QUESTIONING SLI: Rand Simberg also tackles a topic a few of us were discussing at work last week: the automation aspects of SLI.
Our conversation took a different tack, however, focusing not on the damage a government-sponsored unmanned reusable launch vehicle would do to the possible market for private space launch startups, but rather on why we need a man in the loop on the manned flights at all.
The gist of the conversation was that the pilot and copilot on a Shuttle (or its successor) do little but monitor the launch and landing phases of a mission — activities which are either partly or wholly automated. So why not eliminate those positions altogether, and acknowledge that there is very little the crew (any member of the crew) could do in the event of a catastrophic failure. Acknowledge that, and accept that it is part of the risk of space travel, just as we today accept that there is very little a flight crew or the passengers can do in the event of a catastrophic failure on a jumbo jet.
This led into a discussion of one of the crown jewels of the SLI/2GRLV/3GRLV/etc. approach, that of reducing “risk” by a factor of ten with each vehicle generation. It’s understandable that an agency which lives under the threat of Congressional budgeteers using any excuse they can to cut its funding would focus on eliminating any conceivable source of risk so as to avoid providing them with another well-publicized catastrophic failure as a reason to do so. However, how safe is safe? What is an acceptable level of risk? When will we get past the point of expecting spaceflight to be as safe as a milk run — or safer, since it’s already less risky to fly in space than to drive to the corner market?
Can anyone imagine the U.S. military being dominated by such risk aversion?
No, I’m not suggesting that NASA should look at astronauts as though they were Doritos — “Burn them up, we’ll train more!” — but rather that, if space is ever to be opened up to development and settlement, we will need to define an acceptable tradeoff between risk and return…one which does not hobble our efforts from the very beginning with unattainable safety goals for what is (like any other activity) a business with its inherent risks. Yes, the dangers of spaceflight can be managed, but we should not allow our inability to completely eliminate them now, today, deter or delay us from the larger goals of space exploration.
But Simberg hits the right nail with his essay — why should NASA be pursuing this line of development at all? If there is one thing the EELV project proved, it was that heavy government involvement in and subsidization of “commercial” space development activities puts the left-out startups at a financial disadvantage, thus destroying the ability of an organic, self-supporting market to take root and grow.