Shuttle launch to go ahead despite security concerns...

[Richelieu]

I hope they don't regret this...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- NASA's top safety official objected to the agency's decision to press ahead with the launch of Discovery next month without fixing a potentially catastrophic foam-shedding problem, but said he won't appeal -- and won't resign in protest -- because he does not believe the shuttle astronauts' lives are in danger.

There has to be tremendous amounts of pressure on them to go ahead with this.

[reds4ever]

The sooner they retire that thing the better.

[Proteus_MST]

Chances will probably minimal that something catastrophic happens.

After all we have over 100 Shuttle starts compared to "just" 2 catastrophic accidents and all this although the foam problem was there all the time.
So maybe the chance for another accident are < 5%.

[reds4ever]

Originally posted by Proteus_MST
Chances will probably minimal that something catastrophic happens.

After all we have over 100 Shuttle starts compared to "just" 2 catastrophic accidents and all this although the foam problem was there all the time.
So maybe the chance for another accident are < 5%.

You're kidding right? Those are shocking odds.

[Proteus_MST]

AFAIK the probabilities for desaster for the apollo program where calculated even higher.
But nevertheless the risks were taken and, aside from the accident on the ground which cost the lives of the three astronauts of Apollo 1 and of course aside from the near-accident of Apollo 13 they were quite successful and yielded much valuable scientific data.

So no, I don´t think these odds are shocking. Flying into space isn´t like driving a car and it´s only natural that sooner or later something bad is gonna happen if you have space shuttles routinely flying to space.

Of course I think that NASA should fix the problem with the insulating foam, after all everything that increases the safety of the astronauts is good, but I don´t think that starting one or two missions before the problem is finally fixed will pose a real great danger for the astronauts involved (chances are like rolling a D20 and getting a 1)

[Arrian]

What they really need to do, beyond the short term, is to retire the shuttles and move on to other work.

-Arrian

[Jon Miller]

those odds are shocking for the current space program

JM

[Spiffor]

Indeed. The Russians would never launch a Soyuz with such terrible odds. IIRC, normal odds of catastrophic failue, for the Russian manned flights, are largely below 1%

[Harry Tuttle]

Spiff, do you realize how many Cosmonauts died throughout the Soviet space program, or how many failures they had?

[Ecthy]

Chances of dying on a spaceflight mission are 5% per astronaut. No clue about per mission.

[Ecthy]

Empirically speaking... funny also that despite all the mocking of Russian technology programs, more American astronaust died during spaceflight-related missions than Soviet cosmonauts. Of course there is a grey area due to worse information policy in Evil Empire, but even now after decades not many formerly unknown incidents have been revealed that involved the death of cosmonauts.... now, ground personnel, that's a different story.

[Whaleboy]

Security?

[Dis]

I was just going to make a thread on this (with a poll even!), but oh well.

The odds are calculated at 1 in 100 chance of dying. But even that seems optimisitc.

Would you do something where you had a 1% chance of dying? That is the question.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/06/27/shuttle.risk.ap/index.html

[Proteus_MST]

Yep, I would,
if the mission seems to be important enough (for example for science)

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Harry Tuttle
Spiff, do you realize how many Cosmonauts died throughout the Soviet space program, or how many failures they had?

I was talking about today.

Currently, most spacefarers (be they cosmonauts, astronauts or spationauts) use Soyuz to go to the ISS. There's a reason to that.