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QuantumG
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« Reply #30 on: 02/04/2012 09:12 AM » |
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This is sarcasm but I will give it a straight answer.
I wasn't being sarcastic at all. 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.
And the great thing was that it was only a marginal expense.. they were going to launch that Shuttle anyway so giving it a rescue mission instead isn't that big of a deal.
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spectre9
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« Reply #31 on: 02/04/2012 09:14 AM » |
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I support Zubrin. Keep fighting to open up the new frontier whatever way you can. Mars first!!!!  Mars Direct!!! Mars 1 overdue!!! Massive applause falls on deaf ears... 
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kkattula
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« Reply #32 on: 02/04/2012 09:31 AM » |
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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.
You're right. The problem is NASA backed itself into a corner a long time ago. It told everyone how dangerous spaceflight was, then discovered it could present test pilots as celebrities and create a myth of infalliability. All to ensure political support by turning NASA into an american icon, with astronaut heroes. The media jumped on the band wagon because they need heroes, even more so when those heroes fail. They turned the Challenger and Columbia losses from tragic accidents into 'national disasters'. 9/11 was a disaster, the Japan earthquake was a disaster. The loss of 7 people doing a dangerous job is regrettable and a personal tragedy for their friends and colleagues, not a disaster. Maybe for the program. Space IS dangerous. so if we were actually serious about exploring it, you might expect a lot more people would be getting killed.
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aquanaut99
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« Reply #33 on: 02/04/2012 10:14 AM » |
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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?
That is your belief, it is not shared by many. We accept casualties in war or people dying in car crashes because we think the benefits are worth the risk. The problem is, manned spaceflight produces precisely ZERO benefits for the average citizen, but is funded with his/her tax money. We already have difficulty accepting why we have to pay for something that we get nothing out of (other than a few pretty pictures on TV). Why, then, must we also risk people's lives for something that has no benefit? (Note: this is not my belief, but it is what I hear time and again from others). Remember Mondale wanting to use the Apollo 1 tragedy as an excuse to shut down NASA (and divert the money to his pet projects). There's still plenty of people like him around. Which is why NASA wants to avoid losing astronauts at any cost. They remember how close Mondale came to killing Apollo just because of 3 American deaths.
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QuantumG
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« Reply #34 on: 02/04/2012 10:29 AM » |
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Remember Mondale wanting to use the Apollo 1 tragedy as an excuse to shut down NASA (and divert the money to his pet projects). There's still plenty of people like him around. Which is why NASA wants to avoid losing astronauts at any cost. They remember how close Mondale came to killing Apollo just because of 3 American deaths.
That and a treaty ending the space race was signed on the same day...
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Warren Platts
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« Reply #35 on: 02/04/2012 10:38 AM » |
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We accept casualties in war or people dying in car crashes because we think the benefits are worth the risk.
The problem is, manned spaceflight produces precisely ZERO benefits for the average citizen, but is funded with his/her tax money. Non sequiter to the point of being off topic. Yet another one of your tired arguments against human spaceflight, but this one fails as well. It's ridiculous to think that if there were no benefits to driving cars, that that car companies would strive to make them even safer!?! The very idea is crazy. If you believed your own argument, you would have to be against the existence of NASA HSF altogether.
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A_M_Swallow
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« Reply #36 on: 02/04/2012 07:42 PM » |
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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.
And the great thing was that it was only a marginal expense.. they were going to launch that Shuttle anyway so giving it a rescue mission instead isn't that big of a deal.
A similar low cost method of LON can probably be used with Atlas 5 and Falcon 9 LV.
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Will
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« Reply #37 on: 02/04/2012 09:02 PM » |
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Zubrin is, as usual, missing the point. Astronauts on mission have an immense symbolic value to Americans as emblems of national pride and prestige. They treat the deaths of seven of them in the course of a mission as a far, far greater blow than the loss, say, of a multi-billion dollar spysat.
They're paying the bills so NASA is going to respect their preferences.
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dafixer
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« Reply #38 on: 02/04/2012 09:29 PM » |
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Space flight would have to become routine before loss of life became a more acceptable risk to the public.
Look at aviation. The first flyers were celebrities and their deaths were big news. Now when an airliner goes down, the lives lost are statistics. Nobody talks about giving up on flight because everybody uses it.
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FinalFrontier
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« Reply #39 on: 02/04/2012 09:48 PM » |
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Space flight would have to become routine before loss of life became a more acceptable risk to the public.
Look at aviation. The first flyers were celebrities and their deaths were big news. Now when an airliner goes down, the lives lost are statistics. Nobody talks about giving up on flight because everybody uses it.
1. Spaceflight will never be routine. Its spaceflight. 2. When you consider the thousands of different stresses and variables affecting an aircraft in flight, you realize that is anything but "routine" as well. Just because air transportation is widely used, just because there are not very many accidents these days, does not mean its routine. On the contrary it just means we have learned enough and improved upon the mistakes of the past, and that technology has advanced enough, to better handle all of those variables and stresses, but it does not mean they suddenly don't exist. The same is and always will be true of spaceflight. Anything going that fast and that high, into that environment, is not routine.
