NASA Campaigns For Safer Launch Requirements

NASA officials will speak before members of Congress this week in an effort to gain support for more stringent launch safety considerations for the space shuttle's successor. Crew safety remains a major concern for lawmakers while they debate NASA's future and the potential integration of private companies into US space flight plans. "The demonstrated probability of a shuttle launch disaster is 1 in 129. NASA's 83 astronauts think those odds can be improved to 1 in 1,000. Independent safety experts agree. 'None of us want to repeat the accident history of the shuttle,' said retired Navy Vice Adm. Joseph Dyer, chairman of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, a group organized to oversee NASA programs after three astronauts died in the 1967 Apollo 1 launch pad fire. ... NASA's Astronaut Office began a re-evaluation of next-generation launch vehicle safety after the loss of Columbia's crew. The guiding principles laid out in a May 2004 report remain current, astronauts said. Launching astronauts into low Earth orbit is dangerous. But an order-of-magnitude reduction of risk is achievable 'and should therefore represent a minimum safety benchmark for future systems,' the report says."

Comments

Launches would be "safer" minus a human crew.

[couchslug]

Their launches would be much "safer" if they concentrated on useful research instead of the absurd focus on sending people into space.
There is no reason to rush the process, and we need to improve robots (which are expendable and can serve us everywhere) more then we need to send tourists for a ride.

If there is something that an automaton cannnot currently do, it is better to improve the machine than send humans. Humans are delicate, burdensome to support, require excessive safety precautions because society overvalues them (compare to the vigorous level of Terran exploration that used expendable ships and crews) and are a limiting factor rather than an enhancement.

We should dump tourism on the for-profit commercial space community and on foreign countries. We don't have to lead to benefit from technology any more than did the current beneficiaries of OUR technology. The Cold War is over and the penis-waving that drove manned missions can end.