Simberg: Safe Is Not an Option

 

The successful expansion into space requires tradeoffs in cost and safety. But the government’s obsessively risk-averse regulations are preventing us from being able to make those tradeoffs. That’s the message of the new book by Ricochet member, CEI adjunct scholar and “recovering aerospace engineer” Rand Simberg. Safe Is Not an Option: Overcoming the Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive That Is Killing Our Expansion Into Space is getting rave reviews from prominent experts, knowledgable politicians, and successful entrepreneurs.

Simberg notes that, throughout the history of exploration, science and technology has always entailed risk to the health and lives of the explorers. Yet, when it comes to exploring and developing the high frontier of space, the harshest frontier ever, the highest value is apparently not the accomplishment of those goals, but of minimizing, if not eliminating, the possibility of injury or death for the humans carrying them out.

In the decades since the end of the Apollo program, human spaceflight has been very expensive and relatively rare (about 500 people total, with a death rate of about 4%), largely because of this risk aversion on the part of the federal government and the wider culture. Whether in government programs or the regulatory approach for commercial spaceflight providers, our attitudes toward safety have been fundamentally irrational, expensive, and even dangerous,  generating minimal accomplishment for maximal cost.

Safe Is Not an Option entertainingly explains why this means that we must regulate passenger safety in the new commercial spaceflight industry with a lighter hand than many might instinctively prefer; why NASA must more carefully evaluate rewards from planned missions to rationally determine how much should be spent to avoid the loss of participants; and why Congress must stop insisting that safety is the highest priority. Such insistence is an eloquent testament to how unimportant they and the nation consider the opening of this new frontier.

You can find the book on Amazon, read a review by our own Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist, and follow Rand’s blog posts here and at PJM.

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  1. user_1184 Inactive
    user_1184
    @MarkWilson

    Dan Hanson: You’re not going to change the culture of NASA or eliminate the desire for grandstanding in Congress.

     The challenge, in the long term, will be to keep Congress from wrapping its regulatory tentacles around the private space industry, which would open the door for the kind of grandstanding you’re talking about.

    • #31
  2. user_1075445 Inactive
    user_1075445
    @RandSimberg

    Maybe a good analogy would be military aircraft, especially fighter, test pilots.  I suspect the fatality rate is significant for them, but we consider the need for a robust air force sufficient reason to continue with their risks.

    In the book, I point out that from the late forties, when we first started flying jets off of carriers, until the eighties, when the Hornet was introduced and the Navy finally got their non-combat accident rate down to that of the Air Force, we lost thousands of pilots and deck crew in non-combat operations. That’s what you do when something is important.

    • #32
  3. user_1075445 Inactive
    user_1075445
    @RandSimberg

    The best way to create the right climate for proper risk/reward decision-making is to move it to the private sector and exchange one huge program for many smaller ones.  If all your eggs are in one highly visible, multi-billion dollar basket like the shuttle, then a single accident risks shutting down the entire manned space program for years or decades.

    In the book, I address two separate concerns: safety for government spaceflight and safety for private spaceflight. The only solution to the former is to somehow make it more important to do space missions than to lose astronauts, as was the case during Apollo. For the latter, we have to be careful not to let NASA’s perverse notions of safety bleed over into FAA regulation.

    • #33
  4. user_1075445 Inactive
    user_1075445
    @RandSimberg

    I guess I would be more interested in a thread (another if this is not the one) that amplifies on why we need much man presence in in the near space to begin with.

    That’s an entirely different topic, and one that I don’t address in the book. But if the goal is not to settle and develop the economic resources of space, we shouldn’t be wasting government money sending people there, except perhaps for research at the ISS.

    • #34
  5. Instugator Thatcher
    Instugator
    @Instugator

    Rand Simberg:
    For the latter, we have to be careful not to let NASA’s perverse notions of safety bleed over into FAA regulation.

     Once it leaves the atmosphere, the FAA should have nothing to do with it. 

    • #35
  6. user_1075445 Inactive
    user_1075445
    @RandSimberg

    Once it leaves the atmosphere, the FAA should have nothing to do with it.

    Whether you think it should or not, it does. The FAA is the agency currently charged with seeing that the US meets its obligations under the Outer Space Treaty and Liability Convention.

    • #36
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