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NASA not ready for dangers of deep space, auditors say

99 points by ddeck 11y ago

ddeck 11y ago
From the source report: "Although NASA continues to improve its process for identifying and managing health and human performance risks associated with space flight, we believe that given the current state of knowledge, the Agency’s risk mitigation schedule is optimistic and NASA will not develop countermeasures for many deep space risks until the 2030s, at the earliest." https://oig.nasa.gov/audits/reports/FY16/IG-16-003.pdf https://oig.nasa.gov/audits/reports/FY16/IG-16-003.pdf
jessriedel 11y ago
Of 135 shuttle missions, 2 resulted in the death of all crew, giving a confidence interval of something like 1-4% for the mortality risk of each flight. Any sane assessment of the first Apollo landing missions would put the subjective mortality risk at 10% at the very least. (Later landings were somewhat safer, subjectively, since the equipment was proven.) I can't imagine the in-mission mortality risk of a Mars mission would realistically be less than 5%, and 15% would not be unacceptable to me. A 10% in-mission risk equates to something like 5 years of lost life in expectation. In comparison to this, the risk of cancer seem small or comparable. Yes, you'll need to provide sufficient shielding to prevent aggressive cancers from probably developing during the mission, or ones that will reliably lead to death before 60. But I'm not at all surprised that we may need to accept a much higher cancer risk than we would for a normal occupation. This doesn't strike me as one of the key challenges.
- patio11 11y ago
  I can't imagine the in-mission mortality risk of a Mars mission would realistically be less than 5%, and 15% would not be unacceptable to me. Thus the rationalist Mars mission: send a drone to Mars. Give your five favorite NASA crew members one shot in the head apiece with a fairly spun six shot pistol with one bullet chambered. This accomplishes all of your objectives, is cheaper, and minimizes the danger that the mission architects are underestimating the risk.
  - smeyer 11y ago
    The general claim is that your argument is flawed in "this accomplishes all of your objectives". I don't claim to be an expert in the field, but I've heard people who do care about and practice planetary and martian science that a manned mission could accomplish more than all the previous unmanned missions combined.
    - nabla9 11y ago
      That could be true and manned mission can still be irrational choice. All manned missions arguments I have seen are somewhat coy in this respect. Yes, geologist can make better choices on spot and take better samples than current drones, but that's not real comparison. We should compare alternative strategies using opportunity cost. The money used for manned mission could be used for massive fleet of of drones, satellites and technical development. Missions could be more incremental and cover more areas. Self driving cars are just taking off on earth. How does advance fleet of Mars robocars and satellites mapping Mars compare to manned mission?
    - mapt 11y ago
      Some of the lectures I've seen actually peg this as true, but for the wrong reason. It is possible to put together automated missions at-scale. But not likely. Because auditors can trim back an automated mission's scope smoothly, no matter how expansive it is, in order to save money. A slightly lighter, cheaper camera, gives way to an even more slightly lighter, cheaper camera, ad infinitum. A hundred units give way to 99 units give way to 30 units give way to 1 unit. But if you try to do that with a manned mission, you start to jeopardize the public heroes you have sensationalized in order to fund the mission. You don't get to send half a human being to Mars.
  - brianberns 11y ago
    We've already sent a number of drones to Mars. There are rational reasons for wanting to send humans as well: Humans can do things on Mars that drones cannot, and they pave the way for possible colonization in the future.
- kens 11y ago
  In comparison, the risk of death climbing Mount Everest is in the 1.5% to 10% range (depending on how you count), and this is something people do for fun. Obviously safe space flight is a good thing, but I think it's reasonable to accept that going to Mars is considerably more dangerous than climbing Everest.
  - prodmerc 11y ago
    Yeah, this is what I don't get. People do drugs, skydive, go sailing and do 150 MPH on motorcycles for fun, but they can lose their shit if 1 in 100 dies going anywhere in space... I guess it will change with time...
    - anigbrowl 11y ago
      Because the costs of putting people in space are huge, so you need correspondingly huge buy-in. Dangerous recreational activities only appeal to a tiny minority of people (while quite a lot of people take drugs recreationally, most do so fairly cautiously rather than in heroic quantities or contexts a la Hunter S Thompson). With space travel, it's both expensive and inaccessible other than to those who could be regarded as among the 'best and the brightest,' and whose loss is felt disproportionately. A better contrast might be that we (in the US) have a moderately high tolerance for deaths in war, because the bar for entry into military service is not so high. But if you recall the early days of the war in Afghanistan, there was a big freakout over the death of Corporal Pat Tillman, who abandoned a promising career as an NFL quarterback to serve his country post 9/11 and then died in a friendly fire situation during combat. It's very hard to become quarterback in the NFL so his death was considered a great loss, even though morally it's no different from the deaths of thousands of other soldiers. So deaths on a Mars mission would provoke a reaction of 'why are we sending our best to die in the cold wastes of space/on the surface of distant planets when we have perfectly serviceable robots?' I think the way it will change is if privately financed asteroid mining becomes a practical reality, in which case deaths in the line of work will be considered tragic but acceptable (within reason), much like deaths on oil rigs and other high-risk industrial environments.
