John Schwartz of NYT has written "NASA Is Said to Loosen Risk Standards for Shuttle" published today. My cost benefit analysis is here.

The statistics can be simplified. What are the failure modes? What are their probabilities? How much do those probabilities overlap? What rate is it OK for the shuttle to fail? How much does it cost to mitigate the failure modes? Stack rank them according to the highest increase in safety for the lowest cost. Go to work.

So we have a failure mode of about 1% based on 100 trials. So far it has cost $2 billion to mitigate it. That implies that NASA is acting as if the value of the orbiter and crew on each flight is $7 billion or more to make the benefits of the fix outweigh the cost ($2 billlion to achieve a less than 1% reduction in the probability of a fail in 28 flights. $2 billion/(28 * 1%) = $7 billion). The families of the 9/11 victims each received $2.1 million. To compensate the families of astronauts who may die at the same level would cost $15 million. At commercial prices of $16 million for a Falcon V which delivers about 1/4 of a shuttle's worth to the ISS, we could buy 443 flights for $7 billion not counting range and payload costs or over 100 shuttles flights' worth. Even using the Ariane at $4,000/lb according to Futron's 2002 price estimate we could buy 28 shuttle flights' worth of Ariane payload for $5.6 billion. With viable outside commercial options that are less expensive to build and operate than the shuttle is to just operate, the sale price of the shuttle would be zero. We should not be treating it like a $7 billion asset. So perhaps the cost/benefit analysis is a little off at NASA.

Or maybe the following quote from AWST, 4/11/2005 (subscription required) will give you a better feel for what is really going on at NASA:

"We had one place in the backpack where, because of the confined space, the wire bend was tighter than the specified engineering limit was. And the EVA folks said it will cost us $100,000 to fix this," [Wayne Hale, the deputy shuttle program manager] said. "Well, in the space business, $100,000 is not a lot of money, so I said go fix this."

This man should be relieved and someone put in place someone who can explain cost-benefit to the public.

Hrmmm, edible shuttle components in an oxygen rich atmosphere doesn't sound prudent to me. Food has a relatively high energy content which presumably would also be the case for anything edible on the Shuttle. That sounds like a fire hazard to me! Besides from what I gather, oxygen is the real bottleneck.

But this makes more sense in a long term trip (eg, six month flight to Mars) where one both needs a lot of food and can store/strap things outside of the ship's atmosphere.

$100,000 is not a lot of money,

Is there a link for that quote?

Anyone expecting economic rationality from NASA hasn't been paying much attention for the past thirty-plus years.

There's also a strong hidden assumption in the story that there's some simple and (relatively, given the management environment) inexpensive change one could make to the shuttle or to its operating procedure that would make it significantly safer to operate.

AFAICT there isn't anything out there.

$100,000 _isn't_ a great deal of money in many fields which involve engineering and technical consulting and work to be done. Based on our (meaning the consulting business I work for) internal all in cost assumptions $100,000 is around 6 man months work. Certainly in many IT companies the cost of employing an individual for a year is significantly more than $100K one you include payroll, overheads and so forth.

When you then have to include impact on other areas, material changes and so forth - it looks pretty cheap to me for pretty much any engineering or technical endevour.

If Rand isn't looking for money in that sort of order of magnitude or greater he's selling himself sort.

While I'm no shuttle fan, the problem with just looking at the shear costs of using something else that's cheaper ignores the other overheads that come in. Unless, for example, you have some kind of orbital transfer tug - you have to design some kind of transfer vehicle to fit your Falcon/Arianne/whatever so that your payload gets to where you want it. That's more money.

Although, cheap disposables and some kind of easy to replace/make tug makes far far more sense to me.

Daveon: If the benefit is ?? and the cost is $100,000, then the right question to ask is what's the benefit, not it's only $100,000 so let's just do it. If it is too expensive to measure, it should be bounded and ranked against other opportunities.

Phil: Right. If the shuttle risk reduction is 0.5% then the shuttle is being treated as a $14 billion asset. If its risk reduction is 0.1%, then the shuttle is being treated as a $70 billion asset.

Rand: Hope springs eternal that the next guy will do better.

Brian: Linked in piece now. Subscription required.

Karl: Yes, LOx from the main fuel tank. They store food OK in the lockers. I think having mylar juice bags as seat cushions wouldn't be too flammable. Leave it to the engineers to optimize. They should just be sure they are optimizing the right objective. Not lowest dry mass, but highest value of useful payload.

Question to the engineering types, has anyone ever done a cost in todays dollars assesment of the Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria, Mayflower, etc. Or on how many ships were lost in world exploration vs. cost in todays dollars. just the dollar amounts can be done obviously, putting a cost of 50 17th century sailors against seven or 10 or 20 astronauts is a no brainer. Most of us are worth something to someone, and others of us.......

