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The Matador's Cape
A review of Safe Is Not An Option, by Rand Simberg
Peter A. Taylor
July, 2018
I recently finished reading Rand Simberg's book, Safe Is Not An Option: Overcoming The Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive That Is Killing Our Expansion Into Space (Interglobal Media LLC, Jackson, Wyoming, 2013, ISBN 978-0-9891355-1-1). Simberg knows his stuff. The technical content is excellent. The history in the early chapters is fascinating.
I will pick one minor technical nit. On p. 39, Simberg writes, "Regardless of whether it carries crew or cargo, it is economically insane to build a reusable vehicle that is unreliable." This was true of the Space Shuttle Orbiters, but as George Turner pointed out on Simberg's blog, it is not true of SpaceX's reusable Falcon boosters. (The usual caveats about the meaning of "reliability" apply.)
But when we get to the main point of the book, the trade-off between safety and progress, the book pulls me in two different directions. On the surface, the message is clear: "we" (i.e. NASA) have gone overboard on astronaut safety, and it's holding us back. But there is an undercurrent throughout the book that is reminiscent of the old Alcoholics Anonymous slogan that "Alcohol is but a symptom." Is "hyperconcern" over safety the root cause of our slow progress in the manned space program, or is it a symptom of other, deeper problems? Is it the matador or the matador's cape that Simberg's bull is trying to impale on his literary horns?
The question is clearer if we break Simberg's thesis into three smaller pieces:
I want to address our goals first.
I find myself nodding with Ed Lu's Forward on p. xv, where he says of the Columbia accident report,
The striking thing about the report was not the physical cause of the accident (foam loss striking the leading edge of the wing), but rather the inclusion of the lack of an overarching goal for the space program as a contributing cause. They could not have been more correct.
Two paragraphs later, Lu writes,
This book—Safe is Not an Option—brings this point home clearly. It not only provides the historical context of the types of risks people have assumed on other endeavors, but how this mindset of safety above all else is the end result of having no clear mission or purpose.
But in the Preface, on p. xix, Simberg writes,
It should be noted that this book does not attempt to convince the reader that developing and settling space is important. It is assumed that readers would not have bothered to pick up, let alone crack and read the work, if they didn't already believe that.
My view is that NASA hasn't had a clear sense of direction since 1969. As long as we keep things vague, anyone likely to be reading this book can agree that we favor "settling space", but when we start designing spacecraft and planning missions, we find ourselves in the situation described elsewhere by Wiley Larson:
Managing the DoD's and NASA's large space programs is like trying to win a potato-sack race—with five people each having one leg in the sack while running in different directions, and 10 to 30 coaches and helpers are on the sidelines directing the people in the potato sack.
— P. 18, Reducing Space Mission Cost, by James R. Wertz and Wiley J. Larson, eds., Microcosm Press, Torrance, CA, and Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996, ISBN 1-881883-05-1
So I think Simberg made a mistake in allowing the views of the many people on NASA's potato-sack racing team to remain vague regarding their various purposes. Let me list what I think are the big six:
In so far as Congress' goal in funding NASA is to provide "pork barrel" jobs in various districts, the claim that safety is interfering with getting the job done is simply false.
Prestige, on the other hand, is complicated and contentious. Simberg barely mentions it. On p. 155, he writes,
If settlement and development are not the purpose, then other than for the dubious (given the cost) purpose of national prestige, it's unclear why we have a government human spaceflight program at all.
My notes are very sketchy, but I don't recall him mentioning prestige elsewhere in the book. Is prestige dubious, given the cost? If NASA costs something like $20 billion/year, over a population of something like 340 million, that comes to an average annual cost of about $59. That's about what I would expect a major league baseball ticket to cost, and slightly less than what I recently paid to attend a Jordan Peterson lecture. This seems to me to be a reasonable price to pay for prestige. (And this is assuming that voters weigh the cost rationally, which is often false; see Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter. See my review here.) And what does that imply about safety? I would expect national prestige to require (1) that the US do enough with manned space to not be badly upstaged by any rival governments and (2) to avoid embarrassing major failures. Dead astronauts are bad for national prestige. So in so far as Americans are motivated by national prestige, again, the claim that safety is interfering with getting the job done is false.