      - 11y ago
- hguant 11y ago
  Armstrong has said he thought he and Aldrin had about a 50% chance of success for the moon landing. Failure could mean lots of things outside of situations resulting in death, but still, they were taking an awe full risk. Also, looking at the manned Apollo missions, one out of 12 resulted in the death of the crew (Apollo 1), and one in 6 missions were failures (Apollo 1 and 13). Space flight was a hugely risky endeavor back then.
- VLM 11y ago
  Something carefully avoided in the journalist article, yet relevant, is a vaguely four year mission would naturally have a fatality rate around mission length divided by average human lifespan so a death rate around 5% would be somewhat normal. You take a vacation of 1/20th your lifespan, 1/20th of you will die. Before the screaming starts, I am well aware this off the cuff estimate is not the pinnacle of modern actuarial science, and there are a zillion mitigating factors likely to lead to lower fatality rates. I would be kind of pissed off at having to spend 1/20th of my lifetime mostly on a commute to a vacation, I would better tolerate spending maybe 1/40th of my life immigrating permanently somewhere. Also roughly 1/2 the cancer risk would be nice. How much stuff you'd have to send to make it permanent vs merely 1/20th of a lifespan is somewhat unclear.
- WalterBright 11y ago
  Given the long travel times, the untried machinery, the unknown risks, the known risks, the isolation, I doubt the chances of getting there would be larger than 10%, and returning about 0%. One possibility might be to send older people, or people with a short life expectancy on earth, with the idea they could do something great with their remaining time. This may be politically impossible, though.
  - rm445 11y ago
    Given the small number of crew needed for an initial programme of missions, it ought to be possible to select from the population of the Earth a number of superbly able and healthy people who simply accept the risk. I sometimes suspect that the proposers of sending older people to Mars are getting on a bit themselves and wish for a spot they otherwise would be denied. (Nothing personal Mr Bright, I'm sure you'd be an admirable astronaut and I'd happily launch with you if we were given the chance). You don't need to select crew from a subset for whom the calculus of risk of death versus ongoing life on Earth is different in some way. You just need crew who are willing to take the risks, whatever their reasons.
    - WalterBright 11y ago
      NASA selects superbly fit people because they can. I don't see the crises one is likely to encounter in space are ones that superb fitness is going to help much. There's no way I'm going in a tin can to Mars :-) so that's not my motivation. I'm sure there are many young people who would be willing to go on a one way ride to Mars and certain death. I suspect that would be politically impossible, though.
    - WalterBright 11y ago
      I'm sure there are many people who want to launch me on a one way trip to Mars!
  - simonh 11y ago
    Most if the machinery could be tried on the moon first. If we adopt a Mars Direct approach, a return vessel with in-situ refuelling capability would arrive and recommissioning itself before the crew even left Earth, and we might even trial the return vehicle in an automated there-and-back mission first. With all these factors, I think the chances of success could probably be improved to perhaps 90% arrival and 70% return. Pure guesses though, of course.
JamesBaxter 11y ago
"the astronauts chosen to make at least the initial forays into deep space may have to accept a higher level of risk than those who fly International Space Station missions." Is this surprising to anyone? It's a far greater challenge?
- DamnYuppie 11y ago
  The world is not moved forward by those who seek the safety of their current existence. It is those who dare to throw caution to the wind and embrace the challenge of the unknown. Just because there is a danger of dieing doesn't mean that it shouldn't be attempted or that there are not those willing to attempt it.
sevensor 11y ago
Exactly whose safety are they concerned for? The volunteers who would gladly accept the risks of death, disease, and injury for a chance at glory? If we'd had this attitude to risk in the 1960s, the Apollo program would have ended after Apollo 1 burned up.
- codingdave 11y ago
  Yes, that is exactly whose safety they are concerned with. People who are willing to give their life for a cause may be too willing to do so. There is nothing wrong with making a project as safe as possible, even if you can find volunteers with higher risk tolerances.
  - BatFastard 11y ago
    "There is nothing wrong with making a project as safe as possible" This is crazy, it will leave us with space projects that will never be finished. Didn't mars one prove that people are willing to die on Mars to get there first? The cost of getting people to mars is trivial compared to the cost of getting them back. We spend so much time on safety we have become totally immobile in space. The whole NASA budget should be given to the private sector!
