See my proposal for a decentralized approach to developing space in this week’s The Space Review here. What people don’t seem to understand about my subsidy proposal that I first put forward last year (See recommendations 10 and 14) is that NASA and DoD would no longer be directing the space programs. It would be private industry and individual citizens who could book whatever missions they wanted. That would lead to the following benefits:

1) Freedom and liberty
2) Capitalism instead of central planning allocating capacity
3) Private development instead of government development

Government would be the primary beneficiary of cost savings since they are the primary space user. They would have more responsibility since all of space would become open for business.

Private industry and citizens would have new services that would be less valuable at first, but would be more price elastic than the government demand.

Thomas James expresses a fear about government lunar bases, and NASA, that I share. We’ve got to break out of Apollo mode. I hope that the new administrator understands this, but so far, I see little sign of it.

John Schwartz of NYT has written “NASA Is Said to Loosen Risk Standards for Shuttle” published today. My cost benefit analysis is here.

The statistics can be simplified. What are the failure modes? What are their probabilities? How much do those probabilities overlap? What rate is it OK for the shuttle to fail? How much does it cost to mitigate the failure modes? Stack rank them according to the highest increase in safety for the lowest cost. Go to work.

So we have a failure mode of about 1% based on 100 trials. So far it has cost $2 billion to mitigate it. That implies that NASA is acting as if the value of the orbiter and crew on each flight is $7 billion or more to make the benefits of the fix outweigh the cost ($2 billlion to achieve a less than 1% reduction in the probability of a fail in 28 flights. $2 billion/(28 * 1%) = $7 billion). The families of the 9/11 victims each received $2.1 million. To compensate the families of astronauts who may die at the same level would cost $15 million. At commercial prices of $16 million for a Falcon V which delivers about 1/4 of a shuttle’s worth to the ISS, we could buy 443 flights for $7 billion not counting range and payload costs or over 100 shuttles flights’ worth. Even using the Ariane at $4,000/lb according to Futron’s 2002 price estimate we could buy 28 shuttle flights’ worth of Ariane payload for $5.6 billion. With viable outside commercial options that are less expensive to build and operate than the shuttle is to just operate, the sale price of the shuttle would be zero. We should not be treating it like a $7 billion asset. So perhaps the cost/benefit analysis is a little off at NASA.

Or maybe the following quote from AWST, 4/11/2005 (subscription required) will give you a better feel for what is really going on at NASA:

“We had one place in the backpack where, because of the confined space, the wire bend was tighter than the specified engineering limit was. And the EVA folks said it will cost us $100,000 to fix this,” [Wayne Hale, the deputy shuttle program manager] said. “Well, in the space business, $100,000 is not a lot of money, so I said go fix this.”

This man should be relieved and someone put in place someone who can explain cost-benefit to the public.

Not that I’d noticed, but apparently today is the thirty-fifth Earth Day. Jim and Cooky Oberg said a year ago that the proponents of the day are thinking too small. Nothing’s changed since, apparently.