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Pastimes : Shuttle Columbia STS-107
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To: Sig who wrote (436)2/7/2003 9:43:35 PM
From: ownstock  Read Replies (1) of 627
 
Humm, I think if the tiles were inherently so bad they needed inspection on orbit, then we do not have a shuttle.

The launch successes of the Shuttle to date says it is about as robust as the most successful rocket to date: the Russian Proton. That's all we can reasonably expect with that design and approach. You cannot improve a design with inspection.

In all likelyhood, we will never get beyond 95% success in getting into space. That's why it is not a place for school teachers or Senators or "innocents" of any sort. It's a job for gutsy very well paid test pilots, who understand that there is a 1 in 20 chance they will be killed.

An analogy: I have not seen anyone in NASA suggest that a schoolteacher should be strapped to a NASCAR drag racer and launched down a drag strip so they could tell all their students about it.

Rocket ships are not airplanes and have a very long way to go to get there. Infinitely long if NASA never funds research in that direction. They killed the spaceplane project, because they think it is their job to compete with the Air Force to launch payloads.

The payload should be launched by a "dumb" rocket. That will be the safest and cheapest way. The humans should be launched by a spaceplane that has a proven reliability of better than 99.99%. That's an order of magnitude better than anything anyone has done to date. When the number gets there, then we can consider very gutsy schoolteachers and maybe a farting Senator or so.

JMHO

-Own
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