Just because you can imagine something, does not mean it is possible. Conversely, it is the nature of genius that it can identify simple, elegant ways to achieve results that many thought impossible, or had never contemplated; Archimedes leapt from his bath, whilst Turing realized that an executable logic can be maintained independently of physical form. When we look long and hard at the history of imagination, science, technology and engineering, we realize the truth about what is easy, and what is difficult, is only apparent in hindsight. Everything seems straightforward, after we have perfected how to do it. Meanwhile, predictions about future technologies are notoriously unreliable. The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov was a professor of biochemistry, and he tried to be realistic about science throughout his fiction. He wrote stories set in a future where people travelled faster than light to colonize faraway planets, lived lives spanning several centuries and were served by super-intelligent robots. And yet, he wrote that the planetary colonies would grow slowly because the technology of artificial insemination would be beyond them. If we compare his speculations with what has happened in the meantime, we realize test tube babies were considerably easier to manufacture than positronic brains or hyperspace drives. The majority of human beings, ill-informed and data-poor as we are, have no good way of judging what innovations are possible, or the likelihood of failure when striving for novel results. Our only guide is how easily we imagine the desired result. That is no useful guide at all, because we can imagine all sorts of impossible things, whilst being unable to understand many things that are both possible and real. The way the universe works bears no relationship to what my mind finds convenient, or inconvenient, to comprehend. Hence comprehension is the slave of past experience. When there is no relevant past experience, we soon collapse into irrational guesswork. This is the context I want to apply to space tourism, a business model constructed around the idea of developing cheaper, safer ways to transport people into space. Headlines are currently dominated by the failure of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo. Investigators have rushed to the scene, and it may take a year to determine what went wrong. But the real mystery is why we expected, or pretended, that a fatal accident would be unlikely.

I imagine that most people prepared to pay USD 250,000 for a sub-orbital space flight would have a passing interest in the history of space exploration. So here is a quick review of some of the main points.

• The first animal sent into space died long before it returned to Earth.
• In the early days of the American space program, lots of rockets blew up during or immediately after launch.
• Soviet cosmonauts have been killed by a range of accidents, including parachute failures and accidental decompression whilst in space. They survived many more near-misses, including several malfunctions with the separation of re-entry vehicles.
• The Americans suffered similar setbacks, including a re-entry vehicle that was supposed to float but which sank into the ocean instead, and a dangerous high-g spin caused by a faulty thruster.
• Even after successfully sending a man to the moon, the Apollo program suffered an explosion on Apollo 13 which very nearly crippled the vessel and killed its crew.
• Though highly experienced, the Russians finally abandoned their Mir space station after it suffered both a fire and a collision with a supply vehicle.
• By the 1980’s, NASA was so confident in its technological prowess that it gave the name ‘Space Shuttle’ to its chief vehicle, and promised there would be shuttle launches every few weeks. In practice, the vehicle launched far less often than promised, and suffered two fatal disasters.
• For all the failures of manned space flight, there have been many more failures where only machines were involved. Earlier this year, a privately-owned cargo vehicle, contracted to resupply the International Space Station, exploded after lift-off. The CEO of a rival space transport company had previously derided the failed rocket as ‘the punch line to a joke‘.
• For all the people killed whilst lifting off, in space, or during re-entry, even more have been killed by all sorts of training accidents. Bear in mind that a key reason for training is to reduce the likelihood of mistakes.

In short, space travel is very dangerous. To make things much worse, people tend to seriously underestimate the risks, despite the lessons of history. When reviewing the first Shuttle disaster, Nobel physicist Richard Feynman pointed out that promises for the safety record of the Shuttle were risible. As he put it:

It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could properly ask “What is the cause of management’s fantastic faith in the machinery?”

Even the best and most objective engineers have a vested interest in maintaining their employment. As space programs are less likely to receive funding if the public believes they will likely fail with fatal consequences, it is fair to assume that even the most honest individuals will tend towards an optimistic bias when appraising the safety of space exploration. However, it is impossible to identify anyone who is likely to have a compensating negative bias, has useful access to pertinent safety data and has significant influence over decision-making or public opinion.

To summarize, the history of space travel includes a long list of disasters, which must be presented alongside the successes. That is not to say that the accomplishments have not been profound, or that astronauts, scientists and engineers have not made stupendous leaps forward. They have. Nor do the accidents reveal a history of foolish gambles and silly cost-cutting. Space travel has cost the human race many billions, partly because the people involved try to avoid fatalities. Rather, the litany of failure succinctly shows that lifting people into space, keeping them alive in its hostile environment, and then safely returning them to Earth, is a bloody hard thing to do.