    - codingdave 11y ago
      OK, fine, what if we changed it to "as safe as practical"? The point is that those who are willing to die should not set the safety standards. We should surpass their personal risk tolerances, and make it safer than that.
      - BatFastard 11y ago
        As a parent, I found that what I considered "as safe as practical" was considerably different than what my wife considered safe.
  - mturmon 11y ago
    And as we learned after Shuttle disasters, mission failure leading to loss of life has political consequences for the nation and the human space program as well. The risks are not limited to the astronauts.
deleted 11y ago
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jedberg 11y ago
Anyone have historical audits of NASA from 1960? I'll bet they were saying the same thing about moon missions back then.
CIPHERSTONE 11y ago
This is what I don't understand, can someone ELI5 it for me: "Even nutrition, the report said, could be problematic, because any Mars vehicle will likely be significantly smaller than the International Space Station, and astronauts will be too far away to receive the regular resupply missions they now get on the station." Why does that have to be the case? Why are we limiting the size of the spaceship to what can be launched from Earth? Wouldn't it be better to construct teh ship in space so it could be a behemoth that had ample supplies, etc. and in effect could be a semi-permanent space station in Mars orbit that could be launched from to the surface with smaller ships?
- dan-silver 11y ago
  aka, The Martian
- VLM 11y ago
  Fixation on modern implementation of Apollo, go there as a stunt and never come back. Probably they're specifically talking about some kind of transfer vehicle doing a Hohmann transfer orbit. The idea of sending very small resupply and spare part payloads on a non-Hohmann likely very expensive trajectory is interesting, but it'll never work as a substantial fraction of the mass of the ship, like food will have to be. So you could use the entire delta-V of a major booster to deliver a spare circuitboard to a vehicle 3/4 of the way to Mars but significant masses of food won't work. Another problem is organizational inertia, if a Hohmann transfer takes 600 days or whatever and a major international mission takes 10 years of administrative planning, then if a super emergency resupply is required on day 400, it won't arrive until 3400, in other words a bit too late to matter. So technically you could waste a normally 20 thousand pound booster on a 10 pound emergency payload of circuit boards and med supplies, but organizationally "we" are too slow to do it.
- david-given 11y ago
  The short answer is: launch costs and crap rockets. Building a big ship, right now, means lifting lots of mass into orbit and assembling it there. That in itself will be stunningly expensive. But then you want to actually send it to Mars. Earth orbit to Mars orbit costs about 6 km/s (see http://i.imgur.com/SqdzxzF.png http://i.imgur.com/SqdzxzF.png), which is comparable to the 9.4 km/s needed to get from the surface of Earth to low earth orbit. Now, we are in space, which means we can use slow, efficient burns rather than the fuel-belching behemoths you need for a launch... but right now we're limited to inefficient chemical rockets, which means a hell of a lot of fuel. The ISS masses about 400 tonnes. Assuming hydrazine as a fuel, with an isp of about 350, that means that the wet mass of your vehicle has to be (dry mass) * e^(deltav / isp9.8) = 400e3 e^(6000 / 350*9.8) = 2300 tonnes. So you'll need 1900 tonnes of fuel. That's 380 Falcon 9s full of rocket fuel. (Assuming my maths are right.) So you try to make your spacecraft as small as possible. That way you don't need to carry the fuel needed to move the fuel. The rocket equation is a bummer. (Of course, nuclear engines, are vastly more efficient, change all this. Shame we don't have any. If you were willing to wait long enough, an ion thruster with an ISP of 20000 would require only 12 tonnes of fuel. But you wouldn't live that long.)
mapt 11y ago
The only real hard limit is likely to be specifically the radiation acquired from Galactic Cosmic Rays. There is, to a first approximation, nothing you can do about this; And it is in fact up there around our thresholds for dose limit, unless you're satisfied with increasing the mission mass by a factor of a thousand. The only practical thing to do is to adjust our thresholds. But screw it - we're talking about landing on another planet, about millions of man-years of time investment, about activities plenty of people would donate DALYs to accomplish; About activities they will usually have to donate their entire career and their marriages to accomplish anyway, where the unknown unknown risks of sudden death are expected to be of a higher magnitude in the first place. Thresholds are silly in that context. For comparison: Flight attendants who have been on the job between five years and their whole careers have ~600% of the breast cancer (and likely other cancer) risk of the median person. Regular smokers have 2600% the risk of lung cancer as people who have never smoked. Pay a smoker a million dollars to sign a contract stating they will never smoke again, send him to Mars, then pay a private investigator to follow him around for the rest of his life ensuring he does not start smoking, and he will have a vastly lower rate of cancer at vastly lower monetary outlay than if he had been rejected at the first astronaut screening and NASA had attempted to mitigate radiation risk from GCRs.
- aturek 11y ago
