Wasn't NASA's record with the space shuttle more like 1 in 2.5 fatalities per flight? 14 fatalities in 135 launches?
Must have been good enough for government work.
Must have been good enough for government work.
No. How did you reach this number?
> 14 fatalities in 135 launches?
Yes. Though I think it makes more sense to read this as 2 losses in 135 flights (98.5% safety rating), or 14 fatalities among 817 passengers (98.2% safety rating).
(The per-passenger safety rating is slightly less because the only losses carried 7-passenger crews, while about half the flights carried 5 or 6 passenger crews. I didn't include the non-orbital test flights carrying crews of 2, which were arguably more dangerous than orbital flights, and I tried to handle Mir transfers and ISS crew exchanges sensibly.)
Historically, failures in spaceflight result in a loss of all crew (or a loss of no crew, if they have abort capabilities). This suggests an easy way to artificially improve the launches-per-fatality metric would be to reduce the number of crew per flight, so I'd prefer to use numbers for failures-per-launch or fatalities-per-passenger.
NASA threw in with the only folks willing to fund spaceflight--the military. And the military demanded an orbiter that could do circumpolar orbits--which was totally crazy from an engineering standpoint.
This means a massive body to hold an object, The earth would move under the craft as it rotated. Without being able to wait for it to rotate around you need wings for the large cross-range capability to glide back to america.
As KSP teaches us you can't put massive wings at the top of a rocket, without even bigger wings at the bottom. But that's got too much drag to get to space and so, the insane launch system that was the shuttle is invented.
They never used this ability for the entire service life of the shuttle.
Yes, it was political. And it wasn't at all impossible that they would just collapse NASA's budget (this was in the recessions of the 1970's), and NASA wouldn't even exist today.
To torture the shuttle comparison, they shouldn't get damaged by a piece falling of their launching rockets because they get to sit on top and keep their heat shields protected during launch, and they shouldn't be destroyed if the booster explodes because they have launch escape systems. The only two shuttle failures causing fatalities were kind of inherent to shuttle.