My point is we are so dead set against any human loss, in any profession, or cause these days we forget that everyone who ever went into space made the DECISION to do so. They knew it was dangerous and chose to go anyway. Just like sailors and explorers of centuries gone by. More importantly, the MSM makes it seem that they in fact did not know the risk.

Yeah, yeah, yeah I know its not strict exploration like finding a route to India, or exploring Darkest Africa, but going into space above the globe is the best analogy out there today to exploration of the globe circa fourteenth thru early twentieth centuries.

The real break will come once a commercial venture is able to put people in orbit. Then congress will have to deal with the ridiculous difference in cost for which the taxpayers have been footing the bill.

>If the benefit is ?? and the cost is $100,000, then the right question to ask is what's the benefit, not it's only $100,000 so let's just do it. If it is too expensive to measure, it should be bounded and ranked against other opportunities.

And how much does that cost benefit analysis cost? If the manager is prepared to sign off on a $100K change, I suspect that your answer is in there. If the all in cost for an engineer employed at NASA is in the $150,000 ball park (which wouldn't be too unreaonable), then having one or a small team spend a few weeks/months on the kind of analysis you ask for will be burning cash too.

The alt.space community can get away with a lot because a lot of engineering time is, like with many exciting start ups, free or at dramatically reduced costs. Most people don't have the luxary of working for fun - most do it to feed their families.

Steve, the problem with the comparison with Colombus is that while the costs were enormous, the rewards in money terms were huge. He was looking for a sea and trade spice route to the Indies which was worth a fortune then - he failed but did find lots of gold which was also important. If we discovered bucket loads of magical "Unobtanium" on the moon these discussions would be completely moot as getting money and investment for government and alt.space activity would be easy and screw the lives lost.

The trouble is we don't have the economic incentive to go.

The alt.space community can get away with a lot because a lot of engineering time is, like with many exciting start ups, free or at dramatically reduced costs. Most people don't have the luxary of working for fun - most do it to feed their families.

I don't buy that. Maybe a number of people don't have the "luxury" of living within their means, but to say that they don't have the time to work for fun? There's an awful lot of people engaging in leisure activities out there.

Sam, in Mr. Hale's defense, if the process of figuring out how risky the wire bend was more expensive than the fix (and presumably you'd have to do one and/or the other), then it's cheaper to go with the fix. I get the feeling that at NASA you'd have to put together a group to evaluate how dangerous the wire bend would be. That could suck up $100,000 of worker time easily especially if a number of people outside the committee were contacted for information. And of course, it's all wasted money, if they decide to go with the fix.

If you are $2 billion over budget, the answer if it is too costly to figure out whether to fix something or not is to just not fix it.

If you are within budget, the way to choose what to fix and what not to fix if it is too expensive to figure out exactly is to do a best guess, rank according to the best guess and then only do the fixes that are ranked with the highest priority. That is the only way to stay within the cost-benefit budget. Otherwise the costs exceed the benefits, the program is over budget and the safety follows from there being no program because it is cancelled years early!

Sam, I'm not defending NASA's approach to risk analysis. I'm just saying that given the limitations of the system (which incidentally Mr. Hale may be in part responsible for), he seems to have acted optimally to contain costs. We can talk about all the better ways of doing things, but NASA doesn't do them.

> Maybe a number of people don't have the "luxury" of living within their means, but to say that they don't have the time to work for fun? There's an awful lot of people engaging in leisure activities out there.

I'd have to then ask what is an "awful" lot. I'm sure there are some, but I'd not like to guess how many nor how much time they could really contribute?

I don't think this issue is particularly NASA, any large engineering or consulting organisation has the same type of issues. The problem is in how you *do* large scale engineering. Sure, you can side step a lot of this and "free" help works - but engineering costs money, a lot of money and the harder it is the more people you need involved.

Unless a small number of people can do it in a garage you're going to find it challenging.

>Phil: Right. If the shuttle risk reduction is 0.5% then the shuttle is being treated as a $14 billion asset. If its risk reduction is 0.1%, then the shuttle is being treated as a $70 billion asset.

No. If the risk reduction is 1%, then the cost of a failure TO THE PROGRAM is treated as being $14 billion. To consider only the cost of an orbiter is to believe that a failure of an orbiter will not have political consequences, and that the failure of one orbiter will not change the value of the remaining orbiters.

When an orbiter failure grounds the entire manned space program for several years, the cost of a failure is much higher than the cost of the orbiter itself. For example, if another shuttle were to fail, it's quite possible that the entire program would be scrapped. That means the loss of one is the same as the loss of three. It also means added costs to accelerate the development of an alternative, or perhaps the added cost of abandoning ISS and Hubble and anything else the Shuttle was intended to accomplish before retirement.

The other factor here is that government bureaucracies operate in CYA mode all the time. When the tradeoff is, "My own money weighed against possible damage to my career", you get a very different answer than if the tradeoff is, "Some taxpayer's money weighed against possible damage to my career."