>No sane person in the United States of whatever political party or creed would have said a rescue mission that had a reasonable chance of success was not worth the money and risk.
I think most of us have the sentimental and emotional content that we would want the rescue mission to go forward. However, if you were to ignore the feel-good effects, it is very difficult to argue that the mission would maximize human well-being. I only think it is an obvious decision with a failure of perspective. Let me try to characterize some of the considerations in the most approximate and non-rigorous manner.
Ignoring the risk to the rescuers, let's say the cost of the mission is something like $80M per astronaut life saved. If there is 80% chance of success that is equivalent to $100M/life or if there's a 10% chance of success that is $800M/life.
With big numbers, it starts to become a society-level decision about how individual lives are valued. What are the resources we're willing to devote to the rescue of a trapped coal-miner, the cancer treatment of a child with poor parents, a medical evacuation from Antarctica, or the rescue of someone who has been captured by pirates?
One could argue that these astronauts merit greater rescue efforts, since they are spearheading humanity's exploration into space, but you could also argue that they are sufficiently sophisticated to understand the risks they were taking on.
Let's say an aircraft carrier takes two days to meet up with a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean to airlift a girl with an appendicitis to its shipboard hospital. Does the $20M/day operating cost of a carrier count as resources spent on that one child? Probably not, because thousands of crew members are going about their regular training regardless of where they are, and carrier is doing its job of being some predetermined general vicinity. While the justification for the expense of those other goals can be debated, they don't happen to be an opportunity cost of rescuing that girl.
On the other hand, the shuttle crew rescue mission would likely have been entirely in pursuit of one singular goal. The depreciation and consumption of resources could not be considered to serve other purposes. The salaries paid might be thought of as a transfer rather than a destruction of wealth, yet they too represent the efforts of a large work force of highly competent people not doing another tasks for that same pay.
The other benefits of such a mission really are difficult to project. For example, maybe the value of additional capabilities that would have been developed in pursuit of rescuing the astronauts would have been worth it. Perhaps the feel-good effects alone would have been worth as much as anything else that we spend money on that inspires us.
While it is the task of good leaders to divine when unreasonable expenses should be taken when the incalculable benefits are worth it, terrible leaders can be characterized as people who fail to have perspective and don't appreciate costs, and who make rash decisions without considering the implications.
Utilitarian arguments aside, one reason folks are willing to go out there on a limb is, they feel they have backup. The Marines risk life and limb to 'leave no man behind', and it works - Marines are bat-shit crazy-dedicated.
So the human equation counts too, not just the dollars.
It is an implicit agreement that some quantity of available assets will be subjected to a certain level of risk in order to insure that one man is not left behind. The implicit agreement is not made because it is sustainable in an environment when a large number of marines require a sacrifice of multiples of their number to be rescued, but because of the number of marines who are at risk of being left behind and the quantity of assets that are available to insure that does not happen.
When considering what risk will be undertaken, you have to appreciate that limits to what assets are even defined as available are imposed by what has been certified as battle ready, which is essentially a risk assessment about a unit's likelihood of survival in an engagement with the types of enemies it is designed for. Or, to consider extremes, we don't field child soldiers, and wouldn't even if it were the only way to make the difference between rescuing a marine behind enemy lines or not.
Perhaps tens, or even hundreds of millions, of dollars per astronaut life does not yet venture into the exotic territory where commonplace statements about "sparing no cost" are meaningless, but it is unrealistic to assert that no cost is so great that you would ever choose to compromise your norms instead.
You're ignoring that the military's job is to the defeat the enemy. If a marine is down, then the operation to rescue him/her by necessity involves defeating or inflicting a severe blow to the enemy.
The same is arguably true of a shuttle rescue mission for that matter: having never been done, the thinking and technological requirements of such a thing, and the grand experiment of seeing if it all works, would be worth the effort.
As noted, since the Colombia disaster NASA took to prepping "launch on necessity" shuttle missions.
I agree that it would have been a gargantuan, billion dollar effort to rescue Columbia, with a high risk of failure.
But had they succeeded, or even had they not for that matter, the lessons learned would have been substantial. So I would propose that the effort would not have been money down the drain. It would have captured the public's imagination, escalated the space agency and its astronauts to a heroic status not seen since the 1960s, and taught the nation a valuable and graphic lesson on the costs of skimping on safety, in this case failing to have a backup rocket ready to take off, or an escape module built into the Shuttle, for example.
Had we kept the Saturn rockets alive, as an alternative heavy cargo and human transport system, with a launch-ready rocket on the pad while people were in orbit, then Lee Hutchinson's notion would not have been so far fetched at all.
But that would have cost tens of billions of dollars that the nation chose instead to invest into other projects--military buildups in the 1980s, wars of invasion in the 1990s and 2000s, and so forth. Only the most powerful of politicians could have persuaded the country to spend that kind of money as a contingency. It's just too tempting to redirect it into local (vote buying) projects.
I think most of us have the sentimental and emotional content that we would want the rescue mission to go forward. However, if you were to ignore the feel-good effects, it is very difficult to argue that the mission would maximize human well-being. I only think it is an obvious decision with a failure of perspective. Let me try to characterize some of the considerations in the most approximate and non-rigorous manner.
Ignoring the risk to the rescuers, let's say the cost of the mission is something like $80M per astronaut life saved. If there is 80% chance of success that is equivalent to $100M/life or if there's a 10% chance of success that is $800M/life.
With big numbers, it starts to become a society-level decision about how individual lives are valued. What are the resources we're willing to devote to the rescue of a trapped coal-miner, the cancer treatment of a child with poor parents, a medical evacuation from Antarctica, or the rescue of someone who has been captured by pirates?
One could argue that these astronauts merit greater rescue efforts, since they are spearheading humanity's exploration into space, but you could also argue that they are sufficiently sophisticated to understand the risks they were taking on.
Let's say an aircraft carrier takes two days to meet up with a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean to airlift a girl with an appendicitis to its shipboard hospital. Does the $20M/day operating cost of a carrier count as resources spent on that one child? Probably not, because thousands of crew members are going about their regular training regardless of where they are, and carrier is doing its job of being some predetermined general vicinity. While the justification for the expense of those other goals can be debated, they don't happen to be an opportunity cost of rescuing that girl.
On the other hand, the shuttle crew rescue mission would likely have been entirely in pursuit of one singular goal. The depreciation and consumption of resources could not be considered to serve other purposes. The salaries paid might be thought of as a transfer rather than a destruction of wealth, yet they too represent the efforts of a large work force of highly competent people not doing another tasks for that same pay.
The other benefits of such a mission really are difficult to project. For example, maybe the value of additional capabilities that would have been developed in pursuit of rescuing the astronauts would have been worth it. Perhaps the feel-good effects alone would have been worth as much as anything else that we spend money on that inspires us.
While it is the task of good leaders to divine when unreasonable expenses should be taken when the incalculable benefits are worth it, terrible leaders can be characterized as people who fail to have perspective and don't appreciate costs, and who make rash decisions without considering the implications.