Re: Space Shuttle criticizing will start once it has been retired

On Jan 4, 8:00 pm, "Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)"
<mooregr_deletet...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Quadibloc" <jsav...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:8a60d7a9-e82a-4ec3-8694-9b6e69dcde57@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Jan 1, 9:50 am, "Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)"

<mooregr_deletet...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Now now, let's look at the facts....

Number of fatal shuttle flights... hmm.. 2
Number of fatal capsule flights... hmm.. 2

Huh? Every one of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts made it
back to the ground alive.

=========================
Umm, and the Russians capsules don't count?
=========================

If your point is that the Space Shuttle was an example of NASA falling
to the abysmal level of technological backwardness of the country that
brought us the Chernobyl disaster, I might agree with you.

Otherwise, if you're implying that Russian space launches *count*,
that fatalities in the Russian space program have meaningfulness and
relevance to assessing the _inherent_ risks of space capsule travel,
even when done by Americans *when they're doing it right, with the old
Apollo spirit*, as should be obvious if you've read this far, I
disagree.
=========================
You may disagree, but you haven't made any useful argument.
=========================

Later on in this thread, someone did note that there were near-misses
in the U.S. capsule program, and only a very limited number of
flights, compared to the many Shuttle missions. That certainly is an
argument against the notion of the Shuttle being unsafe.

Although the Apollo 1 fire happened on the ground, it did illustrate
the same egregious, at least in hindsight, sort of failure that marked
the Challenger disaster.

But as for the arguments in my post, I left out the argument itself
because I thought it obvious - and there's enough politics here as it
is.

Russia was far behind the U.S. technologically, but it still needed to
maintain parity in defense and space so that its dictatorial regime
could survive and hold on to its conquests in Eastern Europe. Under
such conditions, one would expect that it would employ its lack of
regard for human life as one item with which to make up for its
technical deficiencies - and, thus, a *lot* of things in the former
Soviet Union would be considerably less safe than their U.S.
counterparts.

So, quite literally, what happened in Russia *doesn't* count; it
doesn't supply us with any useful information about the inherent
safety of different spaceship designs.

John Savard
.

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