Aerospace Experts Wrestle with the Cost of Astronaut Safety

The question of how much the life of an astronaut is worth is a perennial question that is wrestled over in aerospace circles. How much money should be spent to ensure that astronauts who venture into space come back alive?

The question has haunted aerospace experts both inside and outside NASA since the beginning of human space flight.

Does NASA overemphasize astronaut safety?

Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer and an advocate for the settlement of Mars, recently suggested in a piece in Reason that NASA is fixated too much on astronaut safety. Zubrin sees this attitude as unnecessarily increasing the cost of NASA missions, sometimes to the extent that the missions -- such as going to Mars -- are too expensive to undertake.

The Hubble Telescope Example

Zubrin points to the last mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope as an example of how NASA's fixation on safety has been taken to extremes. In the wake of the Columbia disaster, then NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe canceled the last mission to the Hubble, causing howls of protest from the astronomy community. The theory was that a mission to the International Space Station could be justified because the ISS could be used as a "lifeboat" for shuttle astronauts should something happen to the orbiter that would prevent it from returning to Earth. A Hubble mission would not have that feature. Finally, O'Keefe's successor as NASA administrator, Mike Griffin, reinstated the Hubble mission, but with the extraordinary effort of preparing a rescue shuttle on the pad in case something went wrong.

The roots of NASA's safety fixation

Defenders of NASA's safety culture point to four events in the history of human space exploration, the Apollo fire, Apollo 13, the Challenger disaster, and the Columbia disaster as what happens when safety is not attended too sufficiently. With the exception of Apollo 13, the events in question led to the loss of crews. In addition the two shuttle disasters led to the destruction of multibillion-dollar spacecraft.

Moreover, each disaster resulted in months and even years of expensive soul searching, political finger pointing, and trauma as well as efforts to fix the original problem. Each disaster led to an investigation that revealed preventable problems that led to it happening. The Columbia accident investigation suggested that the disaster had resulted from a "hole in NASA's safety culture" according to a piece in MSNBC. Each disaster led to measures of buttress astronaut safety, regardless of cost or time required.

In theory, space shuttles could have been launched within a couple of months of the Challenger disaster, when the warm weather would have alleviated the stress on the SRB O ring that led to the destruction of the orbiter. But no one was willing to fly until the O ring and every other problem was fixed.

The Bottom Line

There will always be a tradeoff in space flight between safety on the one hand and the time and expense required to make that safety happen to the fullest extent possible. The question is how much money and how many lives are we willing to spend in the exploration of space?

Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker. He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the L.A. Times, and The Weekly Standard.