[jude24]

Oh, come on, you can't compare a spacecraft with an airliner! Apples and oranges -- space flight is so much more complicated than airline flight which is more complicated than automobiles which are more complicated than trains which....

[hopespringseternal]

Oh, come on, you can't compare a spacecraft with an airliner! Apples and oranges -- space flight is so much more complicated than airline flight which is more complicated than automobiles which are more complicated than trains which....

From autos to trains to planes, they all have one thing in common: practicality. These things were dreamed up and built by individuals to be useful.

Spacecraft are developed by government and practicality and economics are never considerations. The overall shuttle design is not a product of engineering or necessity, but politics. Once the bureaucrats were finished, they handed the engineers a list of requirements that looked like they were strung together by sugared up third graders after watching cartoons all day.

There are ways of making spaceflight safer and more economical, and that should be the goal.