[plug] [OT] Goodbye, Columbia

[Leon Brooks]

On Sunday 02 February 2003 04:57 pm, Peter Weatherall wrote:
> Simon Scott wrote:
>> Its an unfortunate accident. The seven people on board knew the risks.
>> NASA know the risks.

>> In fact, the risks are pretty low. Look at what NASA achieve and how few
>> accidents theyve had. I wonder how their safety record matches up against
>> most of the worlds airlines (which by comparison is a jog down the the
>> local deli).

> the relevant statistic would be passengers * kilometres/fatalitiess and
> on that basis it is safer to fly on an airline than the shuttle.

Are you sure? Columbia was doing 12,000mph (call it 20,000km/h) when it 
popped, had been doing at least that since 16 Jan, means at least 15 days * 
24 hours * 20,000 km/h == 7.2M km (7.2Gm) in one flight and has done... how 
many? Maybe 30 flights, call it 25 to be conservative and make up for the 
less-than-2-weeks flights, 180M km for the loss of 7 passengers, or 26M km 
per passenger life for this vehicle. Hands up all those who've done even one  
million kilometers in a car?

If you include Challenger and average it out across the fleet, the figures get 
to be even better. And airlines don't have to deal with 3000 degrees on their 
leading edges, accelerations in excees of 8G, flight times measured in weeks, 
repeated startup and shutdown of engines, jettisoning of highly explosive 
attachments, yadda yadda. Admittedly, there's less to run into up there...

> Flying on the shuttle is probably equivalent to driving in your car ( the
> most dangerous thing we do , on average ) .

Care to try again? This time with something closer to facts? (-:

"Having said that," there are safer ways again.

> 7 dead = 1 day in Palestine

Roughly 5000 children are killed by diarrhoea every day, a similar number of 
people by AIDS, heaps more by Sickle Cell Aneamia or Malaria, heaps more by 
starvation.

> Having said that I salute the barave souls who flew in it .

...and the brave souls before that who rode fireworks that could best be 
described as `bloody dangerous' in order to test the stuff that lead up to 
Shuttles.

Cheers; Leon