Zubrin on NASA aversion to risk

[A_M_Swallow]

{snip}

I would like to see NASA adapt a policy similar to the following:
(a) All major (e.g. multi-million dollar) decisions where safety is a major criterion in the decision-making process should include a calculation of the expenditure of statistical human lives and dollars for the various options.
(b) All decisions should be consistent with a value of a statistical human life at least $5 million.
(c) All decisions should be consistent with a value of a statistical human life at most $1 billion, except that an option costing a specific person a greater than 20% chance of immediate death may be summarily excluded regardless of the cost. Options costing a greater than 20% reduction in a specific person's expected disability adjusted life years may similarly be excluded.
(d) Exceptions should be explicitly justified based on unusual features of the decision seeking an exception.
{sniP}

I am not certain about the values.

A traditional response to an accident is to launch a rescue mission.  Falcon 9s cost $59.5 million, the capsule is extra.
Dragons and DreamChasers can take 7 people.

$59.5M / 7 = $8.5 million

So people will have to be valued as at least $10 million to launch a rescue mission.

[RocketmanUS]

{snip}

I would like to see NASA adapt a policy similar to the following:
(a) All major (e.g. multi-million dollar) decisions where safety is a major criterion in the decision-making process should include a calculation of the expenditure of statistical human lives and dollars for the various options.
(b) All decisions should be consistent with a value of a statistical human life at least $5 million.
(c) All decisions should be consistent with a value of a statistical human life at most $1 billion, except that an option costing a specific person a greater than 20% chance of immediate death may be summarily excluded regardless of the cost. Options costing a greater than 20% reduction in a specific person's expected disability adjusted life years may similarly be excluded.
(d) Exceptions should be explicitly justified based on unusual features of the decision seeking an exception.
{sniP}

I am not certain about the values.

A traditional response to an accident is to launch a rescue mission.  Falcon 9s cost $59.5 million, the capsule is extra.
Dragons and DreamChasers can take 7 people.

$59.5M / 7 = $8.5 million

So people will have to be valued as at least $10 million to launch a rescue mission.

Is it not in the value in why we go and not in the rescue cost?

Do we determine by cost if we rescue people or not from a sinking ship?

People die every day by auto accidents, but we still drive anyway!
People die in auto races, but we still have legally organised auto races!

Fact of life is we can die so we might as well enjoy life. Take reasonable precautions though.

[deltaV]

{snip by deltaV}
(b) All decisions should be consistent with a value of a statistical human life at least $5 million.
(c) All decisions should be consistent with a value of a statistical human life at most $1 billion, except that an option costing a specific person a greater than 20% chance of immediate death may be summarily excluded
{snip by deltaV}

I am not certain about the values.

A traditional response to an accident is to launch a rescue mission.  Falcon 9s cost $59.5 million, the capsule is extra.
Dragons and DreamChasers can take 7 people.

$59.5M / 7 = $8.5 million

So people will have to be valued as at least $10 million to launch a rescue mission.

You can't pick a single value for a human life that's applied to both astronauts and non-astronauts alike without causing ridiculous results. If you pick a low value similar to the $5-$10 million currently in use in the rest of the federal government then you'd get uncomfortable results like not mounting rescue missions because they're too expensive. If you pick a high enough value to ensure astronaut lives are significantly valued you'd get silly results such as NASA adding extra strength to its cars to make them safer in collisions. To avoid this problem I'm proposing that NASA decision makers continue to make their own decisions on safety using informal means as long as the decisions pass the sanity check of valuing human life at some value between $5 million and $1000 million. I get the impression that even this minimal sanity check would help significantly.

My proposal as written would permit (but not require) most LEO rescue missions. It would prohibit most Mars rescue missions because they'd be too expensive (unless an exception was granted as it likely would be). If that's a bug it could be fixed by extending the suicide mission exclusion so that any time there's two options (even in the middle of a mission after a mishap occurs) and a specific person's probability of survival differs in those two options by more than 20% then the requirement to keep the value of a statistical human life at most $1 billion is waived. At first glance this modification seems to make the proposal better fit contemporary American ethics, so it's probably an improvement to my original proposal.