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dafixer
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« Reply #40 on: 02/04/2012 11:18 PM » |
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1. Spaceflight will never be routine. Its spaceflight.
2. When you consider the thousands of different stresses and variables affecting an aircraft in flight, you realize that is anything but "routine" as well.
Just because air transportation is widely used, just because there are not very many accidents these days, does not mean its routine.
On the contrary it just means we have learned enough and improved upon the mistakes of the past, and that technology has advanced enough, to better handle all of those variables and stresses, but it does not mean they suddenly don't exist.
The same is and always will be true of spaceflight. Anything going that fast and that high, into that environment, is not routine.
Air travel is routine. It is so routine that you can book a ticket to fly on a certain date at a certain time months in advance. If that isn't routine, I don't know what is. Just because something is hard (like flight) doesn't mean it can't become routine. Heck, going 80mph in an automobile creates all kinds of mechanical stresses, from engine components to chassis and suspension. That doesn't mean travel by automobile isn't routine. I guess it depends on what your definition of routine is. Webster defines it as: b : habitual or mechanical performance of an established procedure <the routine of factory work> Your assertion that spaceflight will never be routine echos what was said during the early days of powered flight. I hope that you are proven wrong in my lifetime (one can always hope right? ).
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strangequark
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« Reply #41 on: 02/04/2012 11:21 PM » |
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1. Spaceflight will never be routine. Its spaceflight.
2. When you consider the thousands of different stresses and variables affecting an aircraft in flight, you realize that is anything but "routine" as well.
Just because air transportation is widely used, just because there are not very many accidents these days, does not mean its routine.
On the contrary it just means we have learned enough and improved upon the mistakes of the past, and that technology has advanced enough, to better handle all of those variables and stresses, but it does not mean they suddenly don't exist.
The same is and always will be true of spaceflight. Anything going that fast and that high, into that environment, is not routine.
1. Never is a long time. 2. Routine (adj.) - Of a commonplace or repetitious nature. By definition, if air travel is widely used (e.g. commonplace), then it is routine. That's not to say it's as easy as falling off a log, or that the physics isn't complex. As for "thousands of different stresses and variables", that also applies to the phenomenally dynamic, highly transient form of transportation we call "walking". All that "routine" means is that we do it all the time. Which is what the original poster was getting at. Subsonic consumer air travel is commonplace and anonymous. It is not at the forefront of human endeavor any longer, and therefore crashes are "accidents" rather than "national tragedies". With all of that said, NASA's culture is probably overly conservative, but that is driven by what happens if there is a LOC/LOV event. Namely, you get a 475nm panel led by a 4-star admiral, or a former secretary of state. In the end, the excess conservatism is driven by D.C. That's not to say we should gloss over accidents, but it should be a lot more NTSB and a lot less Nuremberg.
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Comga
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« Reply #42 on: 02/05/2012 05:05 AM » |
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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! No, that's not how I did the math. The LOC probability for missions on EELVs was a small number. The LOC for missions on Ares-1 was slightly smaller. (I forget the name of the guy who presented this, but remember how silly the numbers looked.) I belive that there was something like $8B difference in development cost. (Also not believable.) So the $8B bought down the probability of the loss of a single crew over 100 flights by something like 1/60. $8B/(1/60)=$480B as I recall. They don't have to spend the $480, just like they don't have to lose a crew to calculate the probability.
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Patchouli
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« Reply #43 on: 02/05/2012 05:51 AM » |
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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!
No, that's not how I did the math. The LOC probability for missions on EELVs was a small number. The LOC for missions on Ares-1 was slightly smaller. (I forget the name of the guy who presented this, but remember how silly the numbers looked.) I belive that there was something like $8B difference in development cost. (Also not believable.) So the $8B bought down the probability of the loss of a single crew over 100 flights by something like 1/60. $8B/(1/60)=$480B as I recall. They don't have to spend the $480, just like they don't have to lose a crew to calculate the probability.
I doubt Ares I would in practice have had an LOM/LOC as good as an improved EELV simply because of it's low flight rates. Either EELV probably would be safer then both the Shuttle and Soyuz. But Zubrin is correct NASA has become too risk adverse and not just in the area of crew safety. They have become technologically risk adverse as well which is why CxP was Apollo on steroids and did next to nothing to try out new technologies or reduce costs.
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mrmandias
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« Reply #44 on: 02/06/2012 04:09 PM » |
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Space flight would have to become routine before loss of life became a more acceptable risk to the public.
The lesson here is the same morbid lesson as the comparison with war deaths, which the public largely shrugs off. Space flight needs more death and more accidents, not fewer. Or as noted PR man and Madison Avenue mogul Joseph Stalin put it, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.
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