In article ,
Andrew Gray wrote:

In article , MikeWise wrote:
If I understood O'Keefe correctly, he says we should let Hubble rot
because it would be too risky to send another mission there. That
doesn't make sense on many levels (like past missions for example),
but I want to discuss something else here.

If we can ask 25 year olds to risk their life in battle (Irak or
elsewhere) for whatever reason, why can't we ask 40+ year olds to do
the same for science. Clearly they would be willing (at least some of
them, I suspect all of them).

There are plenty of forty-year-olds; finding a shuttle crew willing to
take a risky flight is not hard. Finding a good, experienced shuttle
crew willing to take a flight percieved as riskier might be trickier,
but still not difficult. (It's not really the most risk-averse segment
of the population...)

Losing a shuttle, though, and trying to keep an ISS flight rate up with
only two orbiters...

Yet will a solution that only sees the Shuttle go to the ISS stop the
next space disaster?

Almost certainly not.

The US has had three incidents in which astronauts have lost their lives
in a space vehicle: Apollo 1, Challenger, and now Columbia. Each
happened at a different point and (even with the two Shuttle losses) in
a different way and with a different cause.

Sooner or later another vehicle and its crew will be lost. If manned
space travel and manned space exploration are to continue then the next
loss is only a matter of time.

When it does happen it will probably happen in a different way yet
again, with a different cause, and in a fashion most people at the time
will least expect (but which everyone afterwards, with the wisdom of
hindsight, will say they *should* have been expecting). If it's not a
Shuttle, it will be a CEV or whatever comes after the CEV.

Suppose for the sake of argument a CEV was lost on its way to the Moon
or Mars. What then? Does America stop going to the Moon or Mars as a
consequence and return to pottering around in the comparative safety of
LEO?

--
Stephen Souter

http://www.edfac.usyd.edu.au/staff/souters/