In article ,
James Oberg wrote:
Criticism of NASA's Safety Culture in the late 1990's:
Chapter 8 // The Mir Safety Debate, from "Star Crossed Orbits: Inside the
US-Russian Space Alliance", James Oberg, 2002, McGraw-Hill, NY.

Criticizing MIR was a good start, but it was not the same as warning
about shuttle safety. For one, you could well read it as attributing
complacency to the Russians, or at least as a disease caught from the
Russians. In fact it goes back to the very beginning of the shuttle
program, to the wishful thinking that manned spaceflight is operational
and not experimental. That is how Reagan described it in 1982, back
when the Russians were the evil empire.

After all, if NASA officials had fully grasped that the shuttle is
an experimental spacecraft, they would never have slated it for a
space station, and especially not for space station construction.
What construction workers, other than astronauts, commute to work in
test vehicles?
--
/\ Greg Kuperberg (UC Davis)
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