You do not need to be a rocket scientist to understand the chief problem with space travel. It requires a lot of energy. Whatever fuel is used, it needs to supply the energy to lift the vehicle, and the people in it, and the machines needed to keep those people alive, plus anything else that is being carried into space. It also needs to provide enough energy to lift the weight of the fuel itself. As a result, space travel necessarily involves fuels with enormous explosive potential, being carried by vehicles that are otherwise as light and minimal as possible.

Amidst this backdrop, enter Richard Branson.

Grinning, amiable, charming Richard Branson is a bit of a PR whizz and business guru, is he not? He has been known to fly exceedingly high in balloons, and to break records when crossing oceans by powerboat. Everybody knows he means well, and they love him as a result. Who else can persuade us to treat space flight like a joy ride in a fast car? I can think of nobody better suited to the task. That is why he should be dismissed as the money-grubbing, life-wasting charlatan he really is. Branson is a lover of music, a genius with marketing and customer service, and an expert at picking top lawyers. These are the kinds of skills that allow him to slap the Virgin brand on everything from financial products to cable television. But the truth is that Branson does not understand many of the products that he sells. That is why he needs so many different business partners, and why he relies on lawyers to extract money from those partners, when things turn sour. Our desire to like Branson should not distract us from an important truth: a lot of the time, Branson has no idea what he is talking about. He may be a great salesman, but he is also a huckster. Branson will sell you crap – or something that kills you – whilst hiding behind the defence that he did not know about his product’s failings.

It was obvious that Virgin Galactic would kill people, sooner or later. We know that people still die on planes, and on trains. We might die on a Virgin plane, or train, without feeling that Branson takes risks we would not choose to take ourselves. But when it comes to trains and planes, we can somewhat gauge the risks intuitively: lots of people use trains and planes to travel a large aggregate distance, but we rarely hear of accidents. In contrast, very few attempt journeys into space, and many of them have died trying. Branson is selling space travel as a frivolous indulgence, not because the passengers need to go somewhere, or will do something useful in space. When people travel to space solely for the sake of the experience, the rest of us should seriously question the odds that people will die for the most flippant reasons imaginable.

You might think that I am too quick to judge Branson after one failure. I disagree. Firstly, I would have gladly pointed out the inevitably of fatal accidents before this most recent disaster. The problem with managing risk is that people do not listen to the data if it does not coincide with what they want to believe, and that means most people will not properly estimate the chances of dying on a Virgin Galactic excursion until after somebody got killed. In addition, this is not the first accident involving this stable of space vehicles. The predecessor to SpaceShipTwo was, unsurprisingly, named SpaceShipOne. It was made by the same people, before Branson entered into partnership with them. SpaceShipOne successfully performed the first private manned spaceflight. When doing so, it repeatedly rolled, contrary to the mission plan. Whilst the pilot was not hurt, we should remember that the sole purpose of SpaceShipOne was as an experimental vehicle used to develop the technology for low-cost spaceflight. As such, any major unintended deviation from plan is both a useful test result, and a failure. SpaceShipOne entered space ten years ago, but even now its successor is still not ready for commercial use, and evidently not safe. This is despite Branson repeatedly announcing deadlines that subsequently slipped. He first said that tourists would be visiting space by 2007. When Branson tells us that safety is his priority, we must question what this really means in practice.

Implying that safety is paramount is one of many ways to discourage clear thinking about risk. However hard people work, however much money is spent on safety, some risk is being taken and it is more important to accurately quantify what that risk is, than to spew platitudes that suggest the risk has been minimized. If preserving life was the only priority, then nobody would ever venture into space. There is always a segment of society that wants the lowering of speed limits for cars, lower tolerances for alcohol in a driver’s bloodstream, and so forth. They do not care if the data suggests that such policy changes will have little impact on the number of accidents. In a way, they do not need to review data – it is logically correct that a slow vehicle is less likely to be involved in an accident than one that moves quickly, and that a stationary vehicle is at even less risk. By that same logic, the cost-effective way to minimize fatalities in spaceflight is to never allow anyone to fly into space.

