On Fri, 06 Jun 2003 19:50:17 +0100, Ian Woollard
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>Yes, but how quickly the equipment ages is all part of launch experience 
>too. When I say launch a/ lot/, I mean, wear out the vehicle in 4 months ;-)

You don't want to wear it out that fast.  If you do, you're running
too close to your margins, and you're going to fail something in
flight.  (Hugh Cook has a good line last week: the objective of
verification is to ensure that the parts count does not change during
flight.)

>Whilst complacency played a small part with the Shuttle mishaps, I would 
>argue that the root cause of the two major accidents were design faults.

There's enough fault to go around with both Shuttle mishaps.  Given
that they chose to live with the design decisions their forbears made,
they needed to be REALLY persnickety on the safety issues.  They
weren't quite persnickety enough.

So far, though, except for one NASA manager who reversed the
engineers' decision to ask the Air Force for a look at Columbia, it
looks like a simple aw shit, as in, "Aw shit, we thought it was safe."

>DC-X; well that was done on an absolute shoe-string, I don't think you 
>can draw any huge conclusions.

No, but maybe a small one.  The guy that failed to connect the landing
gear line, and the guy that checked his work?  I have to wonder how
they were doing on crew rest that day.  I'm thinking not so good.

-R

-- "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters
will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to
the Internet, we know this is not true." -- Robert Wilensky, UC Berkeley
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