I have a piece up on that subject over at Reason. It’s a reprise of some of the arguments I make in the book, which I now expect to be available next week (my printer screwed up). I’d hoped to have them available for SpaceUp LA this weekend, but that’s not going to happen.
18 thoughts on “How Safe Should A Frontier Be?”
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Good article, but I can’t help but visualize regulators patting you on the head and telling you to go play outside while we take of this.
The problem of the nanny state is far more fundamental and should be rejected completely.
We are through the looking glass with Obama telling us 6 is a big number and 15 million isn’t.
We are losing an un-lose-able war, midterm correction or not.
Congrats on the article. I liked it.
Oh yeah, now that you have the cover art, maybe you could update your icon for your twitter account for your book?
Like Trent, I too liked the article, but probably from a much less well-informed viewpoint. However, as a 27 year old I watched Armstrong land on the Moon and have, ever since, wondered, what would have proceeded had he pranged it and been unable to return?
Remember, this was Nixon’s NASA, the one that abandoned Apollo/Spacelab technology for the white elephant “Shuttle”.
Great article.
There’s only one way to fly it total safety – never fly.
Some have really taken to heart…
“Strange game. The only way to win is not to play…”
A robust civilization has death. Not taking risk is a sure way to be surpassed.
I’m thinking about the Scott-Amundsen race for the South Pole. Amundsen’s team won. Scott’s died. Interestingly, Scott led a much larger expedition that did much more research, letting us learn more about Antarctica. Still, though, much good came from that exploration and race. What happened to Scott’s race team is tragic, but it didn’t stop research in Antarctica. OK, the two World Wars delayed research for a few decades, but said research has now continued for some time now. I’ve even known a few people who have done research in Antarctica.
There are some things, though, that are different about space. The environment is, in too many ways, hostile to long term human habitation presently. There are radiation problems and gravity problems. Everyone who spends more that a short time up there experiences those problems. Right now we can’t create a large, self sustaining human colony out there. To do so will require lots of time, lots of learning and a culture that is much more open and democratic than the contemporary aerospace one is.
Low Earth orbit resupplied with expendable launch vehicles is all we know about living in space. If there were resources available for industry, it’d be a completely different environment.
Trent, what a nice setup for me to say, “Mars.”
Chuck, you should comment here more often.
Interesting comment, Ken. A few weeks back on his blog Roger Launius wrote a piece Humanity and the Extreme Environment of Space. He says there what I have thought for some time. He points out the problems that Biosphere 2 encountered. When I went to the Humans2Mars conference in DC last May, I sat in on the session on health issues. It was not reassuring. If we can’t create a healthy enclosed long term environment for humans on Earth, I suspect we will have greater problems doing so elsewhere.
Will we eventually be able — or at least some kind of relatives of ours — elsewhere than Earth? I think we eventually we will be able to. But it is going to take some time. Elon Musk wants to retire on Mars. I don’t that is possible. We might be able to pull off some sort of stunt flyby, even a landing, in this century, but a longer term residence on that planet? I’m skeptical.
I might be a bit more able than most contemporary humans to think in the really long term and in really more open, democratic ways. I was brought up by a family that, on my father’s side, has been doing that for centuries. I can imagine taking a trip back to 1622 in Doctor Who’s TARDIS and showing films such as D-Day, the Sixth of June, Apollo 13, 2001: A Space Odyssey and more, via things like laptop computers and projectors, to King James and his court at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Why did I pick out that location and date? I did so because my ancestor John Donne became dean of the Cathedral in 1621. It is very weird to read a book about some ancestor who lived 400 years ago and see similarities between him and you. BTW, he did participate in one voyage of exploration way back then.
Humanity has accomplished incredible things in the past four centuries. I think we can accomplish even more in the future. But L5 by 95? That didn’t happen, alas. L5 in 2495? That, and far more, I can believe in.
I’ll try to comment more here in the future. Rand’s a good man helping bring about a remarkable future. We don’t always agree, but both of us are committed to free, democratic societies where things get better for everyone.
If we can’t create a healthy enclosed long term environment for humans on Earth, I suspect we will have greater problems doing so elsewhere.
That’s certainly reasonable, but I think it’s worth a closer examination. My take on the closed environment failures are twofold, bad ideology and lousy commitment. Not by the volunteers but by the organizations that were supposed to support them.
The fact is we already know how to keep people alive long term. We could just keep them in sealed environments and forget ISRU damn the costs. But that isn’t right either.
I don’t think sticking our toe in the water is right. After mitigating everything we can think of it’s time to jump in. We may surprise ourselves at our success even if some do die. Mars One, sending four with life support from the earth is a lot like a closed environment except for ISRU water and so is a suicide mission as currently described because it depends too much on two life support units that will break. That mission can be fixed.
They need to reconsider life support in some fundamental ways. The transition to full ISRU should start with bringing the materials, which can be relatively low mass, from earth if it can’t come from mars, for sealing large excavations. Because, although they might be able to stay for quite some time in tuna cans, they shouldn’t.
