Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jessriedel 3867 days ago
It's not possible to justify the very high price we pay for human safety within the space program based on value to the mission. If it were only a matter of the mission, we would accept tremendously more risk. Human lives are only valued at a but under $10 million, so even for a 10-person mission to Mars the value of the humans is < 1% of the cost of the mission.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Life_Value_in_th...

Because of the diminishing returns to safety spending, it's generally better from an economics perspective to accept an order-unity chance of failure and just send multiple missions. But obviously, this is not how we design human space travel.