Beam Me Out Of This Death Trap, Scotty (April 1980 anti-shuttle article, long)

The Washington Monthly ^ | April 1980 | Gregg Easterbrook

[hripka]

I have heard different NASA estimates that the estimated failure rate was around 1 in 400, or in some cases, much much higher.

Since there were about 110 flights of the Space Shuttle, and there have been two catastrophic failures, based on the "short" run of Shuttle flights, the failure rate is about 1 in 55, or about 2%.

Considering that this was written before the Columbia ever even flew, the warnings are chilling. Amazingly prophetic. Thanks to "Timesink" for posting it.

[Timm]

It's inconceivable to me that it would be cost-effective to mine ANYTHING on the Moon or Mars. EVER.

You can say that again. Fly to the moon to get.. water in the northern craters? Volcanic rock and dust? Even gold would be a huge money loser.

Mars? We have deserts on earth already. Ours have air, though, and they're a lot cheaper to get to.

Enormous energy costs to go to moon or Mars. Billions just to ship water, food, not to mention _air_. All of which is recuped by... well, what, exactly? A bunch of guys growing bean seads under a dome? Not exactly a shrewd investment as far into the future as I can see.

[Check6]

I skimmed the article and didn't pick up anything about this: The original shuttle was to be 3 times bigger than the current one, allowing for much engineering redundancy and for a payload large enough to make the shuttle competitive with throw-away launchers. Johnson forced the downsizing when he brought the shuttle budget down to $1.5 billion from the originally approved $4 billion. The downsizing of the shuttle, in favor of buy-more-votes "Great Society" programs, is and was the problem.