Let’s look at the biosphere experiment failures…
1. During the first year the eight inhabitants reported continual hunger.
Bad support. You plan on having more than they could possibly consume which means a combination of dried food from earth and plenty of energy on mars. Under supply of energy is the most serious problem they will face because it leads to low resources everywhere else. We shouldn’t have to guess at crop rates. That’s something we should know before we ever go. We provide them with live soil. We provide them with hydroponics (not the water other than for the first landing. Water is abundant on mars if you have power.) They will be responsible for making more soil from martian resources but should not be dependent on it at first. Note this was fixed for all subsequent years. It should not have happened in the first place.
2. They consumed the same low-calorie, nutrient-dense diet…
Don’t force them to be guinea pigs for some fad… over supply them with a diverse diet that they can choose from. Include vitamin pills which next to seeds are very good space travelers.
3. CO2 levels that “fluctuated wildly”
Bad support. We aren’t sending people to mars as a science experiment. We’re sending them there to live. CO2 scrubbing needs to be robust and low maintenance. It should be a combination of what we send and pure chemistry that they can develop ISRU. This is gaslight technology. There is no reason we can’t get this right.
The fluctuation was because of crops and small areas of different ecologies. Martians should have the heavy equipment to dig large areas for experimentation and these experiments should not be depended on for life support. The first crews, up to a few dozen, are small enough not to need that assuming they have enough energy for water and oxygen.
4. Insect pests
We don’t experiment with insect ecologies on the first landing. Pollination can be handle manually for the low yields they need. Whatever stow aways hitch a ride are more likely to be an annoyance than a survival issue. Later, once the colony is more established they can import all the ants, bees and other crawlies they like.
5. Drop in oxygen.
Energy… an abundant surplus.
6. Carbon dioxide was reacting with exposed concrete
Good to know. They will watch for things like that and use better sealants.
7. They had financial problems.
Another caution. Count the costs before you go.
8. Temperature control.
Abundant usable energy is again the solution. The heat exchangers should be machines they can build and rebuild relatively easy and not dependent on things they bring with them. Electric generators are very simple to build if we teach colonists the skills. Methane motors should also be designed for simplicity and reliability. They can get fancy later. They will need machinists.
Mars provides a huge heat sink not available in space which makes things easier.
9. Other issues. If we provide enough resources they will be able to deal with anything other than a direct nuclear strike. There really are no show stoppers.
Chemists, machinists and their tools along with abundant, redundant, over supply of energy along with radio communication from earth should keep them alive fine. We haven’t lost all people in an artificial environment since Apollo 1 (crashing an environment is something else.) We can do this.
Let me directly address this dire quote…
The goal of keeping people alive in an enclosed, self-contained environment whisking through space may be beyond human capabilities for many centuries.
With all due respect this is very misleading. It’s only true if we assume being in space means being cut off from essential resources. We’re not talking about Bruce Dern alone in space with cute robots.
Colonists on mars are not going to see a sudden crash of life support. They aren’t going to have to wait 26 months for something essential either. What we send will be backup for what they already have. Because mars has all the essentials for life, unlike a sealed spacecraft. Biosphere failed, but the volunteers all survived because it wasn’t a totally sealed environment. Neither is mars.
Before somebody says, “it’s because they could leave,” no it wasn’t. They could have lived in Biosphere until they all died of old age if not for funding.
Interesting to bring up the Scott-Amundson “race.”
Scott was better funded but Amundson’s approach, learning from the Inuit in his Arctic expeditions (the story about how they had a laugh at his expense until they taught him how to grease the sledge runners), was safer. Not just because he survived and the “other guy” didn’t, but there was a sense that Amundon knew what he was doing in that environment, and Scott, tragically, didn’t.
Rand, the story is not between the cautious, safe, NASA approach and reckless private space that is going to get people killed in pursuit of a frontier. It is that NASA’s expensive approach to safety doesn’t seem to be working.
In NASA, there appears to be Cargo Cult safety. Their crewed activities are safe, not by design but by political decree. Kinda like Feynman working his way down the organizational chart, where the folks on top regarded a Shuttle accident as a 1 in 10^6 event whereas da guys in the cubicles said, “A chance of an accident. Dunno, meybe one in every hunred”, which the engineers offered as an estimate because that is the frequency at which rockets have been failing from the beginning of this enterprise, and an estimate that to rough numbers was prophetic.
The problem with NASA is not that they have a “failure is not an option” view to safety, it is that for all of their spending and all of their “processes”, they are the Scott of space exploration and are working off weak designs and architectures.
Paul, we are in considerable agreement. I’ve been an advocate of reforms at NASA (and elsewhere) that would make them much more open and likely to succeed at really expanding out into space.
Rand, the story is not between the cautious, safe, NASA approach and reckless private space that is going to get people killed in pursuit of a frontier. It is that NASA’s expensive approach to safety doesn’t seem to be working.
It’s both, and I discuss that extensively in the book.
Ken,
Interesting points that you make. I will note, though, we still have a great to learn. The NASA way was good for a stunt back in the 1960s. STEM people, though, in general can be too narrow for their own good.
We certainly still have a great deal to learn. It would be tragic to send the first group unprepared for what they may face. But let’s not be afraid of the dark. Volunteers are willing to risk their lives putting us years ahead of where we’d be if none did. Those would be real heros regardless of living or dying.
We should simulate all the known risks and see how difficult they are to actually mitigate not forgetting to look at real life examples where we already do.