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Shuttle to Launch Despite Objections
sam0ht writes "NASA has just named July 1st as the launch date for the space shuttle Discovery, a year after the last shuttle mission. Last July's mission was the first since the break-up of Columbia in 2003, but after foam again broke away from the main tank, the shuttle fleet was grounded. More foam has been removed from the main tank, but NASA staff are divided over whether this is enough to ensure the flight's safety, with some reporting that both the lead engineer and top safety official are against launching again so soon. Managers want to make only one major change at a time, and plan that if damage does occur, the crew would be able to stay in the International Space Station, to which they are delivering supplies, rather than trying to land a damaged shuttle."
If this thing blows up, guess who're going to be blamed for it?
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
If this group was in charge of the appolo missions we'd still be doing near earth orbital testing.
Space is dangerous, expensive, and offers very few good opportunities. If you want to get anywhere you have to take risks. I'm not saying that people should just throw their lives away for nothing, but every trip they make into space breaks new ground and teaches them new lessons. If you want the rewards you have to be prepared to walk away with a bloddy nose now and again, especially in a game like this.
It may be harsh, but I would say that if they are trying to make space travel 100% safe, it's just plain never going to happen. Right now I think we should be happy with 90%. From a purely practical perspective, if a dozen people lose their lives to accellerate the space program 10 years, I would call that a good trade. And I'd be happy to be one of those 12.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Ignoring engineers hasn't got the Shuttle very far in the past. From the Challenger Wikipedia article:
Good. About friking time I had a new wallpaper for my 3840 x 1024 desktop.
Each time the shuttle goes to the ISS I get new wallpaper.
That might be just about the best thing to come out of the ISS program. *sigh*
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
From space.com:
Two senior NASA managers - chief engineer Chris Scolese and Bryan O'Conner, the associate administrator of Safety and Mission Assurance - did have concerns over the potential risk of foam debris posed by a number of insulated ice frost ramps along Discovery's external tank, NASA officials said.
About 34 foam-covered ice frost ramps line the shuttle fuel tank, insulating brackets that connect a cable tray and pressurization line.
"From their particular discipline, they felt they wanted their statement to be No-Go," William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for space operations said. "But they do not object to us flying and they understand the reasons and the rationale that we laid out in the review for flight."
Glad to know there's someone with a set of balls at NASA.
If we wait for everything to be 100% iron-clad safe, we'll never leave this rock.
There's always going to be a nay-sayer somewhere up the chain. Beurocrats get so uptight about their jobs that that they'd never greenlight anything, for fear of being accountable for something (feds are 100% allergic to accountability, anyone who's ever worked a government contract will know this).
Godspeed and have some fun up there.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The ISS project is dying on it's backside without the shuttle and we need the fleet to get operational as soon as possible. Yes, there is danger but there always will be with space travel. The astronauts know this and accept it and if they want to step down there are plenty more qualified people eager for the chance. But these issues highlight a larger problem. We need a new space vehicle - the space shuttle was always a pale shadow of what it could have been. If we are to get the ISS functioning properly and go onwards to the Moon we'll need either a much heavier lifting platform or a totally new way of getting into orbit.
Spending money on the ISS is a good thing. If it has to get the funding and upgrades it needs as 'plan B' so be it, it's still funding.
Time and time again NASA illustrates the things that can go perfectly right and horribly wrong when engineers and pioneers are held accountable to politicians via managers/beauracrats.
Sometimes it works. Kennedy told them to put a man on the moon, and they did it. They were tasked in the 70's with making a reusable spacecraft, they did pretty good for a first project, especially getting it to last damn near 30 years. Then in the 80's they were tasked with long term space visits, had some help with that, but got it done still.
Now the managers are no longer managing but worrying about political decisions. Without good management the actual work stalls as the geeks don't know what to work and jump ship.
I'm torn as to how to resolve this. I don't want public money going to private companies, nor do I want to see it squandered in a dinosaur of an organization.
At the very least acknowledge that NASA has some issues and see what we can do to ease any restrictions against private companies moving into orbit and sharing with them research that was done with public money at NASA.