The single greatest disagreement that I have with Simberg is on the importance of prestige in human spaceflight. I have been strongly influenced here by economists Robert Frank (Choosing the Right Pond: Human Behavior and the Quest for Status) and Robin Hanson ("Politics Isn't About Policy"). Frank points out a paradox: if you speak honestly about the things that you do in order to raise your social status, that has the effect of making you sound insecure, which actually lowers your social status. (I'm calling this "Frank's Paradox".) Consequently, it is almost impossible to have an honest conversation about social status. First of all, human beings are very bad at understanding their own motives (see Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, p. 43). But even if we did understand our motives, we would have a powerful incentive to lie about them, and we usually do this instinctively. As Robert Trivers puts it (p. 263 of Pinker's The Blank Slate),
If...deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray—by the subtle signs of knowledge—the deception being practiced. Thus, the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naïve view of mental evolution.
Part of the potato-sack problem is that, in so far as people are motivated by prestige, they can't or don't want to say so. Mike Griffin talked about this, or at least, talked around it, in his speech, Space Exploration: Real Reasons and Acceptable Reasons. So the space program is constantly plagued by people advocating prestige-oriented (real reason) "flags and footprints" missions but trying to justify them absurdly in terms of economic returns or colonization efforts (acceptable reasons). The word, "exploration", is part of this misdirection, misrepresenting prestige-driven missions as science-driven. Simberg has himself complained about the misuse of the word, "exploration", on his blog.
And speaking of "space exploration," I've decided that this is the year I make all-out war on the phrase. It has held us back for decades in thinking about space in a sensible way.
I complain about this at some length elsewhere. I also have a quotation from James van Allen about bad Christopher Columbus analogies that is apropos. (As Simberg often asks on his blog, "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we get them to stop using bad analogies?")
National prestige also helps explain why Congress is reluctant to fully embrace commercialization of cargo and crew transportation into space: voters identify with NASA more than they do with SpaceX. And of course, in addition to national prestige, there is also organizational and personal prestige. NASA as a whole as well as individual NASA managers lose prestige when SpaceX upstages NASA, on top of whatever effects this has on power and money. On p. 116, Simberg describes the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) as "schizophrenic" in its recommendations for regulating private spaceflight. But strangling private competition makes sense if the motive is prestige.
Obviously, congressmen don't want to admit the extent to which they are motivated by pork barrel (i.e. almost purely). So there is a bunch of conscious lying about motives going on. This is an example of the perverse undercurrent in Simberg's book. On p. 62, he writes that the SLS has "no clear mission requirements other than to maintain the existing Shuttle work force". On p. 98 he writes,
But unfortunately, much of the mewling about "safety" by Congress is actually a rationale to continue to prop up the old ways of doing business that have kept us from making much progress in space. It continues to ensure that money flows to the right states and districts—a system that is threatened by any sort of competition.
Exactly. But it's hard to buy the claim that hyperconcern with safety is the villain when we know that this concern is not entirely sincere.
Irrationality on NASA's part regarding safety is a major theme throughout chapter 8. Simberg continues on p. 98-99:
Also note the glaring inconsistency of declaring commercial providers "unsafe" because NASA doesn't have sufficient control over them, when in fact NASA flies its astronauts on Soyuz launchers and capsules over which they not only have no control, but have nowhere near the level of technical transparency that they will get from the commercial providers. Many opponents of commercial crew have said that a new commercial rocket must have over a dozen successes before it can be trusted to carry crew. Yet the Air Force is requiring only three successful launches before allowing billion-dollar satellites to be carried. NASA had planned to fly crew on Ares I after only a single test flight; and the very first flight of the Shuttle—a brand new, extremely complex system—occurred with two men aboard.
But is this hypocrisy the result of sincere irrationality or conscious dishonesty? I feel the undercurrent very strongly here. Surely Simberg must suspect that such selective hyperconcern with safety is not entirely sincere. How can this hyperconcern be the villain if it isn't real? Perhaps we can say that the voters are overly concerned about safety, but their public servants are being deceitful.