  In case anyone else is puzzled: DALY = "Disability-adjuseted life year", i.e. a year you're alive and not disabled.
tslug 11y ago
Humans were evolved to survive in a razor-thin sliver of Earth's atmosphere and nowhere else. We aren't designed for and don't belong in deep space. We should genetically engineer smart creatures that can fare better out there, creatures with enormous capacities for cancer resistance, stupefyingly impressive energy efficiency, and staggeringly long lifetimes. They don't need all of our gravity-influenced skeletal structure and musculature. The fact that we're air-breathers is a particularly worrisome liability for being a space-faring critter. Little holes in our tin can atmospheres can lead to explosively bad results. I'd start with something closer to an octopus and then throw (even more) intelligence at it.
- tomelders 11y ago
  surely it would be easier to build better robots?
  - tslug 11y ago
    Maybe, if the robots can self-replicate and/or self-repair and have that creative spark, but that's asking a whole lot of tech that we haven't sorted out yet. Life has the replication shit already worked out, so if the goal is really to put intelligent life in deep space in a sustainable way, a genetically engineered super-bright octopus species in a space-faring aquarium with environmental selectors for intelligence built in might actually be more effective.
PaulHoule 11y ago
A realistic near-term goal is to establish a space station at the earth-moon L1 point such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_Gateway_Platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_Gateway_Platform The answer to radiation is that you want 6 feet of rock, ideally all around you, but particularly between you and the sun on solar flares. That can be harvested from the moon or an easy asteroid. A presence on the moon is a lot more realistic, and if commercially useful water can be found at the pole and converted to fuel, it would make it affordable to send astronauts to mars with radiation protection. At that point we would have extensive experience with "living off the land" in space and won't be doing it on a planet with toxic soil.
maxst 11y ago
At the very least, ISS should have a module or two dedicated to growing food. Right now. I don't understand why they're neglecting this technology.
- prodigal_erik 11y ago
  Just as an experiment? ISS would have to be much larger to be self-sufficient in food. On earth it would take around 4,000 m^2 of solar power and 900,000 kg of topsoil (one acre-furrow-slice) to feed each of the six crew.
  - maxst 11y ago
    It doesn't have to be completely self-sufficient. They have 15 pressurized modules, I don't understand why 1 of them can't be dedicated to advance this vital technology.
    - bsilvereagle 11y ago
      It's important to remember that the ISS is a multi-national joint effort. If NASA wanted to convert a non-NASA module to grow plants, it would require the approval of that module's sponsoring agency. I don't think a lot of people realize how inefficient the operation of the ISS is. Take the JEM airlock for example. The JEM airlock is a Japanese (JAXA) module that has a novel slide table which is remotely controlled from Earth. So an experiment can be placed on the slide table, and then can be moved into space from Earth - without astronaut intervention. This offloads time from the astronaut's (packed) schedule to the ground control's schedule. However, NASA cannot operate this airlock! Only JAXA can! So, for the experiment to use the table, JAXA must agree to staff their ground control to operate the lock which has been a problem, causing extreme under-utilization of the lock. NASA is more than willing to take full operational responsibility of the JEM airlock to free up astronaut time, but as far as I know, JAXA hasn't been willing to train any NASA controllers. *This information is going on 2 years old and things may have changed recently.
  - thescriptkiddie 11y ago
    Hydroponics and aeroponics don't require any soil. Using red/blue grow lights instead of full spectrum roughly halves that solar power estimate, and in space they have no atmosphere to block the sun. The ISS certainly couldn't be self-sufficient as is, but it could be with relatively modest expansion.
macmac 11y ago
New auditor's report say that humankind is not ready to leave the cave. We should all stay in the cave.
- gaius 11y ago
  It was a mistake to leave the trees even.
  - simonh 11y ago
    Arguably, becoming air breathing has turned to not be all it was cracked up to be.
avar 11y ago
I've often seen two things conflated when it comes to cancer & Mars. The first is that if we send people on a one-off return mission their lifetime risk of cancer will increase by X%. This is obviously a concern, but as others here in the thread have mentioned we could get people willing to accept the risk. The second is that if people stay on Mars for generations you have the risk of cumulative damage to DNA over generations. Now it's not just a problem that instead of living to 80 you die of cancer at 60, but rather that after N generations the population's DNA might be damaged past repair.
imgabe 11y ago
Ok, exploring space is risky. How does it compare to the risk of previous exploration? I don't imagine that sailing off into uncharted waters in a wooden boat with whatever provisions you could carry was a particularly safe endeavor either. There are more important things than maximizing safety.
Glyptodon 11y ago
Lately I've been seeing NASA and NSA swapped with each other on a subliminal level once in a while and it always leads to some amusing double takes.