The failure rates are like 1 to 75-100 compared to the Project Constellation 1 to 2000.
The main reasons that killed the shuttle was safely, costs, lost of life and other payload rockets like the Ariane, Atlas and so on. I think a few years from now SpaceX will have most control over payload rockets.
Spending money on the ISS is a good thing.
Why? The ISS is going to cost US taxpayers in excess of $100 billion, to boldly sit where Skylab has sat before. Since we don't currently have a reliable manned booster to rotate crew on and off the station (having trashed the working, reliable, relatively inexpensive and more powerful Apollo launcher for the unreliable, outrageously expensive Shuttles), or a reliable means of emergency escape, the ISS is limited to 3 crewmembers on a longterm basis. That's barely enough staff to keep the station running, which means there's virtually no science taking place aboard the station.
I say abandon the ISS now, along with the Shuttles, and divert those tens of billions of dollars into designing and building a state-of-the-art launcher utilizing the lessons learned from the successful Apollo program and those parts of the Shuttle program (such as the engines) which have proven worthwhile. Or spend that money on researching and developing tech which could dramatically lower the cost of access to space, such as carbon nanotube structures or new propulsion technologies. Either would be a far better use of taxpayer money than the useless ISS or the expensive, unreliable Shuttle, which I believe are now up to a billion dollars a launch, making them the most expensive launcher ever by a wide margin. We could launch fleets of astronauts into space aboard Russia's safer Soyuz booster for the price of a single Shuttle launch. Like the ISS, the Shuttle is a crippled dog and needs to be put out of its (and our) misery.
It's not a question of hormones. NASA is willing to take risks. NASA management however has a skewed understanding of their incentive, which results in the wrong things for the wrong reasons. We have built a system which costs dramatically more to fly than the nation is willing to spend. It costs so much to fly that we have reduced our expectations and plans over and over and over to fit within the flight budget, even as monies are re-allocated from doing stuff to flying the Shuttle. This silliness must stop.
Every time the Shuttle flies, we fall about six months further behind where we could be. We still have not started to think about replacing it with a system that will deliver reliable, inexpensive and frequent access to space. The capsule replacement on the drawing board won't be inexpensive and it won't fly frequently. It's a stop-gap measure to provide access to the International Space Station, assuming the Shuttle can fly without disaster something like 18 more times to finish the construction. That is definitely not certain. The loss of only one more orbiter -- even in a ground accident as has nearly happened -- will make it all but impossible to finish construction of the ISS.
If you think human and other activity in space is important then you should be in favor of immediate cancellation of the Shuttle program. I don't know what sort of wake-up call that Congress and NASA need to get the hint, but we really need to start working on a next generation system right now.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
They got the Shuttle to last nearly 30 years by flying it dramatically less often than planned, and spending dramatically more than planned to fly it at all. Reliable, frequent, and affordable access to space can only happen by euthanizing the Shuttle program.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Maybe a small cockpit, in a capsule that could eject would be smart.
I'm sure I'll get slammed for this but, well who cares. I remember watching the first shuttles go up. It seemed like we flew a lot of shuttle missions without any problems (sans Challenger, I know BIG PROBLEM). The point is that it seems like problems are far more common now with all of the new tech and more importantly lessons learned than in the old days.
What's happened? Did we redesign something? Are they so old that the parts are wearing out and we can't replace them as well as we built them to begin with? Are we just publicizing problems more now than we used to? I haven't seen anything to tell me why it seems we can't launch a shuttle without something faling off when the old ones flew without a publicized hitch.
Anyone?
The moonshot was a "fuck money, whatever it takes to get there" project. They got the best people, the best equipment, priority funding and restrictions simply didn't exist. Success was paramount. Failure was no option, whatever the cost, no failure may happen, for this is a fight of ideology.
Now, this changed big time. NASA gets the people it can afford, it gets the equipment the contractors that bid lowest and offer the best counter-contracts offer, they receive funding whenever something's left from the bomb budget and they have to deal with environmental restrictions and people complaining about the noise of their testing facilities.
