<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  What inspired you to write Safe Is Not An Option? I call it an accidental book. I&amp;#039;ve been concerned for many years by government policies and public attitudes toward safety in space that were relics from Apollo, and seemed to be counterproductive in the 21st century, at least in terms of viewing space as a new frontier for economic development and human settlement.   If we had treated aviation in the 1920s and 1930s the way many want to treat spaceflight today, we&amp;#039;d have never had an aviation industry. That, combined with the arguments NASA was making for switching from the successful Space Act Agreement model for COTS [Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, a NASA partnership with private space corporations] to a traditional Federal Acquisition Regulations procurement for commercial crew, ostensibly in the name of safety, made me think it was time to do a public policy project to start a serious national discussion on it.  Tell us about the main points of your book. That no frontier has been opened or explored without risk to the explorers and settlers, and that there&amp;#039;s no reason to think that the harshest one above us will be any different. That if you make safety the highest priority, as NASA (encouraged by foolish congresspeople) insists on doing, then it makes actually accomplishing things in space and sending people into space a lower [priority], as evidenced by the fact that in the over half a century since we first started doing it, we&amp;#039;ve sent a little over 500 people. It makes spaceflight very expensive and very rare. We need to take a different attitude toward it or explicitly admit that our current attitude means that we don&amp;#039;t think that space is very important.   Also, &amp;quot;safe&amp;quot; is not a binary condition. Nothing is safe or unsafeit&amp;#039;s a matter of degree. Every decision you make, every breath you take, involves some level of risk. Why do you think space exploration is seen as so much more dangerous than driving a car, an activity that has many more casualties? Well, spaceflight (I hate the word &amp;quot;exploration&amp;quot; because it&amp;#039;s about much more than that) is obviously much more dangerous than driving a car, statistically. You have a lot more chance of dying in spaceflight than in driving to the store, if you&amp;#039;re allowed or can afford to do it. The reason that so many people die in cars is that there are many millions of car trips per year. We accept those 30,000 highway deaths because being able to get into a car and drive somewhere is a critical part of our lifestyle.   I often say that we&amp;#039;re not killing enough people in space, but in saying that, what I mean is that I want to see so much human activity in space that space deaths are inevitable, just as are highway deaths. So, you&amp;#039;d argue that by worrying too much about the safety of the explorers and astronauts, NASA is hamstringing its own potential? Yes, and there&amp;#039;s a very real danger that NASA&amp;#039;s attitudes will hold back commercial spaceflight as well. Are there any specific examples of when NASA has held itself back?  If NASA had really abandoned the ISS when the Russians were having launch-system problems a couple of years ago, [which nearly happened,] that would have been a huge setback in the name of safety. In refusing to fly on a SpaceX Dragon without a launch-abort system (even though they did it for years with the space shuttle) and insisting on a lifeboat for every crewmember, they&amp;#039;re reducing the potential crew size of the station, which is hindering the amount of scientific research that can be done there. What could NASA do to change? I&amp;#039;m not sure there is anything that NASA can do unless public and congressional attitudes change. As long as people like Chaka Fattah [ranking member of the House space subcommittee] tell the administrator that he was glad that the agency made astronaut safety their highest priority, NASA&amp;#039;s going to have to be risk-averse, even though the route to safer spaceflight is doing risky things and learning, just as we killed lots of people in airplanes in the &amp;#039;20s to learn how to fly more safely.   But it&amp;#039;s not just about NASA. Imposing a one-size-fits-all regulatory regime on the industry will also inhibit innovation and not take into account that some achievements (such as flying humans around Mars, as proposed by Inspiration Mars) justify taking higher risks. The point of my book is that we must start rationally weighing risks against rewards if we expect to make any serious progress in space. If space is more dangerous, will it be harder to find people to go? I can&amp;#039;t imagine that it would be. There are many more people who apply to be an astronaut than are accepted. Even if the line were half as long, there&amp;#039;d be no shortage of applicants. As astronaut Ed Lu wrote in the foreword of the book, he and the other astronauts would &amp;quot;cringe&amp;quot; when they heard that safety was the highest priority. &amp;quot;Safety&amp;quot; to them just means not doing stupid things. They accept that it&amp;#039;s a dangerous job and just want to achieve things that are worth the risk. Would the commercial space race accelerate with reduced regulations? The issue isn&amp;#039;t reducing regulations, because they&amp;#039;re actually reasonable. The danger is that increasing regulations will inhibit industry growth and innovation. How will we know when we strike that appropriate balance between risk and reward? To decide what the correct level of risk is, we have to have a national conversation about what we&amp;#039;re trying to accomplish with human spaceflight and, ultimately, people have to be allowed to take their own risks for their own rewards, just as they do with mountain climbing, free diving, and wing-suiting. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a9813/is-an-obsession-with-safety-stifling-space-exploration-16282762/>