Thanks to computers and robots, it is increasingly questionable why we need to hurl people into space. Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, and like many astronauts he was a natural choice for the space program because he was a jet fighter pilot. These days, we are rapidly approaching a time when jet fighters will become drones, remotely piloted by individuals who sit on the ground, not in the cockpit. Computers can do a lot of the flying by themselves, without human intervention. When human control is needed, it is exercised via a radio link. This is not just a safety feature; it also reduces cost and enhances the performance of the vehicle. Why add to the weight and size of a vehicle by carrying a person, and all the apparatus needed to keep him or her alive, when there is no reason to do so?

As more can be done by machine, we have fewer reasons to send people into space. That is why some models for commercial spaceflight concentrate so heavily on space tourism. Only human vanity can create sufficient demand for the technology that is being developed.

If the safety aspects do not discourage some of us from space tourism, we should also consider the economic, environmental and moral implications. Virgin Galactic is offering customers ‘several minutes’ of weightlessness for the cost of USD 250,000. On Earth, the average GDP per capita is roughly USD 10,000 per annum. So to enjoy a few minutes of floating, every space passenger will consume as much of the world’s economy as the average human being consumes over 25 years. As Einstein showed, matter can be measured in terms of energy, and because energy is bought and sold, that means we can translate energy into dollars, no matter what form the energy takes. USD 250,000 is hence a representation of the total energy cost of space flight – not only measuring the fuel used, but also incorporating the energy that was expended on making the technology. When I replace a traditional light bulb with one of the newer energy-efficienct substitutes, it will typically reduce my electricity bill by USD 4.50 per annum. At that rate, I would need to replace 5,555 bulbs to earn back the cost of an individual’s spaceflight within the course of one year. I do not know about you, but my home is not that large. I will not need that many light bulbs in my lifetime. The SpaceShipTwo is designed to carry six passengers, so 33,333 bulbs will need to be changed to offset every flight. Some people honestly believe that changing light bulbs is a vital way to address the dangers of global warming. When individuals like Branson also express sincere concerns about global warming, they are ignoring the realities of how much energy is consumed by space travel. They are also indifferent to what this tells us about economic inequality, which is intrinsically bound to the problems of managing energy consumption and the environment.

In the spirit of the Darwin Awards, I rather hope that some of the world’s richest and most powerful people continue to solicit Branson to sling them into space. If these people are so poor at judging risk, and their egos so demand another thrill be added to lives that already overflow with material pleasures, then the world might be a better place if some of them explode. Their remaining wealth will be redistributed, and maybe power will also shift to individuals with more worthwhile priorities, and a better understanding of probabilities. Nothing should discourage Branson and his son from keeping their promise, of being amongst the first space tourists. I only regret the vessel will not be large enough to carry his entire genetic line into space, and by extinguishing it, deliver an even greater favour to we earthbound spectators.

Space tourists are likely to be killed during their journey; they will take a risk that is far higher than people consider tolerable in other spheres of activity. The cost of the trip will be very high, partly because the energy required consumes so much of the Earth’s precious resources. And the trip will serve absolutely no purpose, other than providing passengers with a novel kind of leisure. On that basis, space tourism is a very dumb thing to do, and there is no tragedy when the reckless pursuit of pleasure leads a dumb animal to its premature end. The world is full of pleasure, for those who know where to look. For every person seeking leisure, there is another with more pressing needs. We can all happily live without space tourism, and the money would be better spent elsewhere. And for those who feel they cannot survive without experiencing a few minutes of life in space, I will not be sorry if their heavenly chariot carries them further than expected, on what proves to be a one-way trip.

It dragged on and on… you will have to decide for yourself why the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), the UK’s press regulator, took so long to review the inaccuracies in Caroline Criado-Perez’s July 23rd piece about domestic violence. Published on the New Statesman’s website, Criado-Perez made the following assertion.

Domestic abuse is the largest cause of morbidity in women aged 19-44, more than war, cancer or motor vehicle accidents.

This is a dramatic statement, which caught the attention of many readers. When I surveyed Twitter tweets that linked to the article, I found ten percent repeated the claim verbatim. However, Criado-Perez’s domestic violence statistic is utterly false. It was most notably debunked by a 2009 episode of More or Less, the BBC’s statistical fact-checking show.

Criado-Perez did worse than repeating a common lie. If she had stopped there, then maybe she could have feigned innocence, pretending she made an honest mistake. Criado-Perez went further, trying to hoodwink gullible readers by hyperlinking her pseudostatistic to a 246-page report published by the World Health Organization, even though that report contains no data to support Criado-Perez’s hyperbole. The WHO report dates back to 2002, and the most pertinent data it contains is that interpersonal violence then ranked as the 43rd-highest cause of morbidity for women.