One of my former co-workers likes to talk about "safety theater", although I don't recall Simberg using that term. Again, this has to do with insincerity. Certain policies and design decisions are made to give the appearance of safety or safety consciousness, but have little actual effect on safety or may even be counter-productive. Simberg suggests on p. 52 that the Orion Launch Abort System (LAS) may be counter-productive in terms of safety. (As an aside, the Shuttle crew escape pole and its pyrotechnic accessories installed after the Challenger accident were rumored to be similarly counter-productive.) Sellers and Milton argue on p. 70 of Reducing Space Mission Cost that too large a Quality Assurance (QA) bureaucracy can actually reduce quality, as workers find that they have to work outside the system in order to get anything done. Simberg quotes Adm. Gehman at length on p. 66 saying much the same thing. On p. 67, Simberg writes regarding counter-productive safety efforts, "So NASA's approach to safety in Constellation was doubly irrational." These counter-productive policies and systems tend to ratchet up after every high-profile failure (e.g. Challenger).
But is this irrational or insincere? Part of the motivation for safety theater is blame shifting. A manager may not care as much about preventing an accident as he cares about not getting blamed for it. "Don't sue me! I did everything humanly possible! I had no idea that the risk was that high!" Simberg writes on p. 37 about low-level engineers knowing that Shuttle management was lying about safety prior to the Challenger accident. But image-polishing is also part of the problem. I want to be seen as a good person. So some of this safety theater is "virtue signaling". Some of it may be done to deceive Congress, so that Congress will fund or continue to fund a program that is riskier than they would knowingly support. More importantly, management bullshitting about risk allows Congress to blame-shift, making it less politically risky for Congress to support it.
In so far as this book is about safety theater, Simberg's thesis might be more precisely stated as the theory that the general public needs to have a more realistic attitude about risk. The other way to solve the problem would be for public servants to stop lying about risk. But getting public servants to stop lying is a lot harder than getting the general public to be more realistic about risk, and more realistic about public servants lying.
It may be that the distinction I'm trying to make between lying and irrationality is largely false. Lying tends to lead to self-deception, as normal people tend to self-deceive about their own lies. Self-deception tends to lead to irrationality. Also, there is a distinction that Bryan Caplan makes between epistemic and instrumental rationality. There is a nice wikipedia page about this. A politician who convinces himself that 2 + 2 = 5 is irrational in the epistemic sense, but if it gets him elected, it is rational in the instrumental sense.
In so far as the space program is driven by either pork barrel politics or prestige, problems with candor are inevitable. I sympathize with Simberg's confession of being a "recovering aerospace engineer." Yes, it feels crazy, like I should be attending a twelve-step program. I am working for an institution that is incapable of carrying on an honest, intelligent conversation about its own raison d'être.
I should make a confession of my own here. What motivates me, in so far as I am able and willing to say? A large part of it is that I fell in love with the fantasy of escape. I am a big fan of Poul Anderson's "New America" stories. But prestige matters to me, too. My wife takes great pleasure in telling her old friends back home that her husband is a "rocket scientist". I would certainly like to be able to take great pride in my career. But to state Frank's Paradox a little differently, people judge us, and we judge ourselves, not only on what we do, but also on why we do it. Pursuing prestige directly for its own sake (i.e. not having a good cover story) lowers your prestige instead of raising it; hence Mike Griffin's "real" vs. "acceptable" reasons. In order to gain prestige from an activity, we have to bundle it with a reason that we and our audience both consider to be worthy and legitimate. In my discussion of Griffin's speech, I talk about Harrison Ford's character, Allie Fox, in the movie, The Mosquito Coast. Fox comes across as a vain fool rather than a hero because his disasterous trek to deliver a bucket of ice to the aboriginals has no ostensible purpose other than him showing off. Similarly, in order for me to take pride in my career, I need to be able to point to a worthy and legitimate purpose.
The motives I listed above, but haven't discussed, are entertainment, economic returns, and two visions of space colonization (or "settlement", as Simberg and Greason call it on p. 155). Entertainment doesn't get me very far, especially since it depends on novelty, which wears off quickly and doesn't justify any very great cost. Any settlement effort is going to be sensitive to economics. So in order for me to take pride in my career, I need to convince myself that (1) there is a future result that makes economic sense and (2) the projects that I'm working on are relevant to it.
Yes, this is a sore point for me. As a young engineer, I worked on a design study for a reusable Aerobraking Orbit Transfer Vehicle (space tug). My morale never really recovered from the shock of discovering that the cost of hauling the extra propellant on the Shuttle that was needed to recover a reusable OTV was greater than the cost of building another expendable OTV.
