Despite Concerns, NASA Is Planning to Go Ahead With Shuttle Launching (??)

[DeepModem Mom]

New York Times:
Despite Concerns, NASA Is Planning to Go Ahead With Shuttle Launching
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: June 29, 2005


NASA got some unexpected and unsettling news on Monday, when its own advisory panel said the agency had not fulfilled all of the safety goals it had promised to meet before returning the shuttle fleet to orbit. But it is planning to go ahead anyway, launching the Discovery in as little as two weeks.

"I think, based on what I know now, we're ready to go," Michael D. Griffin, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, told the House Science Committee yesterday.

It may sound like a recipe for trouble, or worse, especially since the work left undone includes three of the most critical recommendations of the board that investigated the loss of the Columbia in 2003, including elimination of the kind of launch debris that doomed the Columbia and the development of on-orbit repair techniques.

Yet few experts, even some of those who have been critical of the space agency, seemed troubled by the failure to fulfill those recommendations completely.

The consensus of these experts is that while missions are inherently risky, the remaining shuttle fleet has been made much safer over all....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/29/science/29shut.html

[Igel]

1. It's always been risky, always will be risky.

O'Keefe (?) was an idiot in agreeing to no "equivocation" with the recommendations; or, simply a bad politician.

"Elimination" of the debris risk, i.e., reduction of risk to 0, is difficult bordering on impossible; reduction to acceptable limits is a reasonable goal.

[mtnester]

2. A spectacular explosion is just what the thugs in the WH need right now

I mean, the bears have gone back into the woods, no one is swimming in the Panhandle, Aruba has closed their borders to the press, all white children are currently accounted for, blah blah

The WH NEEDS a distraction, because darn it, the MSM is actually being persnickety about reporting on their woes, lies and general incompetency...and being pushy about it too...calling people on their open fibs and fabrications, etc.

(I am not wishing that ANY children show up missing, nor bears and sharks begin to attack, nor son/daughters turn up missing while in the islands, nor good astronauts sacrifice themselves to bring a distraction for the WH, it just seems stupid that NASA would send the shuttle up with these concerns...if I knew the brakes were gone on my car, I would not take it out on the road...why NASA does not do the same things ASTONISHES me....disaster waiting to happen)

[Kraklen]

3. People knew that Challenger was going to explode.

There was a manager for a subcontractor who worked on the O-rings of the solid rocket booster, the part that failed, that rushed to Florida to try and stop the launch. He knew it would explode well before it ever left the launch pad. He was completely ignored. Disasters like the Challenger don't have to do with the "inherently risky" nature of the space business. It's gross negligence by a ridiculously overbloated government bureacracy.

[Mairead]

5. "Challenger was gross negligence by government bureacracy"

No, by a private contractor: Morton Thiokol. NASA brass pressured Thiokol, yes, but it was the Thiokol senior management who chose to ignore Roger Boisjoly's strong recommendation not to launch in freezing weather.

[MisterP]

4. with * and PNAC, the only "safety" question is "auto or semiauto?"

after all, you can only profit from a space war "'ginst the Red Chayh-nee" if you pretend it's inevitable