To timidly go where a few hundred have gone before
NASA has announced that it is grounding the shuttle fleet until further notice. Despite their engineers concluing that there was "no significant problem" with Discovery, painstaking analysis by the shuttle crew, extensive video that shows nothing major, some brave NASA admin has apparently concluded that the fleet still needs to be grounded.
Have we really reached a point where we can only send people into space if the risks are equivalent to driving cross-country in the family sedan? It seems to me that explorers have throughout history been involved far greater risks for far less benefit. From 1921 to 1999, for example, 900 people climbed Mt. Everest while 150 died trying, giving climbers 1-in-6 odds of dying. Shuttle astronauts, on the other hand, face something like a 1-2% chance of dying. The odds of a soldier dying in a 1 year tour of duty in Iraq is about 0.1%, though the odds for a front line soldier, without the dilution of risk from including the various support troops, will likely be much higher. Is it really reasonable for NASA to blanche at allowing a handful of astronauts to take the sort of risk we ask soldiers to take?
Have we really reached a point where we can only send people into space if the risks are equivalent to driving cross-country in the family sedan? It seems to me that explorers have throughout history been involved far greater risks for far less benefit. From 1921 to 1999, for example, 900 people climbed Mt. Everest while 150 died trying, giving climbers 1-in-6 odds of dying. Shuttle astronauts, on the other hand, face something like a 1-2% chance of dying. The odds of a soldier dying in a 1 year tour of duty in Iraq is about 0.1%, though the odds for a front line soldier, without the dilution of risk from including the various support troops, will likely be much higher. Is it really reasonable for NASA to blanche at allowing a handful of astronauts to take the sort of risk we ask soldiers to take?
