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I've been re-reading The Right Stuff, and noticed that on John Glenn's flight, NASA thought the heat shield might have been damaged, and they went ahead with re-entry, because there wasn't any other option. They also didn't tell him any more than they had to, apparently because they did not want to risk him screwing up because he was nervous. Sounds like they also didn't say a lot to this crew.

Just curious, is this standard policy for NASA?

Exploring the unknown is a dicey business. When someone is piloting a space vehicle they need to concentrate. I met many of the Appollo crew and they were way overloaded with data -- what to do and how to do it. You thought, 'how could they remember all this under those circumstances'.

I don't know about standard policy, but the astronauts generally have enough to worry about. I think the idea has always been to be aware of the risks, but don't dwell on them. I would say each and every one of them always knew that re-entry was the riskest part of the flight and if it went wrong ...

Appollo 13 was a noteworthy event that showed if the astronauts were doing what was necessary, rather than calculating the odds of dying, things might just work out for the best.

We have just lost touch with what these astronauts are really risking when they hit the go button.

So what could they do about Glenn's heat shield except distract Glenn from performing at peak effeciency. It may sound cruel, but I don't think it was, or is. You do your best, sometime it isn't enough. But other times you succeed with spectacular results. It's called exploring the unknown.

I know when we got the first signals back from our experiment packages on the moon, it was an experience that was hard to describe. Sort of like, we didn't really do this did we ... it's really on the moon, right? We were monitoring the solar wind with the packages we designed. They were carried to the moon aboard Apollo. ALSEP/CPLEE was it's name.

It is my belief that the loss of interest in space has a lot to do with the round dee round type stuff we are now doing. We really are exploring things that don't yeild much wow. If you exclude the hubble. We need to get a base on the moon and go on to Mars, IMHO. Continue with the exploration. Let's leave this planet to the libs. VBG.

snooker