Space flight has turned from a prestige object into a business. It has to try to be profitable. Now, it is VERY hard to actually be directly profitable in manned space flight. The moonshot did boost economy and quickened development in many, military as well as civilian, areas, especially we, in the IT biz, would be far from where we're today without the space program.
But today, everything, even science, has to be profitable. That's the big problem with the NASA today. They aren't "worse" than they were in the 60s, they don't slack or work more sluggish. It's just not space race time anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I came across this site with images of the shuttle rollout to the launch pad. A few pages in are some panoramics as well. Whatever its technological flaws, the shuttle is pretty to look at. I wish everyone involved the best until we can get the shuttle's replacement off the ground!
I would suggest you and all the other morons on here actually do some research instead of spouting off. The incidence of foam hitting the shuttle is extremely high and has occured since the beginning, if flights had continued at the same rate as they occured at the start of the shuttle program we would have had many more critical hits. If you don't believe me, ask NASA. Or better yet, read the emails and information that was available to the team members during the Columbia mission:
/ en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=305032
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02
This is the same damn problem they've had since the beginning--only they've continued to make changes without enough testing. The fact that they recently altered the foam is good cause to be even more cautious.
And to the people denouncing the engineers and gov't workers and accountability on this thread, get a clue and pick on another agency. NASA -- the entire agency -- is highly accountable for failed missions from the top on down because it relies on image and public support. The higher ups are accountable to a congress that wants more frequent launches and toys with the budget and priorities--and has a short memory with regard to why we have such a moronic shuttle design. The engineers are doing their job, they did it during columbia, they did it during challenger. In both cases management failed and senior management was fired/retired/encouraged to leave. So spare me the covering-their-asses mentality.
You do not talk about Shuttle Flight Club.
God spoke to me.
Think the controversy has to do with the ice ramps on the side of the tank. They have seen some accumulation of ice on these ramps. Yet, these particular ramps have not caused a failure in the past. Given that there have already been changes I think management at nasa is reluctant to add more variables to the launch. The management looked at the historic probabilities over a hundred or so flights. Until more data is gathered on the ice ramps proving there is an issue, then change them.
My problem is, I think there should be a skeleton crew on these test flights.
Looking forward to seeing ISS completed and shuttle retired. On to the constellation program!
By the way, ISS can have many uses. eg. researching how full a liquid fuel tank is in space. ( or any liquid tank ) There are numerous research possibilities -- just requires some imagination and real problems...
Anyhow, if the shuttle does blow then its over for the shuttle. That is right from the administrators mouth.
If the next shuttle explodes then just blame it on their O/S.
Where's the 0xBEEF
...a good possible use for the remaining shuttles is to launch them unmanned and somehow attach them to the ISS or park them near by for other uses. On the ground sitting still they are OK. Up in space floating around they are OK. The transition in and out of the atmosphere is where they *blow goats*, so do that one more time with no humans in them. As already-up-in-space vehicles and as work/living space they are fine,and they are already built and functional. I say move them to orbit one last time and never return them back down, haul some cargo up with the last launches of them but stop risking humans in them with launches and reentry nonsense. Comes a time to cut your potential losses. Just the savings over the next few years would do wonders for NASA's budgets and to help re-fund a lot of the unmanned satellite jazz they are dropping-because the shuttle sucks down most of their cash. Spend the time designing the next replacement vehicle, and let the Rooskies haul the folks back and forth, they got the rig that works for that.
This article should not have been published without a link to Maciej Ceglowski's excellent analysis, Rocket to Nowhere. It seems to answer a lot of questions folks have here.
A quote: "Taken on its own merits, the Shuttle gives the impression of a vehicle designed to be launched repeatedly to near-Earth orbit, tended by five to seven passengers with little concern for their personal safety, and requiring extravagant care and preparation before each flight, with an almost fetishistic emphasis on reuse. Clearly this primitive space plane must have been a sacred artifact, used in religious rituals to deliver sacrifice to a sky god.
As tempting as it is to picture a blood-spattered Canadarm flinging goat carcasses into the void, we know that the Shuttle is the fruit of what was supposed to be a rational decision making process."
