Blue Collar Space and the Omnipresence of Risk

You can’t eliminate all risk.

Does that mean you shouldn’t take risks?  Drive your car?  Go for a swim?

What I used to hear at the FAA was that if you wanted to reduce all risk of air travel you’d need to ground all the planes.  We don’t want that.  On the space side, I’d hear about accepting risk, residual risk, and the conflation of risk and safety.  It got downright metaphysical at times.

I was reminded of all those discussions as I read a particularly gripping story in award winning author Martin Shoemaker’s Blue Collar Space.  In “Not Close Enough,“ a team consisting of NASA and international astronauts sits in orbit around Mars but doesn’t get to go to the surface.  NASA has decided it’s too risky.  Not all the other space agencies agree, but the Bradbury is NASA’s ship.  The protagonist, Benjamin Cooper, is the mission commander and has to ride herd on a group of astronauts chomping at the bit to reach the surface.  Instead of heading down themselves, they remotely pilot uncrewed landers through the thin Martian atmosphere.  It’s not good enough.

[SPOILER ALERT] What Cooper doesn’t know is that his crew is going rogue, and teams are working out ways to get themselves to the planet below.  The first to leave the orbiting station, a JAXA astronaut, surprises Cooper with his flight.  Cooper orders him back and demands to know what the Japanese astronaut thinks he’s doing.

It was a dumb question, but Ishiro answered it anyway.  “I am doing what we should all be doing, Commander; going to Mars.  It is why we are here.  …  We are meant to explore, not play safe.”

But Ishiro isn’t the only one with these plans.  I won’t spoil the rest of the story, but I will say it’s pretty awesome.

Instead, let’s talk about another book.  Rand Simberg’s Safe is Not an Option—the title of which stands the famous quote on its head–presents a less emotionally intense but more methodical look at NASA’s current practices.  In brief, Simberg makes the case that NASA’s approach to space is expensive, hasn’t gotten us very far, and is expensive.  Also, it’s expensive.  It’s expensive because of the concern that the U.S. doesn’t actually see real value in going to space.  That being so, it follows logically that we shouldn’t risk people’s lives on it, and NASA therefore constantly loads on requirements to reduce risk in unquantifiable ways, but that cost real money.

The book starts with inspiring stories, many of which we are already familiar with; but when Simberg offers them as contrast to society’s current aversion to risk, it shows starkly how much we’ve changed since setting sail in wooden boats to face a hostile continent.  As Simberg notes:

No frontier in history has ever been opened without risk and loss of human life and the space frontier is no different. That we spend untold billions of dollars in a futile attempt to prevent loss of life is both a barrier to opening the space frontier, and a testament to the lack of national importance of doing so.

After showing the pitfalls of demanding perfect safety, Simberg raises an important issue. When the nation thought space was important, we were willing to take risks. All modes of transport carry risks, but we accept those risks because we need to get places. So, he asks, why do we need to go to space? He argues that the settlement of space is reason enough. He does not advocate abandoning safety requirements.  He does advocate abandoning the notion that it’s okay for long-haul trackers to suffer more fatalities than astronauts might.

Simberg believes that human settlement is important enough to allow for some measure of risk. Shoemaker’s fiction suggests other reasons:  the desire to explore, and the desire to be first, to win.  Others–like Heinlein did–see space as providing more elbow room, more liberty.  But you can’t get there by making it so expensive you can’t go.

I’m not sure that a government program such as NASA’s will be able to fix its issues.  Too many competing interests, from politicians’ concerns over appearances to program managers seeking risk ALARA  (As Low as Reasonably Achievable), render change difficult to impossible.  I set my hopes on the commercial sector.  Even with the FAA’s involvement as a regulator, there is more room for innovation and risk taking on the commercial side, and Congress tries to impose limits on regulatory agencies such as the FAA.  Congress requires the FAA to engage in cost-benefit analyses before imposing safety requirements.  The FAA may not unduly burden small businesses.  It has to seek public comment before finalizing rules.  It’s a different culture.  It’s constraining, too, but not in the same way.  And if a private person is willing to risk his or her life to go to the red planet, NASA shouldn’t have the ability to tell that person to stay in orbit.

So we can hope.

p.s. The rest of the stories in Blue Collar Space are really good, too.