How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

This is about 25 years too late, but good.<p>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.<p>This means the number one rule is <i>don't make us look bad.</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.

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."

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

<i>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.</i><p>... well, except for air, and food. But there's water! Which we can detect with sensitive instruments!<p>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 <i>expend</i> lives, by the thousands and even millions.<p>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 <i>Earth</i> spend more and more time in chairs on the ground, steering robots, often from halfway around the world.

"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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

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?<p>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?

Apollo was a national security project -- demonstration of our system, exploration of technology of potential military importance.<p>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.<p>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".<p>Of course it doesn't make sense. But if they recognized that, they wouldn't have flown such missions in the first place.

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.<p>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...

The article is thought-provoking, but marred by an enormous and unsupported leap of logic at the outset:<p><i>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.<p>Why? Because we insist that our astronauts be as safe as possible.</i><p>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 <i>twice</i> what it is today, and as a percentage of the Federal budget it was over <i>5x</i> today's level.

When discussing the 2 rovers with a 90% success rate, the author comes to the conclusion: &#60;blockquote&#62;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&#60;/blockquote&#62;<p>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)

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?"<p>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)<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA</a><p>[2] Source: a talk by the founder of AeroAstro, sorry it's not online

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 <i>just</i> 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 <i>entire</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.

Obligatory:<p><pre><code> "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</code></pre>

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.<p>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.<p>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.

Total aside, bug this article caused me to gawk once again at the technical progress in the US during the mid-20th:<p>State of the Art, 1945: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:F8F_Bearcat_%28flying%29.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:F8F_Bearcat_%28flying%29.j...</a><p>State of the Art, 1965: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird.j...</a><p>State of the Art, 1971: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apollo_CSM_lunar_orbit.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apollo_CSM_lunar_orbit.jpg</a><p>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.<p>More on topic, this article completely fails to support it's hyperbolic "costs thousands of lives" subtitle.

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.

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.<p>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?<p>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.

<i>Starting with near zero space capability in 1961, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) put men on our companion world in eight years.</i><p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

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%.<p>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.<p>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?

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

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

That's a wise policy:<p>=== 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. ===

<i>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...</i><p>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.

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.

Sanitized for your reading pleasure: <a href="http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/26/how-much-is-an-astronauts-life-worth/print" rel="nofollow">http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/26/how-much-is-an-astrona...</a>

One cost-effective proposal for a mars mission that was actually discussed:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_to_Stay" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_to_Stay</a><p>Btw, -many- people died during early space travel.

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...

maybe in bad taste, but made me think of this 'art' <a href="http://www.astronautsuicides.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.astronautsuicides.com/</a>

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.

Author premise only half right. The cost over-runs of the shuttle program were composed of two deep expensive factors.<p>Infinite human safety and the costs of having a horizontal system of sub contractors building the shuttle system instead of a vertical approach.<p>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.

Here is where you supposedly "smart" people are morons.<p>We didn't go to the moon in the first place.<p>They jumped the shark when they showed people on dune buggies on the moon.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>And you're shocked we never went back to the moon? Please! How gullible can you be?