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"Jay Windley" wrote:
Would you like to have a car that got 100 miles per gallon and would keep you alive in crashes up to 70 miles per hour? We can give that to you, but would you be willing to pay $1,500,000 for it? Rather than produce perfectly safe, wonderfully efficient cars that no one can afford, we produce cars in a range of compromises between features and affordability. There is a constraint that cars have to be affordable to the majority of the general public. That limits what engineering can go into them. And automobiles have an advantage that the Shuttle, in fact almost any reusable booster, can never have. To wit; Development costs can be amortized over dozens of years of production and thousands (if not tens of thousands) of individual units. OTOH, this advantage does come at a cost; anything that goes into the automobile must be amenable to mass production. D. -- The STS-107 Columbia Loss FAQ can be found at the following URLs: Text-Only Version: http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq.html Enhanced HTML Version: http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html Corrections, comments, and additions should be e-mailed to , as well as posted to sci.space.history and sci.space.shuttle for discussion. |
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