[QuantumG]

What's this rescue mission nonsense? Everyone has heard Walter Cronkite telling school children in the 60s that rescue from space is impossible. No-one declared this was unacceptable. The public expects spaceflight to be daring and dangerous.. it's spaceflight. The fact that the numbers back up the public perception is a good thing. That NASA seriously talks about rescue missions is proof of Zubrin's argument.

[TomH]

Society has finally gotten back to accepting that casualties are a cost of war. ...

It is the public that has allowed itself to become risk averse

You just contradicted yourself! Both sentences can't be true.

Warren, you assume an equivocation between troops in combat with civilians (including teachers and senators) taking a ride into space.  Those things are not equivocal. I posit that the general public has returned to the point of accepting military casualties in combat, but that it has become averse to civilian loss of life on a spacecraft having a resemblance to a commercial airliner. Those two things certainly can both be true.

The people I was around surely were not joking about either disaster, in fact I don't remember a single person joking about it; they were all dumbfounded.

Now I am not saying society should be that way.  I talked to quite a few people who were asking, "How could this have happened?" and answered them with, "Statistically, I'm surprised it hasn't happened more than it has," and gave numerous reasons why. I think the public needs to be reeducated as to how dangerous this endeavor actually is.

[QuantumG]

I would think that the public is against having teachers and senators flying on the shuttle because it's a waste of their money. It has nothing to do with safety. Kill a school teacher and people start asking why you were flying a school teacher. Big surprise.

[TomH]

I would think that the public is against having teachers and senators flying on the shuttle because it's a waste of their money. It has nothing to do with safety. Kill a school teacher and people start asking why you were flying a school teacher. Big surprise.

I completely agree with you, and I am a teacher. There is no reason public money should be wasted sending unqualified people into space, and that includes any 77 year old senator who used to be an astronaut, no matter how significant he was in an earlier generation.

[deltaV]

What's this rescue mission nonsense? Everyone has heard Walter Cronkite telling school children in the 60s that rescue from space is impossible. No-one declared this was unacceptable. The public expects spaceflight to be daring and dangerous.. it's spaceflight. The fact that the numbers back up the public perception is a good thing. That NASA seriously talks about rescue missions is proof of Zubrin's argument.

A mishap during a sortie mission is likely to kill the crew too quickly for rescue, but with a base a rescue is more likely to be feasible. For example if a Soyuz docked to the ISS were found to be inoperable then a rescue mission, namely sending the next Soyuz up with a reduced or no crew, seems quite doable.

[QuantumG]

You're leaving something out there.. the mission.

How does the inoperable Soyuz affect the mission of the ISS? Let's say the dilemma here is that the next flight was going to carry a Progress with important resupply parts for an ongoing project that will be destroyed if it doesn't arrive on time. Do we scrub the Progress and replace it with a Soyuz flight to get the crew back down right now or can the crew wait until the flight after the Progress delivers its valuable cargo?

The risk to the crew is a few more months in zero-g - which has health implications and may even be fatal if there is a fire and the crew need to escape - but the risk to the project is failure.

[deltaV]

You're leaving something out there.. the mission.

Huh? I never claimed rescue missions were always a good idea, only that they were possible and that the cost/benefit policy should probably allow them even when expensive.

[QuantumG]

But that's the problem right there. The cost/benefit policy should come first and if rescue missions pass it, they should happen.

even when expensive.

What does that mean? How do you judge when something is expensive? A cost/benefit analysis.. right?

When they worked out the cost/benefit analysis of fixing the Hubble they initially said no, not because it was "too dangerous", but because they included a rescue mission in the cost. When it was decided to go, it was because the rescue mission was removed from the cost and all of a sudden it was no longer too expensive. That took hard nosed decision making that I expect we wouldn't get today.

[Comga]

$1 billion USD per astronaut?!? Talk about statistical murder!

