I was just musing about your thinking problem......

Shouldn't you use miles flown instead of missions flown? Or perhaps
pound/miles flown or miles flown/number of viewers.

Randall Clague wrote:

> 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.
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--
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>----<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
........ Alex Fraser  N3DER .........
......... [EMAIL PROTECTED] .......
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