Why is a private citizen risking his life any different from an government employee doing so?
I get all that, and even agree with parts of it. BUT, I’m a perfect candidate. I’ll sign a disclaimer of any legal liability. I’m single, with no dependents. Not really any close family members. I’m not so egotistical that I think I’m irreplaceable at work.
No insurance to pay out, no orphaned children, no family devastation. So, why should anyone be able to “not allow” me to go?
In any case I fully expect the timetable to become delayed. Sure they don’t have to actually figure out how things work, but still, MSF is a high risk experimental endeavor and it’s not as simple as “dust off an old Apollo nav solutions table and punch in a Free Return Trajectory into your newer, better system”.
Would rather this be done strictly by professionals doing serious testing than involve some rich dudes pulling a stunt. Still, hey, as long as it’s their own money and their own ass on the line, I’m not stopping anyone. Godspeed, leftfield6 
…And leaving aside the practical part, and the virtual certainty it will NOT happen that soon… well, I’d applaud the notion of targeting it for late 2018, so the Apollo 50th anniversaries could be kicked off in style; maybe even time it for Xmas Eve… (Let there be Light)
Given that these bozos can’t even manage to transport foam material on the ground, within one of their own sites, in a safe manner…
Yes, for sure.
Given that the same argument clearly applies with precisely equal force to support the “If God meant for man to fly, He would have given him wings” position, I can’t take it seriously.
While I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that no private citizen should be allowed to engage in what is currently a high risk space venture, there are two basic reasons why we (as a nation) should approach “space tourism” with a degree of caution; the first is the impact on personal liability law, and the second is the effect on future commercial space ventures (both crewed and uncrewed) as a whole. I’ll address both directly, but a short digression on the topic of risk as it applies to air and space activities is necessary.
When we talk about risk, the common person thinks in terms of rolling dice or flipping a coin; in such a case, we know the outcome closely follows a discrete statistical distribution and that the result is a random draw within that distribution so we can quantify the “risk” precisely. However, most real world activities with a small or no prior history do not follow this model; much of the potential failure modes are only poorly understood if at all, especially those pertaining to human failures and unexpected variability in processes. Until there is a substantial base of information about potential failures and their causes, any estimates of risk and the associated system-level reliability of complex systems are really very poor estimates and are typically not on the conservative side. This is why most major technological developments start from a small prototype basis and try to build up knowledge from controlled testing and (sometimes intentional) failures that have limited or no liability. As the technology or system develops, a set of ad hoc best practices emerge and eventually become codified as standards (industry or regulatory, depending on contract and application), and the risks become empirically quantified in an actuarial science sense.
Why is this important? A cursory look at the history of commercial aviation provides valuable lessons. While we know commercial airline travel today to be the safest form of travel by person-mile, early aviation was fraught with failures for both pilots/passengers and the general public on the ground. The lack of industry standards and regulatory controls meant that both aircraft manufacturers and pilots frequently repeated the same mistakes over and over with often deadly consequences, and yet the public was poorly versed in the risks they were taking. The June 30, 1956 mid-air collision between the United Airlines Flight 718 DC-7 and TWA Flight 002 Super Connie near the Grand Canyon, resulting in the deaths of all 128 people on board, due to multiple errors by both the pilots and air traffic controllers, was a watershed event for commercial aviation. The nation’s most deadly air crash, coming as it did after a string of previous commercial airliner failures, resulted in the creation of the FAA to control both civilian and military airspace, and was followed by regulatory control in Europe and elsewhere which largely mirrored the American systems. The number of failures due to poor communications and control were reduced, and the FAA went on later to impose maintenance and record-keeping requirements for airlines to assure that “cost control” measures did not unduly compromise public safety and undermine confidence in the burgeoning commercial airline industry. As a result, the airline industry has grown massively while the safety record, while not spotless, is overall better than any other form of transportation by more than an order of magnitude, and the impacts of that have even bled over to nations which have more lax regulatory controls simply by virtue of better design and knowledge.
Getting back to the two issues listed above, while you can sign a waiver or contract which indemnifies a company or joint venture with your companions against “normal” failures, it is well demonstrated that courts will not recognize indemnification against deliberate or gross negligence. NASA gets away with indemnification by the virtue of first using experienced test pilots with intimate knowledge of the space craft on high risk development flights like Gemini and the early Apollo and Shuttle missions, and second because, well, they’re the government. Private industry would not be able to leverage the same degree of acceptance of unquantified risk with civilian passengers, which is a problem often discussed within commercial space law. (There is the argument that what occurs in space is outside of the jurisdictions of terrestrial courts, but the current interpretation is that a launch vehicle or spacecraft remains the jurisdiction and responsibility of the nation which launched and controls it, and the United States is very likely to apply normal liability strictures within that domain.)
