Comment by johng
6 days ago
Great read and interesting article. Hard to believe that NASA would risk astronauts lives simply to save face, but that appears to be what's going to happen.
6 days ago
Great read and interesting article. Hard to believe that NASA would risk astronauts lives simply to save face, but that appears to be what's going to happen.
But that’s exactly what happened with Challenger
And Columbia, too, when they made the decision to reenter without inspection, and reenter instead of waiting for rescue.
A rescue was impractical and potentially riskier no?
7 replies →
Astronauts are smart folks. They can vote with their feet.
What a horrible (preventable) position to be in, though.
It's certainly about their lives, but it's also about not tanking the program due to catastrophic failure. The astronauts are going to do it regardless of the risk.
Was there ever a risk-free spaceflight? Pretty sure even with this finding this flight would be safer than any Apollo.
You seem to be ignoring the "just to save face" part. I'd argue it would be a worse thing for our bar for how safe it should be to be raised significantly from when we had been in space as a species less than a decade to now that it's been 65 years.
Never risk free , but Soyuz hardly lost any crew over its 50+ years
2/156 lost for Soyuz in 59 years, 2/135 for Space Shuttle in 30 years. Same rate. People often underestimate how intense STS actually was.
1 reply →
Yeah, and where is it now?
1 reply →
Saturn 5 had a flawless record. The leftover space shuttle parts which SLS is cobbled together from, not so much. SRBs are inherently dangerous, theyre designed to quickly launch nukes from silos, not people. And Orion is just a typical modern Boeing project. So far its fallen at every hurdle right?
Saturn 5 came close to catastrophic failure at least once. It had partial failures. Its sort of perfect record is mostly down to luck and not launching very many times.
Of course, six decades later, we should be able to do a lot better.
Orion is a Lockheed (CM) and Airbus (ESM) project.
1 reply →
They’ve killed dozens during the shuttle program , or did you forget ? Also a number during Gemini, Mercury and Appollo. Terrible safety record , and 5x worse than Soyuz . Shuttle fatality rate was 1/10. Approaching Russian roulette odds
In total, a little over one dozen astronauts died on shuttle flights (14). No astronauts died during Gemini or Mercury. Three died in a test on Apollo 1. The shuttle failure rate was nowhere close to 1/10. In fact, it was 1/67 (2 failures out of 134 flights).
>They’ve killed dozens during the shuttle program
Columbia and Challenger crew totaled 14, who else are you referring to?
Oh 14 totally acceptable
135 missions, 2 fatal accidents, that’s not 1/10.
[flagged]
8 replies →
It’s the American roulette
*Freedom Roulette