99 points by ddeck 11y ago

ddeck 11y ago

From the source report: "Although NASA continues to improve its process for identifying and managing health and human performance risks associated with space flight, we believe that given the current state of knowledge, the Agency’s risk mitigation schedule is optimistic and NASA will not develop countermeasures for many deep space risks until the 2030s, at the earliest." https://oig.nasa.gov/audits/reports/FY16/IG-16-003.pdf https://oig.nasa.gov/audits/reports/FY16/IG-16-003.pdf

jessriedel 11y ago

Of 135 shuttle missions, 2 resulted in the death of all crew, giving a confidence interval of something like 1-4% for the mortality risk of each flight. Any sane assessment of the first Apollo landing missions would put the subjective mortality risk at 10% at the very least. (Later landings were somewhat safer, subjectively, since the equipment was proven.) I can't imagine the in-mission mortality risk of a Mars mission would realistically be less than 5%, and 15% would not be unacceptable to me. A 10% in-mission risk equates to something like 5 years of lost life in expectation. In comparison to this, the risk of cancer seem small or comparable. Yes, you'll need to provide sufficient shielding to prevent aggressive cancers from probably developing during the mission, or ones that will reliably lead to death before 60. But I'm not at all surprised that we may need to accept a much higher cancer risk than we would for a normal occupation. This doesn't strike me as one of the key challenges.