Though it has taken too long, IPSO has finally reached a decision. Their Complaints Committee said:

The Committee made clear that it would not be able to establish the accuracy of the statistic itself. However, it did consider it misleading for the magazine to cite as a source a WHO report which did not contain the assertion in question. The magazine had not been able to demonstrate that it had taken care. As such, there had been a breach of Clause 1 (i) [of the Editor’s Code of Practice].

Criado-Perez and the New Statesman have misled their readers. That was so obvious that nobody could sensibly deny it, even if they wanted to. I know that some of you have contacted Criado-Perez directly, asking why she cited the WHO report and what was the real source of her claim. Her attitude is plain: she intends to simply ignore those questions. Criado-Perez expects this all to blow over, allowing her to continue her career as a campaigner and journalist without even a hiccup. Instead of choosing to be honest, frank and transparent, Criado-Perez believes that the best course of action is to refuse to discuss questions relating to her integrity as a journalist. Better still, she hopes nobody will ask them. If the press, and its regulator, refuse to hold her to account, then only the public can do so.

I am not satisfied with the conclusion of my complaint. In all my dealings with the press regulator, I emphasized that time is of the essence, when correcting errors on popular websites. Articles on major websites are mostly read during the first few days of publication; this is when the article is featured on the home page and promoted via social media. The article may remain on the web forever, but only a very small number of people will read it after the initial rush. I contacted the New Statesman and Criado-Perez within hours of the publication of this article, alerting them to the error. It took the New Statesman two weeks to delete the bogus statistic (substituting other statistical misinformation in its place). By then, the article had long disappeared from their home page. Nobody was reading the article any more, so it hardly mattered what changes were made. No real effort has been made to correctly inform the readers who have been misinformed. In total, it has taken 10 weeks to get a judgment from the press regulator, though their standards state the following.

We will deal with your complaint as quickly as possible. We will explain any delays and keep you informed of the progress of our investigations. Overall, we aim to deal with complaints in an average of 35 working days.

The press regulator never explained why this complaint needed so much longer than their ‘average’. 10 weeks is a long time on the internet. In that time, a lie can spread worldwide.

More than that, we must question the purpose of a press regulator that is ‘not able to establish the accuracy’ of assertions made by the press. In this case, we are not dealing with a rarefied branch of theoretical physics or speculations about the nature of God. Either domestic violence is, or is not, the largest cause of morbidity for a certain range of women. Either there is statistical data to support this assertion, or there is not. In this instance, nobody can find any data to support this falsehood, and there is plenty of data to the contrary. In short, what is the point of a press regulator tasked to ‘uphold the highest standards of journalism’ and to ‘enforce’ a code which requires ‘the Press [to] take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information’, if that regulator cannot tell the difference between a statistical fact and some made-up garbage that gets repeated by people who should know better?

Even now, the press regulator is complicit in misleading readers. If you visit the offending article on the New Statesman’s website, you will see a footnote. That footnote is a lie, though it has the blessing of IPSO. The footnote begins: ‘Update, 7 August 2014’. I believe an ordinary person, with no knowledge of the history of this article, would assume that this update occurred on the 7th of August. It did not. The wording of this footnote originated in late September. IPSO’s complaint handler told me about it on the 1st of October.

From: Bianca Strohmann
Subject: Complaint 143805
Date: 1 October 2014 09:58:07 GMT+01:00
To: Eric Priezkalns

Dear Mr Priezkalns,

My apologies for the delay in bringing your complaint to a conclusion.

The statistic in the New Statesman has now been amended to

The prevalence of domestic abuse means that in some countries 40-70 per cent of female murder victims are killed by a husband or boyfriend, according to the UN.

And the footnote has been updated accordingly.

The article was first amended on August 7th, and a footnote was inserted then. But what you see today is not the version of the article, or the footnote, as it looked on August 7th. It would bore most normal people to describe every edit made to the article, and to the footnote, since then. Let me assure you that what you see today is actually the fourth version of this article, and the third version of this footnote.

Throughout this process, the ‘independent’ press regulator has been in repeated contact with the New Statesman, negotiating changes to the wording. After each change, I was asked to comment. The implication is clear. The editors of the New Statesman wanted to make the least possible change, and to draw the least possible attention to the inaccuracy in the original article. The press regulator aided and abetted this, by asking me to comment on every change.

