OrlandoNative wrote:drinksmuchcoffee wrote:
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I am sorry but you've hit upon one of my pet peeves. There is this meme that says, "except for the lack of political will we'd have Lunar Colonies, Space Cities, and manned missions to the outer planets by now."
I don't buy it.
Costs to orbit are on the order of $10k per kg. We are never going to have any space colonies at those prices. It just isn't possible economically. And lots of smart people have been working on the problem of lowering launch costs for decades without a whole lot of progress. Similarly, manned vehicle failure rates are unacceptably high, on the order of one out of 100 launches for the Shuttle and probably one out of 500-1000 launches for Soyuz. Getting to a more reasonable rate of one out of 10000 or more will require technology that we do not yet possess.
For my money (and some of it is my money) the considerable resources and effort spent on ISS would be more productively spent pursuing order-of-magnitude improvements in launch costs and vehicle reliability and safety.
I'm not saying it's entirely political. It's also social. Anyone who thinks the government can fix anything and everything obviously hasn't been very observant for the past half century or so.
I'm not going to say we'd have bases on Mars or routine journeys to the outer planets, but had we persevered after the original moon landings we could certainly have a decent orbital infrastructure and even moon bases by now.
As long as the government regulates travel; and controls certain technological experimentation and use, costs will remain high. What is needed to bring the cost down is some way of replacing chemical rockets with something else. Whether it's some sort of nuclear engine (which, of course, the government is loathe to let ordinary commercial entities to work on) or some breakthrough in physics, like the discovery of some way of generating anti-gravity, who knows? I doubt the latter is likely soon, but some sort of "hybrid" craft that used typical jet engines for lower altitude flight combined with some sort of non-combustion engine for higher altitude might be more cost effective. What brings the cost down is (1) adapting current technology to new usages, (2) doing away with "one time" usage, and (3) thinking "outside the box" whenever possible.
As for "manned vehicle failure" rates, tens of thousands of people are killed yearly in automobile crashes in the US alone. How many die in space or rocket accidents in the same time frame? If we still can't expect 0 fatalities utilizing vehicles that have been undergoing constant improvement for the past 100 years, why should we worry about every space fatality? Most auto accidents - even with fatalities - often go unreported by the media. Or at least relegated to the back pages of the "local news" section. I can't think of a *single* space accident that was so ignored, however.
*If* our ancestors had the same timid outlook we seem to have today, we'd either still be in Europe; or else the US would consist of only the Atlantic coast states. There was nothing "safe" about what the pioneers faced in moving westward. Why would we expect the exploration of space to be any different? If people are willing to take the risk, I say let them. Don't hold them back. Encountering problems leads to solutions. It's impossible to fix all problems if you don't know what they are to begin with, and the only way to really find them is to do something.
We seem to have forgotten that.
I think the relative risks of spaceflight are still extremely high, and high enough to be qualitatively different than the risks we accept from passenger vehicles or commercial air travel.
Space Shuttle (1981-2011) -- 135 flights, 2 vehicle losses with fatalities
Soyuz (1967-present) -- 130 flights, 2 flights with fatalities
Commercial Air Travel (Worldwide) (2014) -- 30 million flights, 21 accidents with fatalities
Passenger Vehicles (USA) (2015) -- 411 billion trips, 38300 fatalities
So spacecraft, according to our limited sample size (but over a time period of decades) seem to have fatalities on around 1 percent of flights. Soyuz probably actually does better, because the fatalities occurred on earlier flights (Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11) and might be considered test flights. How much better we can't and don't know, but it is unlikely the failure rate is much better than 1 out of 1000 flights with present technology.
Commercial air travel in 2014 had over 30 million flights with 21 accidents with fatalities. So that argues their "failure rate" per flight is better than 1 out of 100000.
Passenger Vehicles, which on a per-mile basis are more dangerous than commercial air travel, still show a "per trip failure rate" that is better than 1 out of 10000000.
That's what I meant when I said the reliability and safety of space travel need to improve by orders of magnitude. Sometimes I think the best thing for NASA would be a reincarnation of Hyman Rickover who could spend several decades pissing everyone off while keeping them alive.
As an added thought, I never realized there were more Shuttle flights than Soyuz flights, although Soyuz will likely surpass the Shuttle in the next couple of years.
