Shuttle Politics

Posted by michael on Friday May 9, 2003 @01:49AM from the grandstanding dept.

TheLoneCabbage writes "Texas Rep. Joe Barton has been quoted today in an AP article saying that he is in favor of grounding the remaining fleet of shuttles. 'If we have to stop manned spaceflight for five or 10 years, then so be it.' The fine gentleman from Texas displays his outstanding grasp of statistics and engineering stating that 1 failure in every 62.5 flights is NOT acceptable. According to OpenSecrets.org this may have more to do with Joe's friends than how much attention he paid to his math teachers." There's also an interesting piece on testimony given by the first Shuttle program manager.

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Re:Why rush? by philipdl71 · 2003-05-09 05:35 · Score: 0, Redundant

Nice commentary, but don't forget the shuttle costs $500 million to launch per flight which is 100x the original amount they estimated it would cost to launch per flight. Besides being unsafe the shuttle simply costs too much. A half a billion dollars is a lot of tax payer money. If you like this arcane piece of technology so much why don't you pay for it?