Having a plan to harvest the awesome flying monkey energy promised to you by everybody who ever answered you with "when monkeys fly out my butt" won't actually cause the monkeys to fly...
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
But there would have been, if shuttle launches were actually as cheap as they were supposed to be!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Yeah we do; it's called the Soyuz. There's no reason why we can't just build a bunch of them instead of continuing to launch overgrown school buses at the thing!
See, that's the big problem with NASA. They're stuck in this stupid mentality where they think they either have to use the Shuttle or design something brand new and impossibly perfect. That's a false dichotomy. Any replacement for the Shuttle doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than the Shuttle. Freakin Apolllo fits that description; they could just build some more of those! And all they'd have to do is change the shape of the hatch to be compatible with the ISS and run the sucker off a graphing calculator instead of the heavy 60's-era computer technology.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The space shuttles have flown a combined total of 420 million miles (see here: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/missions/sts9 2_longhaul_sidebar2.html, and I'm adding in a rough guesstimate of flights up until the most recent fatal disaster) and have suffered a total of 14 fatalities, for one fatality every 30 million miles. In 1994 alone, US cars travelled a combined total of 1.793 billion miles (somebody actually tracks this: your tax dollars at work http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/rtecs/chapter3.html ). If cars were as "safe" as the shuttle were, you would assume about 60 traffic accidents would happen per year.
However, this is really stacking the deck in the shuttle's favor. If you want to be technical about it, my bicycle hurtled hundreds of thousands of miles through space on my morning commute this morning... relative to the position of the sun. Granted, relative to the position of my house the displacement was only about two miles. Almost all of the mileage wracked up by the shuttle was it coasting around orbiting, when the only thing it had to accomplish was "don't spontaneously explode or have every life support system fail at once". If you want to compare times when the shuttle was actually under directed movement (and a realistic likelihood of danger), which would be essentially limited to lift-off and flying back to earth with some very minor positional adjustments once you're in orbit, the shuttle is many millions of times more dangerous than a car. Some back of the envelope math: the trip to orbit is about 200 miles, the trip down the same, and we'll be VERY generous and say the shuttle travels another 100 miles once its up there in positioning changes and whatnot. Thats a total of 500 miles per trip. There have also been 114 shuttle missions over the course of the space program. Thats one death per 4,000 miles. If cars were that much of a deathtrap we'd expect about 450,000 traffic fatalities in 1994. There were about 43,000 last year.
Bonus points: if you charge the deaths to alcohol instead of cars (hey, the cars would have been perfectly safe if the guy hadn't been driving drunk -- thats like charging a passenger airplane for fatalities if it gets hit with a missile), roughly half of the car fatalities vanish. Presumably the shuttle program does not have an alcohol problem.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Can you point to a single result coming from the shuttle program that was worth a human life?
The development of the personal computer, that might be worth someone dying. Or something of great utility like, I don't know, the automobile. The green revolution. The vaccine for polio. A cure for cancer. If a scientist was killed in a laboratory accident trying to develop one of these things we could eulogize him with "Dr. Bob would be happy to know that he died as he lived, in the service of mankind, and in the cause of something greater than any one of us". Can you name, off the top of your head, any of the "science projects" the Challenger crew was carrying with them? Must have been something of great importance to all mankind to risk 7 lives for, right? Well, lets check the books... Here's what the crew died trying to accomplish:
1) Deploying the Tracking Data Relay-2 satellite, a process which is accomplished dozens of times per year without needing to send humans into space.
2) "Shuttle-Pointed Tool for Astronomy (SPARTAN-203)/Halley's Comet Experiment Deployable, a free-flying module designed to observe tail and coma of Halleys comet with two ultraviolet spectrometers and two cameras." This was a nail developed because we already had a hammer and needed something to bang on -- it could just have easily been done with an unmanned craft (and even if it couldn't, "Pictures of the tail of Halley's Comet" is something mankind can do perfectly fine without).
3) FDE Fluid Dynamics Experiment.
4) Comet Halley Active Monitoring Program CHAMP (see #2, also 100% accomplishable from the ground).
