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Post by nomuse on Feb 2, 2006 19:44:34 GMT -4
But, to continue that logic, if it makes sense to quit the US space program (to go from 18 to 15,) it makes sense to move to Japan (to go from 15 to 10).
It's all about picking a level of risk. Every one of us who drives is weighing perceived risk against known gains. Same for smoking, fatty foods, going armed, exercising, giving birth, leaving the house at all.
(Me, I'd move to Japan if I had a job waiting. But that's 'cause I like the place.)
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lenbrazil
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Post by lenbrazil on Feb 2, 2006 21:10:13 GMT -4
Here another way to look at it... There have been 992 people* launched into space, of which 18 have perished. This gives a death rate of about 18 per 1,000. Here are the annual death rates of some countries (1990 data): Japan...................10 United States........15 India.....................26 Nigeria..................43 * This is the total number of crew, not individuals. If one person flew twice, then this counts as two. This does support a claim that being a randomly selected astronaut for one mission entails less chance of dying than being a randomly selected person in India for one year. But, this is not the alternative fate of an astronaut who quits the space program... N That is what the numbers suggest. If you are an American why not be an astronaut your chance of dying in the next 2 years are the same as dying in a mishap. I would imagine that astronauts have a lower mortality rate then the general populace but even if you double the period it’s an acceptable risk. More up to date statistics can be found at the link below. Though I doubt the accuracy of some of them, could the death rate in Germany really be almost three times that of the Gaza Strip? Funny Jack White and Jim Fetzer have accused me of being a CIA agent and here I am providing a link to their website. I have the same last name as an ex-director* ooooh it must be true. www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2066rank.htmlLen *no not Bush
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Post by Retrograde on Feb 3, 2006 10:40:10 GMT -4
That is what the numbers suggest. If you are an American why not be an astronaut your chance of dying in the next 2 years are the same as dying in a mishap. Well, if you are an American who doesn't know how old s/he is, or what his/her health status is, that would be the case. If you are, let's say, 45 and in good health, your chances of dying in the next two years are much, much lower than one in ten. What's acceptable is subjective, so I don't see any point in debating that. But being an astronaut is bad for your life expectancy. If that's acceptable or not, each potential astronaut has to decide for him/herself. I certainly wouldn't characterize the risk as negligible, though.
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Post by Retrograde on Feb 3, 2006 10:48:33 GMT -4
But, to continue that logic, if it makes sense to quit the US space program (to go from 18 to 15,) it makes sense to move to Japan (to go from 15 to 10). Well, first, astronauts are not immune to other causes of death. Second, astronauts are drawn from a population that (apart from spaceflight accident) has a much lower chance of dying than the total population. I'm guessing if you're 80 years old with a history of heart disease, NASA probably doesn't want you... Regarding moving to Japan, that's one possible explanation for the results, but it's not the only one. The statistics may reflect a different age structure, for example; if you are at the median age in one country, and you move to another, your age doesn't change to be equal to the median age in the new country (well, maybe it does, depending on what the ages are and how long you take to get there...). It's not obvious that people moving from the US to Japan would automatically increase their life expectancy, at least not from this statistic. Agree completely.
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lenbrazil
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Post by lenbrazil on Feb 3, 2006 18:23:58 GMT -4
[If you are, let's say, 45 and in good health, your chances of dying in the next two years are much, much lower than one in ten. N. I think you misunderstood the death rate statistics. The are not fractions they deaths per 1000. So 10 is not 1 in 10 it's, 10 in 1000 or about 1% According to the more up to date statistics the rate in the US has fallen to 8.25 or 0.825% Len
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Post by Retrograde on Feb 4, 2006 8:00:20 GMT -4
[If you are, let's say, 45 and in good health, your chances of dying in the next two years are much, much lower than one in ten. N. I think you misunderstood the death rate statistics. The are not fractions they deaths per 1000. So 10 is not 1 in 10 it's, 10 in 1000 or about 1% According to the more up to date statistics the rate in the US has fallen to 8.25 or 0.825% Len Actually, I had it right when I read the statistics, I just had a brain cramp when I typed the above statement. It should be immediately obvious that one in ten people do not die every year in the US. But in any event, the idea remains - the astronauts are not randomly chosen people from the general population, they are people presumably in good health and in an age bracket where there chance of dying is much lower than that of the general population. Just a quick and dirty calculation from life insurance rates suggests to me that for a good section of the age bracket from which astronauts are chosen, the probability of death would be less than 1 per 1000. N
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lenbrazil
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Post by lenbrazil on Feb 4, 2006 10:40:34 GMT -4
Actually, I had it right when I read the statistics, I just had a brain cramp when I typed the above statement. It should be immediately obvious that one in ten people do not die every year in the US. I was wondering what happened. I thought to myself , "KOS seems like a smart well read guy, how did he make such an obvious blunder".I've made this kind of mistake too, sometimes in my haste to type I forget to make sentences negative by adding 'not'. Agreed, that's why I said, "I would imagine that astronauts have a lower mortality rate then the general populace". I forgot the link to the more up to date stats. www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2066rank.htmlThat seems a bit low to me, that would make their death rate less than 1/8 that of the general population, but for astonaugts it might be true. Bob or anybody else, do you feel like compiling a chart breaking down astonauts by how years after their missions the died? How many cases do any of your know of in which an astronaut died with in a few years of coming back? Len Len
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lenbrazil
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Post by lenbrazil on Feb 4, 2006 12:46:30 GMT -4
Bob/others I think I proposed a rather daunting task. We could simplify the calculations by limiting the comparison to Space Shuttle astronauts. According to Wikipedia out of a crew total of 703, 14 Shuttle astronauts died which again leaves us with a death rate under 2%. Of the 689 who came back (counting those who went on more than one mission for each time they went) how many have died and how many years after their missions. We would have to factor out those among the 14 who had come back from previous missions, by my count there were 6: Scobee, Resnik, Onizuka, and McNair from Challenger plus Husband and Chawla from Columbia.* So there are 683 shuttle astronauts (again counting those who went up more once more than once) who didn’t die in space flight accidents. Of those I assume at least a couple have died. Wikipedia also has an interesting article on space disasters. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_disastersLen *Too a certain degree this is cheating in the astronauts favor because we are partially factoring out “work related accidents”. Extrapolating from WHO statistics about 425, 000 people die worldwide in such accidents. This out of a total of 57 million deaths** or 0.75% and 6.45 billion population or 0.007% but the rate in the US is certainly lower so it’s with in the margin of error. www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr18/en/ (1.7 million / 4) ** Extrapolated from the “World Fact Book” (pop x death rate) www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/xx.html
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Post by bughead on Feb 4, 2006 12:50:30 GMT -4
Do these stats also list the astronauts who died in airplane crashes? Then we would need to include pilots in general in the stats, I would think, to establish a baseline for risk of flying. I've heard the most risky part of being a pilot is driving to-and-from the airport. Is it true? I'll buy it, people die in traffic everyday.
