Actually it was a quoted 10-24% chance of injury in this particular accident, so I rounded down to the somewhat more optimistic 10% (I was only looking for an order of magnitude anyway).On Tue, 26 Aug 2003 21:25:26 +0100, Ian Woollard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
However, if the estimate is at all accurate it implies that /the space shuttle/ statistically kills or injures a bystander on the ground about once per thousand flights. Seems an uncomfortably large number.
A question: how do you get from a 24% chance of injury in a reentry accident to one casualty per thousand flights? I'm not challenging you; I just don't follow you.
There's been a reentry accident in just about one percent of flights, hence the chance of bystander injury is about 10% of 1%. This is 1 in 1000 (ish). (Challenger ended up in the Atlantic, so doesn't count, well ok, it probably does a bit, but it's far less populated, so I've neglected it.)
And a comment: if the 1 in a 1000 figure is accurate,It may well not be. We don't know how representative the injury probability would be here- it may have been an improbably dangerous debris track or an improbably safe debris track (but law of averages says it probably wasn't- and I don't know of any apriori reason that this track was particularly special).
That certainly sounds like NASA.Shuttle is 33 times too hazardous to fly under FAA rules. No surprise there; it can't land in the U.S. under FAA rules, either.
-R
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