Sean Schouten wrote:
> Ha! I have heard that before... Cost and availability? Maybe... Superior
> Safety? Never!

Unless you have some figures to back that up, it sounds like an emotional
knee jerk statement to me.  I don't know if the shuttle is in fact safer
than other alternatives, but it's far from obvious that it's not.  How many
people have gone into space on the shuttle?  Of those, what percentage died?
What is the record of other manned space flight?  At first pass it seems
Apollo was far worse.  Didn't at least 1 out of about 16 blow up?  I don't
think the Soviet program was any better either.  I know there were accidents
in Mercury and Gemini too.  Even one lost flight out of the small number
would appear to make it considerably less safe than the shuttle.  So far 2
shuttles have been lost out of over a hundred (?) flights.  Again, I don't
have the hard figures.  This is just a quick estimates from what I remember,
at first blush it looks like NASA is right.


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