If a spacecraft life support system fails because someone bought counterfeit lithium hydroxide canisters without examining or testing them, that can be easily made into a case for gross negligence in that the failure is both preventable and catastrophic. And there are so very many things on something as complex as a closed life support and environmental system like a spacecraft, and so many ways for it to fail in a manner that is rapidly lethal, unrepairable, and not capable of practical redundancy, that an incredibly amount of develop and qualification/acceptance testing is required just to get to a reasonable level of assured reliability. Space enthusiasts often decry how government-run programs are “dunned” by so many people doing so much “busywork” (e.g. inspection, testing, analysis) and generating the supposed "blizzard of paperwork), and it is true that there is certainly waste and redundant effort in some areas, but every test, inspection, and document exists because somewhere along the way something fell through the cracks and almost or actually caused a failure. We have the standards and processes for a reason, and the reason is that once a launch vehicle leaves the ground there is generally very little we can do to fix anything that goes wrong other than just intentionally terminate it.
People sometimes point to Apollo 13, the “successful failure” as an example of how ingenuity and bravery can overcome failures, but what those people, most of whom seem to know only the often misportrayed details in the Ron Howard film, don’t realize is that Apollo 13 was a very fortunate failure. Had it failed much earlier during its trip to Lunar orbit the astronauts likely would have frozen to death, and had it failed after they injected into Lunar orbit, and certainly after the Lunar descent, they would never have been able to make it back to an Earthbound trajectory before their supplies ran out. As for the ingenuity portrayed in the film, the use of the Lunar Module as a “lifeboat” and virtually every emergency procedure shown (including the multiple firings of the Lunar Module Descent Engine to correct the return trajectory) was developed long before the lunar missions started. Apollo 13 is not so much a story of inevitable triumph over failure as it is good contingency planning combined with the blind pig luck in having a near-catastrophic failure occur during the only segment of the mission from which it would be recoverable, and had a failure occurred for similar reasons (lack of updating the component design to the current revision and not following recommended practices for cable routing) it would likely be considered gross negligence in the current legal environment, and with very good reason.
As for the impact on the industry as a whole, a failure shown to be due to negligence would have a chilling effect both on the company at fault (and any vendors shown to be culpable or even associated) as well as overzealous demand for investigation and regulatory oversight, with competitors both using regulation to try to hedge an advantage and simultaneously trying to distance themselves from the particulars of that failure. This kind of “competition” is not healthy for an industry, especially one in which margins between success and failure (both functionally and financially) are already slim. Space enthusiasts often complain that when there is a failure of a crewed space launch system that the risk adverse managers of NASA (described to me once by an advocate as “nattering nabobs of negativism” without a note of irony) stop all missions and spend many months sorting through data and debris, but this is because there are some many things that can possibly go wrong and the information is often incomplete or leads to an inaccurate conclusion from the first cursory review. An example of this is how people commonly believe that the Challenger failure occurred because one of the solid rocket motors “blew up” (not at all true, it was terminated by the Range Safety Officer after more than 30 seconds of uncontrolled propulsive flight) or that the failure occurred because the ambient temperature was so cold that the O-ring failed (a possible contributor, but the root cause was identified to be a combination of LOX boiloff pooling in the exact area of the failed O-ring, a poor joint configuration to resist unload of the O-ring in bending, and a beyond three sigma wind shear condition on the day of launch). The actual failure that doomed Challenger, of course, was not a functional failure of SRB but the jetting of gas from the field joint cutting into the LH tank. It is really an illustration of how failures in complex systems are often due to the interplay of different factors which by themselves don’t result in a failure in ground or subsystem testing.
Space exploration and travel is already a really complex and often unquantifiably risky endeavor, and to go from “never launched a single rodent into space and successfully returned” to “sending non-expert paying customers around the moon” in less than two years just invites catastrophe. Failures will inevitably occur at some point, of course, just by the natural hazards posed by space travel, but I frankly can’t see how SpaceX can possibly be ready to do this with any kind of acceptable technical risk posture; even if they demonstrate sending crews to Low Earth Orbit or the International Space Station on their optimistically projected timeline, sending even experienced astronauts out to deep space creates a whole new set of risks and challenges, from communication and telemetry to thermal management, environmental control, and of course, foreseeing and preparing for contingencies with any realistic hope of recovery. And things fuck up all the time; every single Gemini and Apollo mission had at least one significant anomaly that required deviation from the standard checklist, and several had potential mission-ending problems during ascent or landing, notwithstanding the rushed state of the LM to meet the 1970 deadline and the design flaws only caught by diligent technicians and astronauts during vigorous inspections after the spacecraft was delivered. Will a commercial organization, focused as much or more on immediate profitability be as devoted to long term mission success and reliability?
