A blog post with the European perspective, from Jan Woerner. It’s almost as though he read my book.
3 thoughts on “Risk In Space”
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A blog post with the European perspective, from Jan Woerner. It’s almost as though he read my book.
Comments are closed.
I attended a Commercial Spaceflight Federation breakfast this morning, featuring Bob Walker on the Trump space vision. During the Q&A, Alan Stern stood up and, rather than asking a question, made a statement. In essence, he said, every transportation system kills people, and the earlier in development it is, the more people it kills. We are coming up on a new wave of human space flight, and as sad as it is, people are going to get hurt, and people are going to die. But we can’t be paralyzed for three years at a time every time it happens.
Bob agreed, saying that we need to educated Congress on the fact that real expansion into space isn’t a risk-free proposition, and they can’t stop it every time an accident happens. I was gratified both by Alan’s statement, and Bob’s reply.
Private space development will help. But the problem will be preventing political pressure on the FAA to force cease-and-desist orders whenever there is a fatality. This will be especially a problem for fatalities during launch or landing ops when there is no remnant space occupation (folks still in a station or hab post incident). Less so when there are still folks in space. Less so if the fatality is unrelated to transport infrastructure. The *political* workaround here is to make sure you *always* keep someone in space after the first up-transport. A macabre form of insurance…
Since there will be BA330 stations on orbit before the ISS is “fundamentally transformed” out of NASA’s budget, this “cease and desist from spaceflight” meme shouldn’t be a problem for the field in general, though it may strongly burden any single launcher company. Once Boeing/ULA, SpaceX, SNC, and Blue Origin are all flying crewed capsules to orbit, losing one out of the four for a while shouldn’t hurt as badly. Indeed, those attempting to shut the field down may be less pushy once their targets become so diverse they cannot excuse shutting them all down for a single accident.
The worst problem could come from a debris field “cascade event”, which would excuse many idiocies by lawyers. One of the few things that a Trump/Putin rapport may make possible is a cleanup of the debris field’s main elements, the old upper stages from the Cosmos spy satellites of the USSR. Russia cannot afford it anytime in the next 10 years, but the US could, especially if they use the Tethers Unlimited schemes for electrodynamic tethers to maneuver and either gather stages for recycling or dump them into the Pacific for disposal.