Simberg has a lengthy quotation from Jon Goff on pp. 103-106 about some research on the International Space Station (ISS) that promises to produce better antibiotics. I hope that's real, and I wish them the best of luck with that. I should probably have a better attitude about ISS than I do. But microgravity research seems like a very small economic niche. I can't imagine something like a Gerard O'Neill L-5 colony being able to turn a profit by doing microgravity research.
If my biggest disagreement with Simberg is over the importance of prestige, my second biggest disagreement is over economics. Thomas Carlyle called economics "the dismal science". He didn't know the half of it. There just doesn't appear to be a good way for a Mars colony to export anything of sufficient value to pay for the imports from Earth they will need in order to make life on Mars attractive. The Americas could profitably export tobacco, silver, gold, sugar, indigo, cotton, and useful native flora and fauna (e.g. potatos, maize). All Mars appears to have to support an export industry is a venue for doing exo-geology research and making low gravity basketball videos. If you had enough money to either buy the capital equipment you need to live on Mars or buy the state of Hawaii, why would you want to live on Mars?
I acknowledge my bias here, but the most plausible route to settling space seems to me to be the Mormon or "New America" model. It's a two-step process. First, develop the technology that would enable people to live on Mars or an O'Neill colony permanently, independent of Earth, albeit at great cost and with a much lower standard of living. Second, find a group of smart, hard-working people, and make life on Earth a living Hell for them so that they are willing to move to Mars. The second part is easy. The first part is hard.
Part of what's hard about developing this technology is that it has very little to do with short-term prestige-driven "flags and footprints" missions. It's boring, like Biosphere II was boring to most people. Here I'm back to bitching about "exploration". Instead of writing ostensibly about safety, I would have preferred that Simberg had written explicitly about bullshit about safety. And instead of that, better that he had written a book about bullshit about exploration. But what I really want to read is a serious book about the economics of settling Mars. We all know that the physics of space travel is hard, and most of us seem to know that the engineering (making hardware that deals with the physics reliably) is harder. But a lot of space enthusiasts still seem to be in denial about the horrific ugliness that is the economics of manned space travel. Elon Musk is making good progress on the supply side, but the demand side still looks hopeless to me for the forseeable future.
I also don't see a development path such that a microgravity research platform evolves into a colony. The capital you need to keep people alive for the indefinite future on Mars isn't likely to be dual-purpose with any sane terrestrial technology, and isn't likely to be something that will start to give you any sort of payoff until the whole thing is ready to go. Even then, the monetary payoff in the near term seems paltry. Humanity gets an insurance policy, which we desperately need, but it isn't the sort of thing that's easy to monetize. Another payoff is a few people being able to live further away from people they don't get along with. But the big monetizable payoff doesn't occur until the price of real estate on Earth becomes large compared to the cost of space transportation and the cost of living on Mars.
So yes, in the long term, space settlement is a worthy goal, and we will eventually be glad that we developed cheap reusable launch vehicles, plasma rockets, reliable closed ecological life support systems (CELES), Mars-friendly nuclear reactors, Martian in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), and 3-D printers that run on Mars dust and are capable of producing all of the parts (including the electronics) needed for all of the above systems (including themselves). Let's throw in artificial gravity and cosmic radiation protection. But until we have all of this stuff, what's the point of manned spaceflight? (On p. 110, Simberg writes favorably of the possibility of sending people on a one-way mission to Mars, with "equipment to grow food, and live off the land." If he means to suggest that this technology is anywhere near being available, then I vehemently disagree.) I can't figure out how to connect the dots between the long term goal of space settlement and much of what NASA is doing, or even seriously talking about doing, in the near term. It drives me nuts.
This brings me back to the third part of my (perhaps twisted) restatement of Simberg's thesis:
This excessive safety concern is a genuine, binding constraint on progress towards our goals in space.
It isn't clear to me that the constraints on space operations due to safety are actually binding on anything that I think is important. I think most of what we need to do is technology development in boring laboratories on the ground, with no short term application in sight. Until a great deal of this sort of work is done, I don't see much point in manned spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit, where boring physiology research is worthwhile. (I'll make an exception for learning how to cope with Lunar dust.) Simberg seems to think that we could make dramatically faster progress if we were willing to kill more astronauts. This appears to me to be largely wishful thinking.
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