SpaceX has had notable success for a young aerospace startup, but also some pretty dramatic failures (and some behind the scenes near failures and stumbles) in their race to be first, and they are inarguably one of the two or three best prepared and experienced commercial space ventures. Should they have a failure attributed to a lack of engineering rigor or oversight, it will likely potentially affect the entire commercial space industry in a multitude of ways, and the profitability of space tourism is highly questionable at best versus the ever-growing Earth surveillance and telecommunications market. It makes little sense to risk the viability of the industry in the near term for what is primarily a public relations stunt. Musk seems to think in terms of a software startup, where you launch your beta and see how it tests “in the real world” and then update the final release accordingly, whereas failures of actual hardware that is defying Newtonian physics on the whimsical “breath of a dragon” tend to have much greater and unrecoverable consequences.
Stranger
Not to hijack the thread, but this reasoning is not at all far off from, say, “If we allow people to have gay sex, there will be a higher rate of HIV/STDs, since gays have more HIV/STDs than heterosexuals, and we all pay for that healthcare cost and associated societal burden.”
Stranger, do you mind my asking what your occupation or previous occupation was?
NASA? NTSB?
Just curious.
I’d go - in fact, I’d be a pretty good choice. I fly jets for a living, I’m healthy and have no dependents *. Call me, Elon!
- Unfortunately, I don’t have a billion dollars laying around either…
Same. I got a bag packed, just in case.
Well, I was once referred to by a colleague as “the Indiana Jones of engineers”, which I was not entirely certain to be a compliment, as I do try to not be “making this up as I go along.”.
In seriousness, I have worked in both the government contractor and commercial aerospace industry and on unsolicited proposals for non-profit space advocacy groups. I don’t claim to know everything about space launch systems and space travel (or even everything about my narrower fields of discipline) but I’ve learned a lot from working on various proposals and adjunct studies, and the general lesson I’ve taken away is that the things people think are easy (like just sending satellites to LEO) are hard, the hard things (sending a spacecraft beyond Earth orbit) are extremely difficult, and the extremely difficult (sending anything to another star system) essentially impossible within the current framework of physics as we understand it. Adding people to the mix increases the difficult, complexity, and effort by a couple of ordes of magnitude at a minimum, and of all components in a mission, people (both on the crew and on the ground) are the most prone to error from confusion, fatigue, or miscommunication.
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t try to do hard or extremely difficult things (and look for ways to reduce “essentially impossible…” to merely “extremely difficult”) but we need to be realistic about risk versus opportunity, including legal, political, and especially financial impacts on future viability, and what can be done to test those assumptions and manage unaboidable risk. And as an engineer who has witnessed the result of unethical or incompetent decisions creating destructive hazards, I’ll say that taking undue and uninformed risk is rarely a worthwhile gamble in any normal environment, often resulting in regret and recrimination over a mistake that could have been easily avoided by an objective critical review or just listening to one’s internal cautionary voice that tells you not to leap over a gaping crevice.
Stranger
I am 60 years old and grew up idolizing astronauts and being fascinated by all things space-related, like so many of my generation. Yes, I would go and I would go now if they would let me, lest it be too late for me to go.
I have lived a long, full, life and if I were to perish doing something I have dreamed of my entire life, I would be just fine with that.
I’m 29 but think much the same but don’t want a painful spacefaring death (e.g. burning to death in reentry); hypoxia would be better.
This, or more likely, shitting myself out of fear the whole time. I’ll spare myself and any companions the trouble. :o
After the testing, I would agree. But I point out that at this time, none of the steps you mentioned have actually happened. There hasn’t been a test flight of the Dragon 2 capsule-previous flights have all been with an earlier generation. The Dragon hasn’t demonstrated the ability to reenter at the speeds a lunar flight will require, in fact there hasn’t been a single person to have ever flown in any Dragon capsule. So, buying tickets for a trip around the moon is a bit premature-if safety is a consideration. So, once the testing is complete, it will be an interesting trip.
I think it’s a pretty good guess that the contract includes something like “trip will not take place until at least one NASA crewed flight with no significant anomalies.”
The Dragon 2 has undergone the first step of its launch escape system testing. That is a pretty significant thing since it is a completely new component vs. the Dragon 1, and required new rocket engines, propellant systems, control systems, and so on. It’s probably the single biggest long pole with regards to crewed flight. They have yet to complete the in-flight abort test, however.
I think there are enough rich people in the world who would be willing to undertake the risks of going around the Moon even without a prior first safe flight demonstration.
I don’t see the appeal. Basically I’d be paying someone to torture me for a week so I can see pictures I could download off the internet.
It’s the difference between watching the Superbowl game in the comfort of home with all the closeup camera shots or… not.
The thing is, you could substitute ANY risky endeavor in his logic and ban it. There’s nothing special about spaceflight except that it’s possibly more risky than other things out there that people can currently engage in, like say… climbing Mt. Everest. We don’t know though at this point.