Regardless of risk, I'm saving money for my trip to the Apollo Landing Site Tour. By the time I'm old and rich modern medicine can probably fix my "mitral valve prolapse" so I can actually go.
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Bob B.
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Post by Bob B. on Feb 4, 2006 15:42:20 GMT -4
Here is a list of all former NASA astronauts: www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/astrobio_former.html36 are listed as decreased. Of these 17 are ‘old-timers’ from the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo era, 2 are from the Shuttle era but never flew a mission, 6 are former Shuttle astronauts whose deaths were non-Shuttle related, and 11 died in the Challenger/Columbia accidents. This gives 6 deaths out of the 683 Shuttle astronauts lenbrazil calculated. The problem is the linked list includes only NASA astronauts. Missing are payload specialists who are not officially members of NASA's astronaut corps. For instance, Gregory Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe, and Ilan Ramon are not on the list. We need to find the current status of all payload specialists and add to the total of 6 any who are now deceased. Alternatively, we can delete the payload specialists them from the total of 683 and compare the revised number to the 6 known deaths.
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Bob B.
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Post by Bob B. on Feb 4, 2006 16:16:40 GMT -4
Here is some more data ... During the period 1978-2000 NASA selected 237 astronauts for its Space Shuttle program. Of these, 11 where killed in the Challenger/Columbia accidents. Of the remaining 226, six are now deceased due to non-Shuttle related reasons.
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Post by Retrograde on Feb 5, 2006 7:16:34 GMT -4
We have the issue here that the missions were at different times, over a 20-something year period. So statistics such as X out of Y astronauts from space shuttle missions have died of other causes are going to be pretty hard to interpret; for some in the sample, that reflects a 20-year survival rate, for others, it reflects a 3-year survival rate.
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lenbrazil
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Post by lenbrazil on Feb 5, 2006 10:28:34 GMT -4
Here’s another way of looking at it. One question is a personal one, for individual astronauts to decide if the risk is worth it for them. The other is from a societal perspective looking at the cost of space exploration in “blood and money” looking at the Wikipedia article I counted a total 99 space exploration deaths including ground crew, I believe many more lives than that were saved by space technology. The current World population is about 6.4 billion, in 1966, when space technology started to trickle down, it was about 3.4 billion. Let’s suppose that about half of those people (1. 7 billion) are no longer alive and that at least 1 billion people who were born after 1966 are no longer alive. That gives us a total of 9.1 billion people who were alive at sometime in the last 40 years. Or about 92 million people for every space exploration related death. Look at the list of NASA technical “spin offs” which does include spin offs from private and non US programs. It’s not a stretch to believe that one life in 92 million was saved by this technological trickle down: smoke detectors; improved: water purification, baby food, shock-absorbing helmets, home security systems, food packaging, weather forecasting, fire-resistant materials, sewage treatment, fireman’s air tanks, emergency rescue cutters, and winter tires plus safer bridges and airplanes. I haven’t even mentioned medical technology: programmable pacemakers, MRI, ultrasound scanners, automatic insulin pumps and portable x-ray devices; improved: breast cancer detection and laser angioplasty. Both lists (non-medical and medical) are partial see the linked article for the complete list and details*. I haven’t seen any numbers but I would imagine that many of these innovations alone saved at least 99 lives. This doesn’t take into accounts lives saved indirectly by space technology, for example space exploration gave a big boost to computer technology and computers have used various life saving technologies. This also doesn’t take into account the quality of life improvements space technology led to or our increased understanding of our planet and universe etc, etc. Do the benefits we’ve gotten from manned space exploration justify all the money that was spent? That is a much more complicated question which I don’t think I’m qualified to answer though I’m inclined to say yes. That is however the subject of another thread. apollohoax.proboards21.com/index.cgi?board=apollo&action=display&thread=1134538067* www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html There was a similar editorial in USA Today - www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2004-01-21-eicher_x.htm
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lenbrazil
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Post by lenbrazil on Feb 5, 2006 10:37:33 GMT -4
We need to find the current status of all payload specialists and add to the total of 6 any who are now deceased. Alternatively, we can delete the payload specialists them from the total of 683 and compare the revised number to the 6 known deaths. Which do you think would be easier? But at any rate it seems that in all probability all 4 people who died on the shuttles had survived those missions would be alive today. 11/14 of 683 is 536 so let's say 500 of the crew were astronauts 6 out of 500 is only 1.2 %
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