5) Phase Partitioning Experiment (PPE)
6) three Shuttle Student Involvement Program (SSIP) experiments (Now, without discounting the massive contributions to science our high school students provide on a regular basis, I'm guessing that adding low gravity to a science fair project does not result in something worth dying for)
7) a set of lessons for Teacher in Space Project (Just like a regular teacher, except she's in space!)
So, which of these projects was worth someone giving their life for? Or, if you prefer, what project ever accomplished by the shuttle program was worth the cost (heck, ignoring the 2% risk of death of everybody on board there's nothing thats been accomplished that was worth the cost of fuel... examination of the effecs of weightlessness on spider webs? Yaaaay?)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I look at old systems such as B-52s still flying missions and question whether the problem is *inherent*. How about, nobody has been asked to come up with a better solution. Why not "peel the banana" and have a coating on the external tank that is *designed* to safely fall away? Or use something like Space ShipOne/White Knight that uses and an aerodynamic system for initial assent?
It may be cheaper in the long run to replace the shuttle but I haven't seen enough discussion of the alternatives to know that. I look at SpaceShipOne/White Knight and see that its possible to have a safe, economical, and reusable launch system.
I don't think that the shuttle has an inherent design flaw; it just suffers from being the first operational attempt at making a reusable launch system. Its probably possible to design a shuttle version 2.0 that looks a lot like the existing shuttle (keeps lots of development costs down) but that doesn't have the risks or costs of the current shuttle. Most of the other posts regarding the shuttle focus on risks but NASA hasn't met the original goals for shuttle trip costs or turn-around time and this probably has a lot more to do with efforts to replace the shuttle than flight risks.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Sounds like the people who were in charge when the first shuttle blew up are back at the helm.
No, I don't believe that. It was 23 years ago when the Challenger exploded. The people in charge now are the children of the management 23 year ago.
There's gota be a name for this, perhaps nepodilbertism.
Tag lost or not installed.
Originally they didn't plan to strap it to the side of a whopping great rocket and shoot it into space, either. Originally they had planned to have a very large, reusable delta-winged aircraft which the shuttle would clip into (this is one of the reasons why it fits so cleanly onto a 747). The booster aircraft would take the shuttle up to a very high altitude, the shuttle would take off into orbit, and the booster would return back to the ground where it could be re-used. They didn't build it, convinced it would cost too much to put the desired payloads into orbit. In retrospect they probably would have been better with the original idea. Certainly it would have been better then the horrible kludge they came up with.
Absolutely right: perfectionist, budget-buster, and committed to testing every part before putting them together.
I highly recommend the new von Braun biography, "Dr. Space".
One thing NASA has forgotten from his legacy is the need for absolute honesty in engineering. He rewarded people for coming forward and admitting screwups even when they might have been blamed for loss of a vehicle.
Honesty, safety margins, and a culture of "there's no such thing as 'sort of' working" give you machines that work and that don't kill people. Von Braun's team designed the Saturn first stage. It's entertaining to calculate the total energy that was stored in one of those, and divide it by c squared. 300 milligrams. All released in a few minutes. Von Braun's team made that work safely and successfully every single time.
I need to get my eye glasses prescription bumped up again. If you look at the page I linked to, it was a comma there (1,793 billion miles, not 1.793 billion miles), not a period. Which changes the calculation by three orders of magnitude. Doing some additional Googling I found that the NHTSA has broken down the numbers for us: there are roughly 1.51 deaths per *hundred million* miles travelled. This means that, by any definition of "miles travelled" the shuttle is less safe.
n n/TSF2001.pdf
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/nrd-30/NCSA/TSFA
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
During mankind's past history, this same stuff was called "colonizing the americas" and "colonizing australia".
Maybe, they'll be still alive.
With luck, they'll be happy to stay there, escaping from the police-state that would have developped by then accross the occident on Earth. (and becoming the *new* land of the free).
With more luck, after a couple of centuries, they'll manage to become the new cultural and economic super-power.
And then, most probably, several decades later, they'll start to protect their corporation, abuse their new patent system, waive personnal freedoms in the name of planetary security, be constantly affraid of imaginary "pedo-terrorist-pirate" that reportedly posses anti-matter weapons, declare wars against anyone standing in the way, etc...
