Does Tragedy Prove That Space Exploration Is Worth It?

The 1986 explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger had a dramatic effect on NASA and the space exploration community. It was also, arguably, a textbook example of something called a "normal accident."

The 1984 book Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies by Yale University sociologist Charles Perrow describes normal accidents as the inevitable disasters that accompany the use of any complex, high-risk technology.

Perrow sets out a lot of formal definitions and reasoning, but the gist is familiar to anyone who has ever heard of Murphy's Law or perused a novelty t-shirt shop: Shit happens. A complicated thing can have so many moving parts that some of them are always going to be a bit out of whack in unexpected ways — most of which don't matter. But if enough things are off enough of the time, they may add up to disaster. This can happen so quickly that it takes a long time after everything has blown up to figure out what went wrong; if it were easy to spot, it would have been easy to prevent. And if you add more checks and safety measures to the system to prevent any failure from ever happening, you also end up adding more complexity, which can make things worse.

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In the case of the Challenger disaster — the 30th anniversary was this week — it wasn't just a matter of the Space Shuttle itself, but the entire network of NASA and contractor responsibility and communications to transmit information vital to the safe operation of the Shuttle. Adding more checks and balances added more bureaucracy and procedures, which, in turn, introduced their own problems.

So, according to Perrow, complex human spaceflight systems are bound, sooner or later, to kill off the crew and passengers from time to time, no matter how hard anyone tries. The best you can do is defer tragedy, not prevent it.

Regardless of whether or not this is true, it's an interesting idea.

Another interesting idea comes from Henry Petroski, who specializes in failure analysis. He's written a slew of books about what happens when engineering goes to hell and what it means, but there's one particular book worth noting: Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America. In the book, Petroski argues that the bridge-building field has a catastrophic disaster every 30 years or so.

The idea here is that just after a major disaster, everyone doubles down on safety, hedges on design margins, and generally plays it close to the vest. But with each passing year, people get a little more ambitious and schedules get a little more compressed. Thirty years later, the previous generation of engineers who got the shit scared out of them by the last disaster have all retired. Someone presses their luck a little too far, disaster ensues, and the cycle repeats.

NASA's three big human spaceflight disasters are the Apollo 1 fire of January 27, 1967; the Challenger disaster of January 28, 1986; and the Columbia disaster of February 1, 2003. The first two are 19 years and one day apart. The second two are 17 years and three days apart. On average, that's 18 years and three days apart. Assuming that human spaceflight disasters are very punctual and this is all a matter of precise, clockwork mechanics, NASA's next big crackup will be on or around February 3, 2021.

Of course, that logic would be idiotic — basing analysis on cycles like that is just this side of superstition.

That said, NASA's first planned crewed mission of the Orion capsule on the under-development Space Launch System was originally scheduled for 2021 and has been pushed back to 2023. Meanwhile, NASA's workforce is aging at a pretty brisk clip, and around that time, a lot of the old-time NASA folks will be hitting retirement, which runs the risk of draining the organization of critical expertise. And to make things more complex, in the years before the planned launch, NASA has stacked up a whole bunch of very high-profile objectives for very expensive programs, putting further pressure on the organization.

Put together normal accidents and the failure cycle concept, and it suggests there's at least some reason to suspect you can't keep putting people on top of intensely complicated machines that are chock full of explosives year after year without killing some of them. In fact, disaster might even be an inescapable feature of exploration.

Understanding that means taking a quick look at what the hell exploration really is, at its most basic level.

If there are any overarching commandments for living creatures, they are "be fruitful and multiply" and "the most fit may live to eat, survive, and screw another day."

Charles Darwin called this natural selection. Weak critters get killed, get eaten, or starve, while the badass critters prosper and procreate. Over long periods of time, this amounts to a really gnarly breeding program.

Now, one of the very early strategies critters figured out is that it can be a lot easier to go where there's no competition (or at least no natural predators). The trick is for the critter to move into a place harsh enough that it will kill off (or at least discourage) the competition without killing off the creature making the move.

For instance, turning into a wooly mammoth turned out to be a great way for Asian elephants to move out of the jungle and away from the competition, and onto the tundra. Of course, the process took a long time and was likely an ugly trial-and-error process. But in the end, it meant not competing for a slightly larger piece of the old pie because they had a whole new pie to themselves.

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This natural selection and evolution, of course, all relies on genetics. But there are a couple shortcuts. First off is the use of technology — specifically tools, which negate the need to go through the pain of evolving. Likewise, social skills and language are a faster way to pass on information about technology than relying on genetics as a means of knowledge transfer. Add in written language and you're (at least on comparative terms) lightning-fast at expanding and adapting. It's the difference between looking at the IKEA instructions for guidance on how to put something together versus trying to evolve a creature that, by virtue of instinct alone, knows how to assemble Swedish-designed bookshelves.

At a primitive level, caveman Grok wants to avoid the time-consuming hassle of growing a thick furry coat for winter. He figures out that he can find another creature that already painstakingly evolved adaptations to its environment, kill it, take its skin, and get dinner in the bargain.

Now warmer and well-fed, Grok can now operate in a wider range of climates and environments. He can provide fur coats for the cave ladies, have little Groklings, and teach them the secrets of boosting animal hides. Over the long run, Grok, his family, and his offspring ultimately end up with more survival options, more available resources, and more contingencies if things go to hell.

This, essentially, is exploration.

Once humans developed the technology to wear animal hides, farm, hunt with weapons, and so on, they used those new tricks to move into and live in new, previously untapped and/or impossible to reach and/or uninhabitable areas, and they've basically been exploring ever since.

If we look at exploration as movement or expansion into a space that has previously been off limits, and there's an advantage to getting there first, then an exploration program that isn't courting danger is, in the end, probably trivial.

If countries had been able to get people into space easily and there hadn't been fatal accidents like Apollo 1, Columbia, and Challenger — and Russia's Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 — then getting to space would be a trivial exercise in long-term cost reduction.

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This, of course, isn't to say that exploration should proceed with homicidal levels of negligence. But rather, when President John F. Kennedy gave his seminal 1962 speech about going to the Moon and said, "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard," he may have meant it as Cold War rationalization, but he was also more right than he knew.

Follow Ryan Faith on Twitter: @Operation_Ryan

Photo via NASA