Respect for Life Pt. II
Here you go... a totally different story about the value of human life.
Visions for the Future: The Rules of Risk
If you?re not willing to take a risk, you?ll never get off the ground!
Guy Thibodaux and Max Faget
Robbie: There?s a question I really want to ask. What is your vision for the future of humans in space? If you could paint the picture any way you wanted, what?s your vision? What would it look like?
Max: I think the long range vision is probably that humans will at least explore the inner planets. I?m not sure they?ll go much beyond Mars, unless they get something that science fiction calls hyper-drive or something like that and the human race is really going to move to another solar system. We need space for more and more things. The commercial use of space could probably hardly be done without the human applications.
I?ll make another prediction that?s not original with me because Bob Gilruth said it long before I did. He said, "Next time we go to the moon, the people who do it are really going to find out that it is very difficult." I would agree with him on that. With the modern ground rules, it?s almost impossible to do. The military talks about "rules of engagement." Well, I?ll talk about rules concerning risk and so forth. Those rules we have imposed on ourselves almost preclude the possibility of a reasonable landing on the moon in the next thirty or forty years. That?s my feeling. We either change the rules or we won?t get there for another thirty or forty years.
Robbie: Because of the structure of NASA now?
Max: It?s the mindset of the bureaucrats on what?s safe and what?s not safe, and it?s the culture of the country where human life is so precious and it can?t be wasted. We?ve got rules against killing people even if they are murderers. They?re not hard rules, but you?ve elevated the value of human life out of proportion to its true value. That?s all there is to it. I?m talking as an engineer who is used to looking at big pictures and understanding what?s going on.
Robbie: So you think risks have to be taken to get back to the moon and they won?t be willing to take those risks.
Max: Every endeavor in the future has to be more risk free than the previous ventures. You just have to look at history to understand that.
Guy: There?s no joy to success without an opportunity to fail. Absolutely not. If you can?t fail, then there is no point in trying. Anybody can do it. It?s not a challenge.
Robbie: So are you saying the astronaut that gets in the next rocket has to be willing to die?
Max: I didn?t say you?d have to be willing to die, but you have to understand the risk. The risk right now of flying is acceptable because it?s an existing machine. But if you designed another one now you?d have to preclude a lot of the risks that are acceptable on the shuttle?they?d have to be ruled out.
Guy: Many of the astronauts live around here--Buzz Aldrin, David Scott, Dick Gordon, Gene Cernan and Mike Collins all went to the moon. Jim McDivitt, Rusty Schweikert and Walt Cunningham flew on pre-lunar missions as well as Gemini missions. My wife knew all of their wives. She said, "Well, what?s the difference in working in NASA?" And every wife told her, We go to fewer funerals these days because they were all test pilots, and the death rate on test pilots is far more severe than any other group in the United States.
Robbie: How do you reckon the true value of human life? You said that they are overvaluing human life right now and that?s hurting them.
Max: Well, see that?s the problem. It depends on what you?re talking about. The place where a human life is valued the least is in the Highway Department. I can go up and down this road here and show you situation after situation where humans are at unnecessary risk because of the way the highway is constructed and so forth and so on. They?re slowly getting rid of these things, but I think the highway department probably used a formula?a million dollars for a human life, something like that. Now, if it?s a criminal, the life of a convicted criminal is probably worth about $20 million. You understand? You spend $20 million dollars screwing around with him after he gets the death sentence. That?s ridiculous. We send them to the gas chamber in five or ten years. It doesn?t make any sense.
Guy: I?ll tell you how I feel. I?ve worked in safety. I?ve worked in the most hazardous part of the operation. Everything I had could explode and detonate and do all sorts of damage and all of the failures of anything I had to do with were going to be the most spectacular things you ever saw. Consequently, I was very heavily involved in safety. My attitude toward safety is that if in order to save one man?s life I have to spend more than one man?s lifetime trying to do that, there?s a net loss to humanity. That?s a very cold-hearted way of looking at it. It?s a very practical way of looking at it. If I have to spend a thousand man years of effort to save one man?s life, then it?s a great loss to humanity. That would not be a very popular opinion, but I?ve always looked at safety that way. I lean more toward the safe side, but that pretty much expresses my feelings about risk, for example. Knowledge of what you are doing, how it works and personal responsibility of the people doing the work is what makes things safe.
I remember a story about all the accidents people were having operating a press. People were having fingers cut off and other damage to their hands. Some bright guy got the idea to put the operators hand in shackles so when the press came down, the man?s hands were pulled out of the way. The union struck. People were not going to be subject to the machine. So some bright guy put a ring with a small amount of harmless radioactivity in it. The press sensed when the operator?s hand was near and would not operate. The machine was now subject to the man. You have to know a lot about human nature and human behavior to be a successful safety expert.
Max: The best way to be safe is simply to understand what the hazards are. If you understand what the hazards are and the people that are involved understand what the hazards are, then you?ve gone a big step forward toward safety. A lot of our safety now is what you might call "plastered-on safety." It hasn?t got anything to do with making the thing safe, but we?ve got a committee to sit in review, we?ve got special organizations that specialize in safety.
The special organizations that specialize in safety don?t understand the problem near as much as the guy that is working with the problem. You know--you?ve got novelists that write good novels and you?ve got critics. The critics themselves would love to be a good writer but they don?t know how to do it, so they become a critic. Same thing with movies. They don?t know how to act or they don?t know how to produce a movie, so what the hell, I?d like to be a critic. It?s cheap to be a critic. Well, you?ve got these safety organizations of nothing but critics. That?s what they are. Most of those people have never really done real engineering themselves. They had a brush with it or they?ve got an engineering degree, but they don?t know how to make things work, they can only criticize the work of others. (laughs)
Robbie: As you speak, I am remembering that if you had been listened to in the design of the Challenger, there would have been no O-rings.
Max: The rocket would have been all one piece. It wouldn?t have had any joints.
Robbie: So that means it wouldn?t have blown up.
Max: But that was not a politically acceptable solution.