Only this time, the catapult-over-the-mexican-border will be a little bit more complicated to do.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It's apparant, to me, there's NO way to make the Shuttle 100 percent safe....there's no way to make ANY spacecraft 100 percent safe. Space is a hostile environment. The astronauts know this. One thing that cannot be disputed is that the shuttle has flown before with foam ramps falling off the shuttle. What happened to Columbia was very unfortunate, but in my book, it's a freak accident. There are so many variables that had to happen JUST RIGHT in order for the vehicle to be lost. All that can be done is try to minimize it. It can't be prevented. What happens if a Heron or some other big bird is in the way when the shuttle launches? Odds are, a BIRD can bring the shuttle down just as easy as a piece of foam. The odds are very low that this will happen but NOT zero. Does that mean we don't launch?? No.
What I do see happening is a return to the traditional capsule like format. It could even be done in a reusable format MUCH easier and less prone to problems then the shuttle. We have to keep in mind....space is different. We can't send airplanes into space. We have to send spacecraft into space.
Gorkman
When I joined the workforce it was with Uncle Sam: the federal government. That's the same outfit, for those of you who might be unaware, that runs NASA. The federal government is a large and interesting organization that has a rule book for everything and everything is done by the book. Or Else. As it was explained to me, the government doesn't like having to explain replacement of expensive things because of stupid mistakes. They make enough stupid mistakes as it is. They also find it difficult to deal with angry families or foreign nations when these accidents impact those entities.
My early work experience was very similar to the business of space travel. I worked on high performance fighter aircraft. You had to focus very hard on safety and doing your job right because the danger level was already higher than most people see in their lives. On top of that, I was an armament systems specialist which means that I worked with things intended to blow up or otherwise kill people. Usually these devices were intended to kill large quantities of people or destroy very large and heavily armored vehicles or buildings. Safety was therefore extremely important because you didn't want one of these things going boom at the wrong time or place. Our goal was in fact to have the pilots fly around with these things and bring them back to us in one piece not having killed or destroyed anything. If/when we pulled that off it was A Good Thing(TM) . We were told, and I have witnessed, that if we took the time to do our jobs safely we would be doing them faster and at less cost than if we threw caution to the wind. Yes, I said that I have witnessed it.
Safety was preached to us all day, every day. We began each day with a mission briefing, a prayer and a safety briefing. On the flightline we started every load with a safety briefing. At the end of the day we debriefed so that we might learn from the experience and be more safe tomorrow. If, at any step of the operation, anyone thought conditions were unsafe, they would speak up and everything stopped until the situation was corrected. It didn't matter if the person crying safety was a general or the newest airman fresh out of tech school and wet behind the ears. The fact that I ended my enlistment with all of my limbs is a testament to this culture of safety. When you consider the dangers involved....it's pretty darn mindblowing.
If you compare tactical fighter operation with shuttle operation, the danger levels are very similar. Why then do we have NASA willing to launch a shuttle despite their top people saying it is unsafe to do so? When the engineers are saying "STOP", why is the mission allowed to proceed?
This is not the first time that NASA has had a disregard for safety. In fact it's something of a way of life for them. Remember the Apollo 1 disaster and the hatch that couldn't be opened by the astronauts? And that's not the first such stupid unsafe act they were involved in. NASA and the CIA have always had this acceptable risk culture as part of their flight operations.
The military has a culture of safety and, although their jobs are extremely dangerous, they do not believe in acceptable risk. The military is always working to make their jobs safer. NASA, on the other hand, has a culture of acceptable risk. They seem to figure that their jobs are dangerous and that's just the way it is. I'm thinking NASA could learn quite a bit from DoD. Yes, I actually typed that.
If we're ever going to get off this rock, space travel has to become safe. If we're ever going to use space to our advantage it has to become affordable, and that means we can't be accepting high risk all the time. Therefore this culture of acceptable risk is holding back our space program.
The Russians don't have the safest space program around but they sure have a cheaper space program that is just as active. The Soviets, when they ran the show, had a hell of a lot of stupid accidents. Then again, they have never spent the kind of
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.