patio11 11y ago
I can't imagine the in-mission mortality risk of a Mars mission would realistically be less than 5%, and 15% would not be unacceptable to me. Thus the rationalist Mars mission: send a drone to Mars. Give your five favorite NASA crew members one shot in the head apiece with a fairly spun six shot pistol with one bullet chambered. This accomplishes all of your objectives, is cheaper, and minimizes the danger that the mission architects are underestimating the risk.
- smeyer 11y ago
  The general claim is that your argument is flawed in "this accomplishes all of your objectives". I don't claim to be an expert in the field, but I've heard people who do care about and practice planetary and martian science that a manned mission could accomplish more than all the previous unmanned missions combined.
  - nabla9 11y ago
    That could be true and manned mission can still be irrational choice. All manned missions arguments I have seen are somewhat coy in this respect. Yes, geologist can make better choices on spot and take better samples than current drones, but that's not real comparison. We should compare alternative strategies using opportunity cost. The money used for manned mission could be used for massive fleet of of drones, satellites and technical development. Missions could be more incremental and cover more areas. Self driving cars are just taking off on earth. How does advance fleet of Mars robocars and satellites mapping Mars compare to manned mission?
  - mapt 11y ago
    Some of the lectures I've seen actually peg this as true, but for the wrong reason. It is possible to put together automated missions at-scale. But not likely. Because auditors can trim back an automated mission's scope smoothly, no matter how expansive it is, in order to save money. A slightly lighter, cheaper camera, gives way to an even more slightly lighter, cheaper camera, ad infinitum. A hundred units give way to 99 units give way to 30 units give way to 1 unit. But if you try to do that with a manned mission, you start to jeopardize the public heroes you have sensationalized in order to fund the mission. You don't get to send half a human being to Mars.
- brianberns 11y ago
  We've already sent a number of drones to Mars. There are rational reasons for wanting to send humans as well: Humans can do things on Mars that drones cannot, and they pave the way for possible colonization in the future.
kens 11y ago
In comparison, the risk of death climbing Mount Everest is in the 1.5% to 10% range (depending on how you count), and this is something people do for fun. Obviously safe space flight is a good thing, but I think it's reasonable to accept that going to Mars is considerably more dangerous than climbing Everest.
- prodmerc 11y ago
  Yeah, this is what I don't get. People do drugs, skydive, go sailing and do 150 MPH on motorcycles for fun, but they can lose their shit if 1 in 100 dies going anywhere in space... I guess it will change with time...
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    Because the costs of putting people in space are huge, so you need correspondingly huge buy-in. Dangerous recreational activities only appeal to a tiny minority of people (while quite a lot of people take drugs recreationally, most do so fairly cautiously rather than in heroic quantities or contexts a la Hunter S Thompson). With space travel, it's both expensive and inaccessible other than to those who could be regarded as among the 'best and the brightest,' and whose loss is felt disproportionately. A better contrast might be that we (in the US) have a moderately high tolerance for deaths in war, because the bar for entry into military service is not so high. But if you recall the early days of the war in Afghanistan, there was a big freakout over the death of Corporal Pat Tillman, who abandoned a promising career as an NFL quarterback to serve his country post 9/11 and then died in a friendly fire situation during combat. It's very hard to become quarterback in the NFL so his death was considered a great loss, even though morally it's no different from the deaths of thousands of other soldiers. So deaths on a Mars mission would provoke a reaction of 'why are we sending our best to die in the cold wastes of space/on the surface of distant planets when we have perfectly serviceable robots?' I think the way it will change is if privately financed asteroid mining becomes a practical reality, in which case deaths in the line of work will be considered tragic but acceptable (within reason), much like deaths on oil rigs and other high-risk industrial environments.
    - 11y ago
hguant 11y ago
Armstrong has said he thought he and Aldrin had about a 50% chance of success for the moon landing. Failure could mean lots of things outside of situations resulting in death, but still, they were taking an awe full risk. Also, looking at the manned Apollo missions, one out of 12 resulted in the death of the crew (Apollo 1), and one in 6 missions were failures (Apollo 1 and 13). Space flight was a hugely risky endeavor back then.
VLM 11y ago
Something carefully avoided in the journalist article, yet relevant, is a vaguely four year mission would naturally have a fatality rate around mission length divided by average human lifespan so a death rate around 5% would be somewhat normal. You take a vacation of 1/20th your lifespan, 1/20th of you will die. Before the screaming starts, I am well aware this off the cuff estimate is not the pinnacle of modern actuarial science, and there are a zillion mitigating factors likely to lead to lower fatality rates. I would be kind of pissed off at having to spend 1/20th of my lifetime mostly on a commute to a vacation, I would better tolerate spending maybe 1/40th of my life immigrating permanently somewhere. Also roughly 1/2 the cancer risk would be nice. How much stuff you'd have to send to make it permanent vs merely 1/20th of a lifespan is somewhat unclear.
WalterBright 11y ago
Given the long travel times, the untried machinery, the unknown risks, the known risks, the isolation, I doubt the chances of getting there would be larger than 10%, and returning about 0%. One possibility might be to send older people, or people with a short life expectancy on earth, with the idea they could do something great with their remaining time. This may be politically impossible, though.
- rm445 11y ago
  Given the small number of crew needed for an initial programme of missions, it ought to be possible to select from the population of the Earth a number of superbly able and healthy people who simply accept the risk. I sometimes suspect that the proposers of sending older people to Mars are getting on a bit themselves and wish for a spot they otherwise would be denied. (Nothing personal Mr Bright, I'm sure you'd be an admirable astronaut and I'd happily launch with you if we were given the chance). You don't need to select crew from a subset for whom the calculus of risk of death versus ongoing life on Earth is different in some way. You just need crew who are willing to take the risks, whatever their reasons.
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    NASA selects superbly fit people because they can. I don't see the crises one is likely to encounter in space are ones that superb fitness is going to help much. There's no way I'm going in a tin can to Mars :-) so that's not my motivation. I'm sure there are many young people who would be willing to go on a one way ride to Mars and certain death. I suspect that would be politically impossible, though.
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    I'm sure there are many people who want to launch me on a one way trip to Mars!
- simonh 11y ago
  Most if the machinery could be tried on the moon first. If we adopt a Mars Direct approach, a return vessel with in-situ refuelling capability would arrive and recommissioning itself before the crew even left Earth, and we might even trial the return vehicle in an automated there-and-back mission first. With all these factors, I think the chances of success could probably be improved to perhaps 90% arrival and 70% return. Pure guesses though, of course.

JamesBaxter 11y ago

"the astronauts chosen to make at least the initial forays into deep space may have to accept a higher level of risk than those who fly International Space Station missions." Is this surprising to anyone? It's a far greater challenge?

DamnYuppie 11y ago
The world is not moved forward by those who seek the safety of their current existence. It is those who dare to throw caution to the wind and embrace the challenge of the unknown. Just because there is a danger of dieing doesn't mean that it shouldn't be attempted or that there are not those willing to attempt it.

sevensor 11y ago

Exactly whose safety are they concerned for? The volunteers who would gladly accept the risks of death, disease, and injury for a chance at glory? If we'd had this attitude to risk in the 1960s, the Apollo program would have ended after Apollo 1 burned up.

codingdave 11y ago
Yes, that is exactly whose safety they are concerned with. People who are willing to give their life for a cause may be too willing to do so. There is nothing wrong with making a project as safe as possible, even if you can find volunteers with higher risk tolerances.
- BatFastard 11y ago
  "There is nothing wrong with making a project as safe as possible" This is crazy, it will leave us with space projects that will never be finished. Didn't mars one prove that people are willing to die on Mars to get there first? The cost of getting people to mars is trivial compared to the cost of getting them back. We spend so much time on safety we have become totally immobile in space. The whole NASA budget should be given to the private sector!
  - codingdave 11y ago
    OK, fine, what if we changed it to "as safe as practical"? The point is that those who are willing to die should not set the safety standards. We should surpass their personal risk tolerances, and make it safer than that.
    - BatFastard 11y ago
      As a parent, I found that what I considered "as safe as practical" was considerably different than what my wife considered safe.
- mturmon 11y ago
  And as we learned after Shuttle disasters, mission failure leading to loss of life has political consequences for the nation and the human space program as well. The risks are not limited to the astronauts.

deleted 11y ago

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jedberg 11y ago

Anyone have historical audits of NASA from 1960? I'll bet they were saying the same thing about moon missions back then.

