4 ms·

Even taking into consideration cost of labour, it seems like US manufacturing and infrastructure costs are excessively bloated. Is there any way to reduce it wh

• valuearb 10y ago
  We are probably not taking enough risk, esp. for manned missions. If qualified astronauts are willing to take a 10% risk of death, why spend far more to engineer for a sub-1% risk? Over time risk declines with more missions and experience.
  • JamilD 10y ago
    That's what I was thinking too. Looking back at Apollo, it seems like they were far more willing to tolerate a higher % risk. What changed? The lack of competition with the USSR? A general shift in our culture?
    • dragonwriter 10y ago
      > What changed? The lack of competition with the USSR? That exactly.
    • prodmerc 10y ago
      It's not only the US, risk aversion has increased all over Europe, as well. Drink bottled water, travel to safe destinations, god forbid you find an insect or even hair in your food, don't let the kids outside by themselves, don't play with dangerous things like electrical equipment or chemicals, don't move unless you know someone in that new city, etc. I don't know why, maybe the media's constant reporting of the worst things has taken its toll, maybe it's the government micromanaging everything, but most people today are afraid of risks of any kind.
    • VygmraMGVl 10y ago
      I imagine NASA became a lot more risk averse after actually losing astronauts in the Challenger and Columbia disasters.
      • kchoudhu 10y ago
        If I recall, quite a few astronauts were killed on the way to the moon.
        • pilom 10y ago
          3 died on the ground during a test exercise. No American astronaut died _in space_ until the Challenger explosion.
          • dragonwriter 10y ago
            > No American astronaut died _in space_ until the Challenger explosion. No American astronaut died in space then, either.
          • kchoudhu 10y ago
            You must be fun at parties.
          • krallja 10y ago
            No American astronaut has ever died in space. The astronauts of Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia all died in the Earth's atmosphere.
    • rlanday 10y ago
      I had the opportunity a few years ago to see Buzz Aldrin speak at Facebook for the 45th anniversary of Apollo 11. Someone asked him about the speech that was prepared for President Nixon in the event that Neil and Buzz had been stranded on the Moon; Buzz's answer was basically that he wasn't worried since the engineers had told them they had a ~95% chance of making it back to Earth safely, which I thought was interesting, since I have no idea how idea how they could be that confident about doing something so risky for the first time (although I guess the different pieces of hardware involved had been tested on prior missions).
  • tonmoy 10y ago
    Because in case of the astronaut's death, public opinion of the organization diminishes. You could say that the astronaut's life is more valuable to the organization than the astronaut himself
• pjc50 10y ago
  Isn't that coupled to real estate costs, via salaries?
• gthtjtkt 10y ago
  I don't think U.S. costs are bloated when it comes to these types of applications, where perfection is pretty much a requirement. On the other hand, if you just want to make a million doodads and sell them to consumers, U.S. costs are outrageous. I was trying to get 500 of a machined part made recently and the quotes from U.S. manufacturers were 40-100x higher than the quotes from China.
• Houshalter 10y ago
  It's another victim of Cost Disease: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost... >The first New York City subway opened around 1900... it suggests costs of... $1-4 million per kilometer... inflation-adjusted equivalent of $100 million/kilometer today... a new New York subway line being opened this year costs about $2.2 billion per kilometer, suggesting a cost increase of twenty times...