Shuttle good for return.

Discovery has been given a clean bill of health to return to earth after an mission extension of one day. They've got some issues with filler fabric on the tiles just behind the nose gear door, but NASA said if necessary they could send someone down there to trim them off :-) The photos coming from NASA are breathtaking in their scope and detail. Check out this snippit from one of the nose tile inspection photos.



Debate has been raging on newsgroups and media sites like CNN and BBC who posed questions such as "is it worth the risk?"
There are always small-minded people who are terrified of exploration and a lot of these people seem to gather on these newsgroups. It amazes me when I read things like "if commercial airline travel had the same safety record as spaceflight there would be 500 crashes a day."
Well duh.

I suspect "Bob" from Cheshire (BBC link) considers that in 30+ years of manned spaceflight in the US, 17 dead astronauts is a large number, but he probably smokes, drives a car and drinks coffee - all of which put him in a group of people far more likely to meet a grisly death than any astronaut.

There are more in-air hours of flight racked up in an hour of daily air travel than the entire history of spaceflight. Lets look at it another way : if there were 10,000 space shuttles, one taking off and landing every 90 seconds, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, don't you think the sheer volume of extra data might make things safer?
The same small-minded individuals had the same problem understanding the Concorde crash. They couldn't fathom why a Boeing 737 was safer than Concorde. They couldn't understand that Concorde flew perhaps 6 hours a day, compared to 12,000 hours a day of combined flight for Boeing 737s.
These are the same people who would no doubt have told Columbus it "might be best if you stay home today."

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