CIPHERSTONE 11y ago

This is what I don't understand, can someone ELI5 it for me: "Even nutrition, the report said, could be problematic, because any Mars vehicle will likely be significantly smaller than the International Space Station, and astronauts will be too far away to receive the regular resupply missions they now get on the station." Why does that have to be the case? Why are we limiting the size of the spaceship to what can be launched from Earth? Wouldn't it be better to construct teh ship in space so it could be a behemoth that had ample supplies, etc. and in effect could be a semi-permanent space station in Mars orbit that could be launched from to the surface with smaller ships?

dan-silver 11y ago
aka, The Martian
VLM 11y ago
Fixation on modern implementation of Apollo, go there as a stunt and never come back. Probably they're specifically talking about some kind of transfer vehicle doing a Hohmann transfer orbit. The idea of sending very small resupply and spare part payloads on a non-Hohmann likely very expensive trajectory is interesting, but it'll never work as a substantial fraction of the mass of the ship, like food will have to be. So you could use the entire delta-V of a major booster to deliver a spare circuitboard to a vehicle 3/4 of the way to Mars but significant masses of food won't work. Another problem is organizational inertia, if a Hohmann transfer takes 600 days or whatever and a major international mission takes 10 years of administrative planning, then if a super emergency resupply is required on day 400, it won't arrive until 3400, in other words a bit too late to matter. So technically you could waste a normally 20 thousand pound booster on a 10 pound emergency payload of circuit boards and med supplies, but organizationally "we" are too slow to do it.
david-given 11y ago
The short answer is: launch costs and crap rockets. Building a big ship, right now, means lifting lots of mass into orbit and assembling it there. That in itself will be stunningly expensive. But then you want to actually send it to Mars. Earth orbit to Mars orbit costs about 6 km/s (see http://i.imgur.com/SqdzxzF.png http://i.imgur.com/SqdzxzF.png), which is comparable to the 9.4 km/s needed to get from the surface of Earth to low earth orbit. Now, we are in space, which means we can use slow, efficient burns rather than the fuel-belching behemoths you need for a launch... but right now we're limited to inefficient chemical rockets, which means a hell of a lot of fuel. The ISS masses about 400 tonnes. Assuming hydrazine as a fuel, with an isp of about 350, that means that the wet mass of your vehicle has to be (dry mass) * e^(deltav / isp9.8) = 400e3 e^(6000 / 350*9.8) = 2300 tonnes. So you'll need 1900 tonnes of fuel. That's 380 Falcon 9s full of rocket fuel. (Assuming my maths are right.) So you try to make your spacecraft as small as possible. That way you don't need to carry the fuel needed to move the fuel. The rocket equation is a bummer. (Of course, nuclear engines, are vastly more efficient, change all this. Shame we don't have any. If you were willing to wait long enough, an ion thruster with an ISP of 20000 would require only 12 tonnes of fuel. But you wouldn't live that long.)

mapt 11y ago

The only real hard limit is likely to be specifically the radiation acquired from Galactic Cosmic Rays. There is, to a first approximation, nothing you can do about this; And it is in fact up there around our thresholds for dose limit, unless you're satisfied with increasing the mission mass by a factor of a thousand. The only practical thing to do is to adjust our thresholds. But screw it - we're talking about landing on another planet, about millions of man-years of time investment, about activities plenty of people would donate DALYs to accomplish; About activities they will usually have to donate their entire career and their marriages to accomplish anyway, where the unknown unknown risks of sudden death are expected to be of a higher magnitude in the first place. Thresholds are silly in that context. For comparison: Flight attendants who have been on the job between five years and their whole careers have ~600% of the breast cancer (and likely other cancer) risk of the median person. Regular smokers have 2600% the risk of lung cancer as people who have never smoked. Pay a smoker a million dollars to sign a contract stating they will never smoke again, send him to Mars, then pay a private investigator to follow him around for the rest of his life ensuring he does not start smoking, and he will have a vastly lower rate of cancer at vastly lower monetary outlay than if he had been rejected at the first astronaut screening and NASA had attempted to mitigate radiation risk from GCRs.

