Lost me after defining the worth of an astronaut to be $50 million, and the value of scientific knowledge obtained from a longer-lived Hubble to be incalculable.
Even though I think the author makes a point worth considering, I found that a really sloppy justification.
Indeed. I would say that in truth an astronaut's life and a bunch of money are incommensurable.
The value of the article lies in showing that if agencies pretend to assign a certain value to a human life then they can become less inconsistent. (And if in this case it serves Zubrin's laudable aim of getting to Mars now, so much the better.)
For Zubrin himself to be consistent, OFC, he should have tried to assign a value to, say, another decade of Hubble data. Omitting that was, as you say, sloppy.
BTW I find it quite shocking that neither the article nor the other comments so far consider the relevancy of the astronaut's opinion of what is an acceptable risk for him. It is, after all, his life, and he remains a taxpayer like everyone else.
I guess in the future where things like life extension and legal suicide are commonplace it will be considered strange to ignore a person's wishes in this way
There is a simple reason why we can ignore what the astronaut wants: if any particular one is too risk-averse, there are many other similarly qualified ones that are less risk-averse and NASA can hire them instead.
Additionally, I would not be surprised at all if the average astronaut is willing to put up with much more risk than the government or general public is willing to put him or her in.
Even though I think the author makes a point worth considering, I found that a really sloppy justification.