HeatherN wonders whether NASA is holding itself back by putting too much emphasis on astronaut safety.
According to this interview with Dr. Robert Zubrin, NASA is putting too much importance on astronaut safety. Basically, his argument is that because it costs so much to put an astronaut into space, NASA has a responsibility to actually do something with that money. He then goes on to suggest that NASA’s policy of putting astronaut safety as the top priority is needlessly holding it back.
Would NASA do well to be less cautious with their astronauts’ lives?
Image of astronaut courtesy of Shutterstock
About HeatherN
If the only way to get to mars involves developing every form of abdominal cancer known to modern medicine then it’s probably not worth it.
Exploration has to be practical and the safety standards being developed and tested by astronauts are an integral part of their mission.
I’m a bit horrified reading this article, probably because I place an infinite dollar amount on a single person’s life. I would say any person’s life is worth way more than twenty-eight billion dollars. Now, if the astronauts are willing to take the risk, then let them, but to ask “is one astronaut’s life worth twenty-eight billion dollars” rather undermines the value of human life, in my opinion.
I’m in total agreement here…just want to put that out there. I kept my little piece on it sort of neutral to maybe spark a bit of discussion. By yeah, I definitely think that an astronaut’s safety should be top priority.
Also, I think the key thing to remember is that astronauts are intelligent well-informed people. If they know the risks and are willing, and if those risks are unavoidable with our current technology, etc., then they shouldnt be held back.
How about the life of a soldier in the US military?
I don’t think Heather agrees with this person’s thesis that NASA values human life too highly, but rather that there are many, many jobs where we value human life significantly less. Such as a soldier, a person on a deep water fishing boat, diamond miners, miners of all variety really, men working on oil rigs, etc.
Sorry, this is going to sound very callous, but it is actually impossible to put an infinite value on a human life.
At some point, on some level, we all place a finite value on a human life. If we really put an infinite value on human life, none of us would dare to get out of bed in the morning. No one would ever be allowed to drive, and the entire federal budget would go to saving the life of one sick child. If the value of a human life really was infinite in our society, there would be no life insurance and no airline industry. (If you have any life insurance, you are benefitting from the fact that it’s not infinite.) If the value was infinite, then if you won a wrongful death suit you would get the entire universe as a payment.
It is also impossible because if one human life is worth infinity, then all other human lives would be worth zero.
At some point there has to be a balance between the benefits and the risks. In terms of addressing the cost of airline safety, the FAA calculates the value of a human life at 2.3 million dollars per person. Make that higher and the cost of airline travel would also go up. (I imagine the gov’t has a similar figure when it comes to car safety.) 28 billion is extremely high in our society.
If NASA really is about scientific knowledge, then sending a person anywhere off-planet is an enormous waste of resources. Send robots who don’t need food, oxygen, water, radiation shielding, medicine, pension plans, health care, legal services, etc.
P.S. If you think medical care is too expensive now, imagine if the value of each American’s life was 28 billion dollars. That would require spending 28 billion per person. Lots of luck.
When dealing with space the stakes are MUCH higher.
A trajectory miscalculated by a few degrees.
A single wire burns out in a vital system.
A small tear/crack in a suit/hull.
A pilot burns just a few pounds too much in fuel.
Any one of these things could literally be the death of an astronaut.
And even in the cold calculating sense of dollars and cents a human life is very valuable.
Stay cautious.
The problem is not astronaut safety. The problem is ASTRONAUTS. NASA is holding itself back by excessively spending money on manned space flight. Its incredibly stupid. It makes no sense to spend on manned missions at this time. Spend on robots instead.
There are many advantages to this approach.
1) Its much cheaper and simpler because robots don’t need life support systems, require far less space and can be made very small. They don’t lose muscle due to low gravity, they don’t need oxygen, food. They are far better adapted to space travel than humans. Remember the cost of sending something into space is nonlinear because you need to expend fuel to get the fuel itself into space. So manned flight massively increases the cost of space travel.
2) Robots have large civilian applications. For instance robots that could construct structures on the moon would have massive applications for constructing things on Earth.
3) Robots can prepare the way for humans. They can map everything out, build structures, find energy sources, create living quarters etc. When we get there things will be much easier for us because the robots will have done the work.
4) Almost all the scientific knowledge obtained by NASA has been due to the use of robots not humans.
Humans should only go into space when technology has succeeded in making space travel inexpensive, safe and easy.
This is exactly what the robots want us to think. All part of their cunning plan for global domination….
I Think what is being missed in this commentary is that crux of Dr. Zubrin’s argument is that Nasa has become obsessed with safety over the last fourty years, and it is this hyper focus on safety that is needlessly hampering human exploration of space.
If you look back through history of human expansion and exploration of the world, A lot of what you see are people of that made huge risks and did dangerous things. Often they would be lost to this storm, or died from that disease. The very nature exploring requires one to take on risk, and possibly do things that may not be safe. Danger is part and parcel to exploration and should be appreciated and respected, but not feared. The same goes with the exploring new technologies. While a technology is young it is almost a given that there will be injuries and even deaths during its development and adoption into society at large. If we want expand and grow we should take reasonable safety precautions when we explore, but we should not let the chance of injury and death hold us back from exploring space and moving out into the stars.
metaphorically speaking, NASA has turned into that overprotective mother that doesn’t let her kid outside to play because she is worried he will be fall and hurt himself or get an infection from a scratch. And all Dr. Zubrin is saying is that if we want him to grow strong and explore what is around him, we need to let the kid have a chance to fail; we need to let him go outside knowing there is the very real possibility that he could injure himself or get sick.