It's the only manned spacecraft to ever use solid rocket motors (see Challenger, explosion of), be reusable (after several thousand workers "refurbish" for months it between each flight), use a non-ablative heat shield (see Columbia, destruction of), that glides to a landing (still cool after all these years), and costs upwards of $500-700 million per flight.
Pulling high gs during a launch abort is still preferable to pulling high gs during an explosion followed by a free fall to your death, as the Challenger crew experienced. Given the alternatives, I'm sure those two Soyuz crews who aborted felt pretty good about how well their launch escape systems functioned. Which leads to an observation: the old Soviet Union killed millions of people, but they also developed some very good life-saving technology for their combat aircraft and spacecraft. They still make some damned good ejection seats.
Space/Science » in reply to re: To date, there has not been a single astronaut or cosmonaut killed by an exploding rocket
Compared to all other manned spacecraft, the Shuttle is hardly conventional
The whole thread (29 posts)
- Ex-astro Phil Chapman on NASA
- Right About The Failure, Not So Sure About The Solutions
- Tom Brosz on NASA
- re: Unmanned v Manned
- What NASA needs is a plan.
- re: Ex-astro Phil Chapman on NASA
- re: Ex-astro Phil Chapman on NASA
- Painfully correct
- Excellent article