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What is an Astronaut's Life Worth?: An Interview with Robert Zubrin

Fri, 18 May 2012 11:30:00 EDT

"You're saying that you're going to give up four billion dollars to avoid a one in seven chance of killing an astronaut, you're basically saying an astronaut's life is worth twenty-eight billion dollars," says astronautical engineer and author Dr. Robert Zubrin.

Zubrin, the author of a popular and controversial article in Reason's space-centric February 2012 Special Issue, argues that the risk of losing one of the seven astronauts who repaired and rescued the Hubble Space Telescope was well worth it. "If you put this extreme value on the life of an astronaut...then you never fly, and you get a space agency which costs seventeen billion dollars a year and accomplishes nothing."

NASA's role, according to Zubrin, should be in the pursuit of ambitious missions such as "opening Mars to humanity," rather than a bloated, safety-obsessed bureaucracy. "The mission has to come first."

Runs about 3.50 minutes.

Produced by Anthony L. Fisher. Camera by Meredith Bragg and Josh Swain.

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Live From Washington, DC: The Space Shuttle Era is Over (Thank God!)

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00:00 EDT

So the space shuttle Discovery has flown its last mission; it's been towed over the nation's capital like a bruised Chevy after a demolition derby before being deposited at the Udvar-Hazy air and space musuem in northern Virginia.

Other space junkers -- Atlantis and Endeavour -- are being retired like Brett Faver in a pair of Crocs, too, bringing to end an underwhelming three decades of fruitless and tragic exploration of low-earth orbiting patterns.

Let's face it: Once we beat the Russians to the moon, the national rocket grew limper than Liberace at a speculum convention. NASA has been dining out on a single 1969 hit longer than Zager and Evans.

The good news is that amateur hour is now over and the private space race has begun. Where two Cold War superpowers failed, let a thousand business plans bloom!

The future of space is in the hands of the guys behind Amazon, PayPal, and Virgin. The force of competition will create endless possibilities and unimaginable technologies. No more talking about how the space program brought us Tang and Tempur-Pedic mattresses. We're going to Mars, baby, in business class.

Virgin's Richard Branson has already signed up more stars than there are in heaven and his regular press releases read like the headlines at TMZ: Ashton Kutcher, Katy Perry, and Angelina Jolie have all reserved space on the first civilian flights to the great beyond.

The International Space Station will continue as a government run intergalactic DMV, but at least the spaceships shlepping materials and mouthbreathers to and from it will soon be operated by private
vendors--at an expected 90 percent discount. That should put plenty more celebrities --and civiliams-- in the mood to join the 30-mile-high club.

The founder of BudgetSuites, Robert Bigelow, has already launched experimental modules and is dreaming of putting affordable hotels --complete with bedspreads soaked in alien DNA—in orbit and PayPal's Elon Musk has said he wants to die on Mars. Preferably in a colony established by SpaceX, his company that's hell bent not just on leaving Earth but getting to the Red Planet in style.

Nobody knows exactly how private space exploration and entrepreneurship will play out. But's its a lock that the next 30 years won't resemble our government-run space program's decades-long failure to launch anything more inspiring than Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space.

Space out!

About 2:30 minutes.

Filmed by Joshua Swain and Jim Epstein. Edited by Meredith Bragg. Hosted by Kennedy.

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Blast Off Into Space with Reason Magazine's Matt Welch

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:00:00 EST

"For decades now people interested in free markets have been talking about a glorious future of private space exploration and travel," says Reason Magazine Editor in Chief Matt Welch. As Reason Magazine's latest issue makes clear, "that glorious future... is now."

Welch previews the February special issue on the "Rocket Men" such as Virgin's Richard Branson and Amazon's Jeff Bezos who are underwriting a new generation of space exploration.

The stories from the February issue will be rolled out at reason.com over the coming weeks. Go here for a list of stories that are already on the web.

Subscribers to the print edition of Reason recieve their issues a month before the stories go live online. A year's subscription is just $14.97 for 11 issues. Go here to subscribe now.

About 1:20 minutes. Shot and edited by Meredith Bragg.

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Wanna Ride?

ted.balaker@reason.tv (Ted Balaker) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 19:40:00 EST

Burt Rutan took the cloak off of his new spacecraft on Wednesday.

Mr. Rutan, the creator of SpaceShipOne, the first privately financed craft to carry a human into space, traveled to New York to show detailed models of the bigger SpaceShipTwo and its carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo.
“2008 will really be the year of the spaceship,” said Sir Richard Branson, the British serial entrepreneur, at the heavily attended press conference at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Sir Richard, who founded a company, Virgin Galactic, that promises to take tourists on brief trips to the edge of space, was there to show off the sleek pod of a spacecraft and its spidery carrier plane.

NYT article here; my 2005 interview with Burt Rutan here.