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August 12th 05, 04:57 AM

wrote:
K4YZ wrote:

an_old_friend wrote:

wrote:

What does this have to do with ham radio? Plenty!
For one thing,
ham radio is mentioned in the second article.

mentioned

Yep.

Did anyone besides me actually read the articles I linked?

The Space Shuttle was promoted as the "next big thing"
in space travel
- as a "space truck" that would cut the cost of
getting to orbit,
reducing the waste of one-time rockets, etc. We were
told of turnaround
times of a few weeks, and missions costing 10 to
20 million dollars
total - none of which has ever come to pass, 30
years after the program began.

yea the shutle was and is a failure

Based upon WHAT data, Mark?

It's a fact that the Space Shuttle program has not reached *some*
of the goals set for it. OTOH it has reached and exceeded some
of the goals, too.

The Space Shuttle program is neither a complete success nor a total
failure. It's done many great things, but not everything
that was expected.

But that's not the point I was making.

That people have been killed flying it? So what?

No Americans died flying the Mercury, Gemini or Apollo missions. The
Apollo 1 fire that killed astronauts Grissom, Chaffee and White
happened during a ground training/checkout session.

People die on
commecial airliners on a monthly basis. Are airliners a
failure?

There's a big difference.

The chances of dying in a commercial airliner accident are extremely
small. The failure rate of commercial airline flights (where "failure"
equals "people died") is extremely small. In fact if you drive to the
airport, fly around the world on First World commercial airliners
(returning to your point of origin), and drive home, the most dangerous
part of the trip is the drive to and from the airport, statistically
speaking.

One of the statistics that is trotted out when speaking of airline
safety is passenger miles. I suspect the shuttle would fare *very* well
if we applied passenger miles to it! ;^)

- Mike KB3EIA -

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