heros (and mine) Richard Feynman is
one of the causes (but not blame). His appearance at and commentary of the
Challenger disaster made people extremely allergic to risk. You can argue his
message was taken to the extreme but perhaps his scientists attitude was not
so attuned to the engineering mindset of compromise and risk assessment.

------
squarecat
Sanitized for your reading pleasure:
[http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/26/how-much-is-an-
astrona...](http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/26/how-much-is-an-astronauts-
life-worth/print)

------
DMalloy
One cost-effective proposal for a mars mission that was actually discussed:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_to_Stay>

Btw, -many- people died during early space travel.

------
lnanek
They forgot to price in the cost of a politician's power into the life of an
astronaut, which is worth everything the politician can put to bear to keep
it...

------
ChrisArchitect
maybe in bad taste, but made me think of this 'art'
<http://www.astronautsuicides.com/>

~~~
ysangkok
scrollbar is the 1px black line below image

------
hattrick
Epic fail. The author starts off with the moral premise that all lives are of
equal monetary value. Moral laws != mathematical laws! We put #s on people all
the time: net worth? Garbage in gives garbage out.

------
shareme
Author premise only half right. The cost over-runs of the shuttle program were
composed of two deep expensive factors.

Infinite human safety and the costs of having a horizontal system of sub
contractors building the shuttle system instead of a vertical approach.

But, conversely while close to infinite safety costs can reach military
objectives, for example using tracked-light heavy armor in places of urban
combat(less civilian casualties thus locals want to work with our forces), the
same cannot be made for civilian space agency in terms a full benefits.

------
wbienek
Here is where you supposedly "smart" people are morons.

We didn't go to the moon in the first place.

They jumped the shark when they showed people on dune buggies on the moon.

They won't go back because when people see how hard it is to land and relaunch
with human life in tow, the world will know we didn't go in the first place.

Nobody will be going to the moon until it doesn't matter that the world finds
out we didn't go in the first place.

Ask yourself. What is easier: scamming a trusting, patriotic 60's public on TV
or landing a human being on a foreign planet.., whats harder? Having people
drive a dune buggie, then relaunching and landing safely back on earth or
setting up a desert set piece to look like the moon. Or maybe a Hollywood
studio to look like the moon. I've seen the video. It's a joke.

And you're shocked we never went back to the moon? Please! How gullible can
you be?

~~~
macspoofing
>scamming a trusting, patriotic 60's public on TV or landing a human being on
a foreign planet

Not only 60's public but also the public of every subsequent year (and by
"public" you have to include scientists, engineers and otherwise intelligent
men and women from all walks of life). Given all that I'd say the former is
much harder (downright impossible) to accomplish.

~~~
learc83
Also none of the thousands of people involved, who would have had to be in on
the secret, have come forward.

It would be much harder for thousands of people to keep such a secret, than it
would to just go to the moon.