A genuinely impartial body would have no need to ask my opinion, because they could have told the New Statesman that the changes were clearly inadequate, as they continued to mislead readers by presenting statistical falsehoods. Why ask me about every change, only to then negotiate further changes, unless the regulator hoped I might drop my complaint? Why draw this process out unnecessarily, with repeated trivial edits, unless the goal was to avoid issuing a formal decision that the Editor’s Code had been breached?

Over the last 10 weeks, a lot of my time has been wasted. My ‘reward’, such as it is, is that the regulator was finally forced to issue a decision, stating that the public had been misled. This is of scant benefit, if the public does not learn the truth. Though it is entitled to do so, the regulator has not published its decision. I received the decision by email, as if lies about the prevalence of violence in our society are a private matter between me and a group of career journalists who never had the decency to respond to me directly.

At every turn, the regulator has done the least it can possibly do, to correct the misinformation spread by Criado-Perez and the New Statesman. It should not be up to private citizens, like you and me, to hold the press and public servants to account, in this fashion. But it is up to you, and me, to hold them to account. We cannot rely on anyone else to do it for us.

Criado-Perez is a famous victim. Her fame is inextricably linked to the abuse she received from Twitter trolls. Our society is humane; we have sympathy for victims. But we all know that bad people can be victims too. We must not allow sympathy for Criado-Perez to grant her leeway we would not permit to every journalist. She lied, and it was a gross lie. The readers of her articles should know about this, and apply appropriate scepticism to everything she writes in future.

The truth has come out, somewhat. But the truth has arrived late, and is only spoken in whispers. You are reading this now, but many more people read the original article by Criado-Perez, and they believed its contents. They are not reading this, or learning they were misled.

In many respects, this process shows how liars and cheats are winners in our society. It is people like you and I, who want journalists to present reliable information to readers, who are the losers. Perhaps we are in the minority. But even if we are a minority, I intend to keep fighting, and I hope to find myself fighting alongside you. If you agree with me, that Criado-Perez was caught in a barefaced lie but has suffered no repercussions, then I urge you to tell others about this incident, and the judgment issued by the press regulator. We cannot rely on others to do it for us.

The full text of the IPSO decision follows.

Committee’s decision in the case of
Priezkalns v New Statesman

The complainant expressed concern about an article, published on the magazine’s website only, which reported incidents of domestic violence, and called for a change in UK law to offer greater protection to victims.

Clause 1 (i) of the Editors’ Code of Practice states that “the press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures”. The complainant stated that a statistic used in the article, that “domestic abuse is the largest cause of morbidity in women aged 19-44, more than war, cancer or motor vehicle accidents”, had been widely debunked and was inaccurate. Further, the magazine had linked to a World Health Organisation (WHO) report to support this assertion. The report did not contain the statistic in question and the complainant considered that it was misleading for the magazine to suggest that this statistic could be attributed to the WHO.

The Committee noted the complainant’s position that the statistic under complaint had been widely debunked. The magazine had stated that it had been quoted in government reports, including one issued by the Home Office, but acknowledged that it had been widely contested. The Committee made clear that it would not be able to establish the accuracy of the statistic itself. However, it did consider it misleading for the magazine to cite as a source a WHO report which did not contain the assertion in question. The magazine had not been able to demonstrate that it had taken care. As such, there had been a breach of Clause 1 (i).

Clause 1 (ii) states that “a significant inaccuracy, misleading statement or distortion once recognised must be corrected, promptly and with due prominence”. The magazine was obliged to correct the impression that the statistic quoted had come from the WHO. The magazine had replaced the original statistic with one contained within the report, and added the following footnote: “This article originally referred to domestic violence as “the largest cause of morbidity in women aged 19-44”. However, this was not contained in the WHO report cited as the source. The article was amended to state that “in some countries 40-70 per cent of female murder victims are killed by a husband or partner”, a statistic contained within the report in question”. The Committee was satisfied that, in acknowledging that there had been an error, and making clear the amendment that had been made, the magazine had taken sufficient action to remedy the initial breach.

The Committee noted that the complainant was concerned about the prominence of the correction, stating that the original article had been one of the four most popular on the magazine’s website when originally published, but only a minority of readers would be likely to revisit the article and see the correction. The Committee made clear however that the correction should appear where the original inaccuracy had. It was satisfied that the remedy offered was sufficient. The complainant was further concerned about the time taken to publish the final correction. The Committee noted that the process had been lengthy, but was satisfied that the magazine had not failed in its obligations under the terms of the Code. The complainant had also suggested that the magazine publish a comprehensive history of its footnotes, but the Committee did not consider that it was obliged to do so.

Reference no. 143805