In article , Max Beerbohm
wrote:


Seriously, if you are going to say that there is no reason not to do a
Hubble visit, you need to address the safety issue - as some on this
group have done.

The article above is poorly researched because of this.

The expected risk cost is ~0.1 lives and 0.015 shuttles (assuming a
1/70 chance of disaster with each shuttle mission not to ISS).

The deaths are equivalent to ~12 million passenger miles of automotive
travel, or every member of the American Astronomical Society driving
2000 miles, or every U.S. amateur astronomer driving about a dozen
miles, or every person who has ever looked at a Hubble picture and
thought 'wow! that's cool' driving a few hundred meters.

Or to put it another way, it's equivalent to each of the seven
astronauts who decide that they are willing to risk a Shuttle flight to
fix Hubble doing so.

Now that the safety issue has been addressed (although not compared to
that of the dozens of planned trips to the ISS, with only a marginal
increase in safety per flight) let's go and fix it.

--
David M. Palmer (formerly @clark.net, @ematic.com)