NASA studies new booster (UPI)

In article , TKalbfus wrote:
Nonsense. Do you think astronauts are the only people whose lives are
worth anything?

The only thing an unmanned orbiter would do is increase the risk to
people on the ground.

This is not Trantor! Their are only 6 billion people living on Earth and the
chance of a piece of space debris hitting someone on the head is small. I
suppose you've never been outside of your city and you think the
whole world is one sprawling metropolis.

Hmm. Columbia, according to the CAIB, had about a 10-25% change of
causing a severed injury through debris fall. The area it fell in is
about two-thirds as densely populated as the planetary average (for
habitable land), maybe a bit sparser. Over a city, maybe ten times that
probable casualty rate.

It's not a major danger, compared to everything else, but it's certainly
a nontrivial one... especially when you consider the indirect economic
impact of the debris, the requirements to recover and clean up after it,
which are *expensive*. (As a rough rule-of-thumb, the economic impact of
a death is about $5-10m - the Columbia recovery cost at least $300m,
not counting 'uncharged' costs in volunteer or already-employed labour)

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-Andrew Gray