While I don't have the details handy, which included the predicted LOC probablilities presented to the Augustine Commission for Ares-1 and EELV, it was possible to calculate that, for a 100 mission run of the Constellation system, NASA found it to be warranted to spend $480 Billion to prevent the loss of one crew of four.  That's $120 Billion per life.  The number gets higher with fewer flights, which would be more realistic.   $1B/astronaut would be a comparative bargain, even while being statistical murder.

And no, NASA is not doing this calculation.  To some they could not admit doing it.  To the rest they could not admit the result.

[A_M_Swallow]

What's this rescue mission nonsense? Everyone has heard Walter Cronkite telling school children in the 60s that rescue from space is impossible. No-one declared this was unacceptable. The public expects spaceflight to be daring and dangerous.. it's spaceflight. The fact that the numbers back up the public perception is a good thing. That NASA seriously talks about rescue missions is proof of Zubrin's argument.

This is sarcasm but I will give it a straight answer.

In the 20th century NASA did not have the facilities to launch rescue missions, although Hollywood made at least on film about it.  Following a Shuttle disaster NASA instituted a new safety procedure of having a second Shuttle ready to launch during missions.  This was called LON - Launch On Need.

Many of the Shuttle procedures can be duplicated for missions using the CCDev spacecraft.  By the third flight of the manned Dragon it should be possible to have a LON on hot standby.  Welcome to the 21st century.

The LON spacecraft and launch vehicle may require an extra launch pad, resulting in additional expense.  With the correct organisation the Atlas V and Falcon 9 LV could act as LON for each other.

[HIP2BSQRE]

To me..an astronaut life is not worth $1billion.  Maybe $10 million...more than that..so sad...too bad.  Yes--I am not the one whoes husband/wife may be lost.  I am the one paying for all this safety equipment.  Was the west won with people saying no lives can be lost?  How many people die skydiving, mining coal, etc??  If we lost 10 astronauts a year/so what???  Yes--cold..but you cannot build a bridge/society without some eggs being broken!  Think of the American Revolution--people believed in it and were willing to die for it.  I can beat you--if you said to the American public--we need 10 people to go to Mars and it would be a one way trip--guess how many qualified volunteers you would have?  People would die and???  Part of living is people die.  :-(  Explain the risk and let the public accept it.  The problem comes when we tell people its safe and people will not die.  Nothing is safe in life.  You can stay at home and a plane comes down on it.  :-(   If you asked people to fly on Atlas as is--no LAS--people would do it.  If 1 in 100 did not make it--that is 7 people a year--that is NOT a very high number--so be it.  We lose how many people in car accidents and we are scared to lose 7 people a year? 

[Warren Platts]

$1 billion USD per astronaut?!? Talk about statistical murder!

While I don't have the details handy, which included the predicted LOC probablilities presented to the Augustine Commission for Ares-1 and EELV, it was possible to calculate that, for a 100 mission run of the Constellation system, NASA found it to be warranted to spend $480 Billion to prevent the loss of one crew of four.  That's $120 Billion per life.  The number gets higher with fewer flights, which would be more realistic.   $1B/astronaut would be a comparative bargain, even while being statistical murder.

And no, NASA is not doing this calculation.  To some they could not admit doing it.  To the rest they could not admit the result.

Wow! That is just crazy! I'd like to see more details of that calculation, but that's very interesting if true. @ $8B/year it would take 60 years of NASA's HSF budget just to make it safe to fly!

@ a 2% risk of loss per flight, the expected loss per flight is ~$10 billion. Since the cost to mount a mission is only 1 or 2 $B, then we shouldn't be flying at all. And guess what: we're not! Maybe they are performing an explicit risk analysis... 

EDIT: Conversely, we can calculate the risk they would have to get down to:

If one flight (in round figures) is $1B, then if a crew is worth $500B, then to make it worth it, they would have to get the expected risk of loss per flight down to on the order of 0.1% or 1 loss per thousand flights....