On Sat, 8 Feb 2003 11:18:50 -0800, "Sander Pool"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>I was thinking of that too, perhaps deaths per person space mile or deaths
>per ton (launch and re-entry) would be better units.

If sending the crews some distance, or hauling some quantity of bulk
cargo, was the mission, I might agree with these.

>And then the fact that Apollo's problems were unrelated to launch/re-entry.
>More long duration flights may have caused more issues there.

That was Deke's thinking.  Launch and reentry were fairly safe because
they were short (though there was that problem on Apollo 18 reentry:
RCS fuel vapor does NOT belong in the crew cabin).  He had less
confidence in cruise mode because of Gemini 8 and Apollo 13.

>not enough to build a vehicle that succeeds in reaching orbit and returning
>safely, you need to keep the vehicle intact in between those events.

That hasn't been a problem with Shuttle, AFAIK.  The Russians haven't
had such luck.  Fires aboard Salyut 1 (rumor) and Mir, a cosmonaut
drifting away from the station (Romanenko, Salyut 6), fuel line
rupture (Salyut 7), meteoroid strike (Salyut 7), and the Progress/Mir
collision have made life aboard Russian stations interesting.

-R

--
Every complex, difficult problem has a simple,
easy solution - which is wrong.
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