I got to thinking... Hi, I'm Randall, and I have a thinking problem. In his autobiography, Deke Slayton responded to people who looked at Challenger and said Shuttle was too unsafe to fly, and we should go back to flying Apollos. Deke didn't like the idea: "If we had flown 25 Apollo missions, we would have lost a flight crew."
This led me to a per flight comparison. Program for program, Shuttle is the deadliest vehicle by far, having killed 14 people. Year for year, it's a little safer than Apollo, having killed two crews in 22 years, to Apollo's one - nearly two - in 8 years. But flight for flight, Shuttle is much safer than Apollo, or even Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo combined. Mercury: 6 flights in 2 years; no casualties Gemini: 10 flights in 2 years; one emergency, no casualties Apollo: 16 flights in 8 years: lost one crew, nearly lost another ELV total: 32 flights in 14 years; lost one crew, had two emergencies Shuttle 1-25: 25 flights in 5 years; lost one crew Shuttle 26-113: 88 flights in 14 years; lost one crew Shuttle total: 113 flights in 22 years; lost two crews So a factoid seen above is that even in its first 25 flights, Shuttle had a better safety record than Apollo. Both vehicles killed their crews, but Shuttle had more flights. A factoid I haven't seen before is that Shuttle has a better safety record than Soyuz. Both vehicles have killed two flight crews, but Shuttle has flown 113 times to Soyuz's 87 manned flights. Of course, that's mostly historical: Soyuz hasn't killed a crew since 1971 - over 30 years - and Soyuz engineers can also point to Progress, Mir, and the Salyuts to demonstrate their safety record (though they would have to own up to the Apollo 13 level emergency caused by the Progress vs. Mir collision, since a godawful user interface was a major contributing factor there; also the fire aboard Mir). So we've had more casualties in flight primarily because we've had more flights. We always said we would accept that as the price for opening the frontier. Let's name some streets after them and push on. -R -- Every complex, difficult problem has a simple, easy solution - which is wrong. [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