aturek 11y ago
In case anyone else is puzzled: DALY = "Disability-adjuseted life year", i.e. a year you're alive and not disabled.

tslug 11y ago

Humans were evolved to survive in a razor-thin sliver of Earth's atmosphere and nowhere else. We aren't designed for and don't belong in deep space. We should genetically engineer smart creatures that can fare better out there, creatures with enormous capacities for cancer resistance, stupefyingly impressive energy efficiency, and staggeringly long lifetimes. They don't need all of our gravity-influenced skeletal structure and musculature. The fact that we're air-breathers is a particularly worrisome liability for being a space-faring critter. Little holes in our tin can atmospheres can lead to explosively bad results. I'd start with something closer to an octopus and then throw (even more) intelligence at it.

tomelders 11y ago
surely it would be easier to build better robots?
- tslug 11y ago
  Maybe, if the robots can self-replicate and/or self-repair and have that creative spark, but that's asking a whole lot of tech that we haven't sorted out yet. Life has the replication shit already worked out, so if the goal is really to put intelligent life in deep space in a sustainable way, a genetically engineered super-bright octopus species in a space-faring aquarium with environmental selectors for intelligence built in might actually be more effective.

PaulHoule 11y ago

A realistic near-term goal is to establish a space station at the earth-moon L1 point such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_Gateway_Platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_Gateway_Platform The answer to radiation is that you want 6 feet of rock, ideally all around you, but particularly between you and the sun on solar flares. That can be harvested from the moon or an easy asteroid. A presence on the moon is a lot more realistic, and if commercially useful water can be found at the pole and converted to fuel, it would make it affordable to send astronauts to mars with radiation protection. At that point we would have extensive experience with "living off the land" in space and won't be doing it on a planet with toxic soil.

maxst 11y ago

At the very least, ISS should have a module or two dedicated to growing food. Right now. I don't understand why they're neglecting this technology.

prodigal_erik 11y ago
Just as an experiment? ISS would have to be much larger to be self-sufficient in food. On earth it would take around 4,000 m^2 of solar power and 900,000 kg of topsoil (one acre-furrow-slice) to feed each of the six crew.
- maxst 11y ago
  It doesn't have to be completely self-sufficient. They have 15 pressurized modules, I don't understand why 1 of them can't be dedicated to advance this vital technology.
  - bsilvereagle 11y ago
    It's important to remember that the ISS is a multi-national joint effort. If NASA wanted to convert a non-NASA module to grow plants, it would require the approval of that module's sponsoring agency. I don't think a lot of people realize how inefficient the operation of the ISS is. Take the JEM airlock for example. The JEM airlock is a Japanese (JAXA) module that has a novel slide table which is remotely controlled from Earth. So an experiment can be placed on the slide table, and then can be moved into space from Earth - without astronaut intervention. This offloads time from the astronaut's (packed) schedule to the ground control's schedule. However, NASA cannot operate this airlock! Only JAXA can! So, for the experiment to use the table, JAXA must agree to staff their ground control to operate the lock which has been a problem, causing extreme under-utilization of the lock. NASA is more than willing to take full operational responsibility of the JEM airlock to free up astronaut time, but as far as I know, JAXA hasn't been willing to train any NASA controllers. *This information is going on 2 years old and things may have changed recently.
- thescriptkiddie 11y ago
  Hydroponics and aeroponics don't require any soil. Using red/blue grow lights instead of full spectrum roughly halves that solar power estimate, and in space they have no atmosphere to block the sun. The ISS certainly couldn't be self-sufficient as is, but it could be with relatively modest expansion.

macmac 11y ago

New auditor's report say that humankind is not ready to leave the cave. We should all stay in the cave.

gaius 11y ago
It was a mistake to leave the trees even.
- simonh 11y ago
  Arguably, becoming air breathing has turned to not be all it was cracked up to be.

avar 11y ago

I've often seen two things conflated when it comes to cancer & Mars. The first is that if we send people on a one-off return mission their lifetime risk of cancer will increase by X%. This is obviously a concern, but as others here in the thread have mentioned we could get people willing to accept the risk. The second is that if people stay on Mars for generations you have the risk of cumulative damage to DNA over generations. Now it's not just a problem that instead of living to 80 you die of cancer at 60, but rather that after N generations the population's DNA might be damaged past repair.

imgabe 11y ago

Ok, exploring space is risky. How does it compare to the risk of previous exploration? I don't imagine that sailing off into uncharted waters in a wooden boat with whatever provisions you could carry was a particularly safe endeavor either. There are more important things than maximizing safety.

Glyptodon 11y ago

Lately I've been seeing NASA and NSA swapped with each other on a subliminal level once in a while and it always leads to some amusing double takes.