The Nucleus

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July 22, 2011

Ground Control to Sir Richard

With the end of the era of the space shuttle has come alot of speculation about the future of space travel. Who will run it? How much will it cost? Where will we go?   What will it accomplish? As private companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic have come to the forefront to offer a sort of astronaut fantasy camp for the super rich and future visions of family vacations to the moon, the most important question seems to be curiously overlooked - how safe will it be? Coincidentally, I was recently reading a fantastic book called Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception by Charles Seife which chronicles the distortion of numbers and statistics in the dissemination of news. The author happened to touch on the subject:

Airline magnate Richard Branson is hard at work trying to snooker private investors. Branson is currently running a private spaceflight enterprise, "Virgin Galactic," which within its first five years of operation is supposedly going to launch an estimated 3,000 passengers into space. Safely. "Virgin has a detailed understanding of what it takes to manage and operate complex transportation organizations....such as Virgin Atlantic Airlines and Virgin Trains which carry millions of passengers each year and have enjoyed superb safety records," brags the Virgin Galactic website. If you believe Virgin, spaceflight will be no riskier than a little jaunt on a private jet.
      Hogwash. By comparing spaceflight to train and plane travel, Virgin is effectively underestimating the huge risks you take when you strap yourself to a rocket. It's a very dangerous task to pack enough energy into a cylinder to get you into space - and it's equally dangerous when, falling through the atmosphere, you get that energy back and have to dissipate it away in the form of heat. Throughout the history of spaceflight, about one in a hundred human-carrying rockets has killed its passengers, and that risk seems unlikely to change in the near future.
       One chance in a hundred might not seem like so much, especially for the rare privilege of becoming an astromaut. But as far as risks go, it's extraordinarily high. For comparison, if today's U.S. passenger aircraft had a similar failure rate, there would be roughly 275 U.S. plane crashes every day. A one in a hundred chance of dying every time you set foot on a plane would doom the airline industry; a 1% chance of death is simply too risky for any form of transportation to be commercially viable. If the historical failure rate holds, at Virgin Galactic's projected launch rate of one flight per week, there would be only a one in three chance that Virgin Galactic goes for two years without a Challenger-type disaster. All in all, their chance of getting all 3,000 people into space and back safely in this scenario would be about half of one percent. People would almost certainly die, sooner rather than later. Even if the company survived the inevitable investigation and embarrasment, it would be jsut a matter of months before another explosion.
       In my opinion, Branson is downplaying the risks, which has helped him convince more than 250 astronaut wannabes to put down $30 million worth of deposits on rides into space. He's also sold politicians and the public on his vision. In 2005, New Mexico politicians started spending tens of millions of dollars to build a spaceport. Two counties even passed a sales tax to fund the project. As a smart businessman like Branson knows, downplaying risks can be very lucrative.