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February 04, 2003
Unacceptable risk?
Gregg Easterbrook's 1980 article on the Space Shuttle programme, Beam Me Out Of This Death Trap, Scotty is being linked to a lot since the weekend.
Easterbrook's article was published in 1980, when the Columbia was at the centre of a tale of horrendous cost overruns, missed schedules and technical problems. It's an interesting historical piece, but I don't think it's any more relevant today than it was a week ago. The proposition that the Shuttle turned out to be much more expensive to operate than planned and much less useful isn't remotely surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to the space programme for the last couple of decades. The notion that any major damage to the shuttle's tiles would potentially have catastrophic effects is entirely reasonable, but it's hardly news.
My point isn't that Easterbrook's article was wrong about the problems facing the Shuttle programme, it's that the problems it highlights are old news and paint a far too pessimistic picture of the Shuttle programme. Regardless of the spin NASA's press office chose to put on it, the Shuttle is, was and always will be an experimental spacecraft, and surmounting the various technological challenges set out in such detail in Easterbrook's article remains one of NASA's finest technological achievements. (It certainly wasn't an economic success, but then nor was the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programme. But that wasn't the reason for putting human beings into orbit, or sending them to walk on the Moon, and deep down it wasn't what the Shuttle was about either.)
Perhaps NASA's mistake was to pretend that the Shuttle had made space travel routine, when it's anything but.
For another perspective on the question of the distinctly non-routine nature of space travel, see Gary Westfahl's rather strange, not to say defeatist, article Columbia, and the Dreams of Science Fiction.
Given the technology we have today, space travel is just too darn difficult. We've been stretching our capacities to the limit, and we've been doing our damnedest, but America has still launched over 150 space missions and has watched three of them end in catastrophic failure. A 2% failure rate just isn't acceptable; would trains or jets be in use today if there was a 2% chance that every trip would end in disaster?The best response to that point came from Jon Hansen:
If a 2% failure rate for mankind's most difficult challenge isn't acceptable, then what kind of standard does he require for more mundane tasks, such as driving to the store or walking his dog? 0.2%? 0.02%? Considering that it is impossible to remove all risk from everyday life, I find myself thinking that it's a wonder that Mr. Westfahl leaves his house at all.
Posted by John at February 4, 2003 11:20 PM
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