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Comment by johng | Hacker News Reader

Great read and interesting article. Hard to believe that NASA would risk astronauts lives simply to save face, but that appears to be what's going to happen.

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But that’s exactly what happened with Challenger

And Columbia, too, when they made the decision to reenter without inspection, and reenter instead of waiting for rescue.

A rescue was impractical and potentially riskier no?

Riskier? Didn't they all die. Maybe if you ended up with 2 stranded shuttle crews, but correct me if I'm wrong, and I probably am, but couldn't the shuttle fly without any crew?

It couldn't, for a funny reason. Everything on a Shuttle flight could be automated except lowering the landing gear just before touchdown, which had to be done by hand from inside the cockpit.

There are rumors (that I've never been able to run down) that the astronaut corps insisted on this so the Shuttle could not be flown unmanned.

And Buran(soviet copy of the shuttle) could and in fact did fly completely unmanned. In a way it's a shame the collapse of the soviet union killed that program, because a crew less shuttle would have been a huge asset to have.

I'm not surprised more people don't know about the X-37, but it's in effect the distillation of the Shuttle program to a very effective vehicle: Crewless, reusable, cheap, and effective.

Bureaucratic requirements and institutional jockeying largely ballooned the Shuttle into something it was never supposed to be.

Which is, regrettably, the same thing happening with SLS / Orion / Artemis

You can do a less risky thing and die or do a more risky thing and live. What happened doesn’t determine which thing is riskier just like I can call a 1 and roll dice and land it and you can call tails and flip a coin and not get it.

The outcome doesn’t determine the risk. I agree that this kind of office politics / face savings definitely is the cause of these two things.

I'm sure I watched a documentary that said it basically wasn't feasible to launch the other shuttle. All checks and preparations would have to be done in absolute record time, with no mistakes and under timelines never attempted before. But even if they tried, you have the obvious question of - we know the core issue isn't solved and we're about to launch the second shuttle with the exact same design into orbit, if it suffers the same problem then what? But afaik the second one while important wasn't as much of a blocker as the first one. It just wasn't possible in time - it's not like the first shuttle could stay in orbit indefinitely too.

Astronauts are smart folks. They can vote with their feet.

What a horrible (preventable) position to be in, though.

It's certainly about their lives, but it's also about not tanking the program due to catastrophic failure. The astronauts are going to do it regardless of the risk.

Was there ever a risk-free spaceflight? Pretty sure even with this finding this flight would be safer than any Apollo.

Saturn 5 had a flawless record. The leftover space shuttle parts which SLS is cobbled together from, not so much. SRBs are inherently dangerous, theyre designed to quickly launch nukes from silos, not people. And Orion is just a typical modern Boeing project. So far its fallen at every hurdle right?

Orion is a Lockheed (CM) and Airbus (ESM) project.

Yeah, I thought it was Starliner on top. I dont know anything about Orion then. SLS is very crappy and disappointing, its using shitty old space shuttle tech, + its ridiculously expensive in terms of payload to orbit, but it will probably work.

I didnt know, cus I just dont give a shit about this stupid project.

Saturn 5 came close to catastrophic failure at least once. It had partial failures. Its sort of perfect record is mostly down to luck and not launching very many times.

Of course, six decades later, we should be able to do a lot better.

You seem to be ignoring the "just to save face" part. I'd argue it would be a worse thing for our bar for how safe it should be to be raised significantly from when we had been in space as a species less than a decade to now that it's been 65 years.

Never risk free , but Soyuz hardly lost any crew over its 50+ years

Yeah, and where is it now?

The next two Soyuz launches are this Wednesday and Saturday.

2/156 lost for Soyuz in 59 years, 2/135 for Space Shuttle in 30 years. Same rate. People often underestimate how intense STS actually was.

The 2 were early, and fewer lives were lost. The shuttle was unnecessarily risky , and NASA was aware from its inception

They’ve killed dozens during the shuttle program , or did you forget ? Also a number during Gemini, Mercury and Appollo. Terrible safety record , and 5x worse than Soyuz . Shuttle fatality rate was 1/10. Approaching Russian roulette odds

It’s the American roulette

*Freedom Roulette

135 missions, 2 fatal accidents, that’s not 1/10.

>They’ve killed dozens during the shuttle program

Columbia and Challenger crew totaled 14, who else are you referring to?

Oh 14 totally acceptable

In total, a little over one dozen astronauts died on shuttle flights (14). No astronauts died during Gemini or Mercury. Three died in a test on Apollo 1. The shuttle failure rate was nowhere close to 1/10. In fact, it was 1/67 (2 failures out of 134 flights).

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