Some Safety Record
By Carl Bussjaeger, 2/10/2003

NASA wants us to believe that two fatal accidents in twenty-two years of shuttle operations are a pretty good safety record. But remember that those years actually gave us just 107 shuttle missions, for a lethal accident rate of nearly two percent. And NASA only held the rate down that much by cutting missions back from a planned fifty flights per year, to fewer than five. So with the shuttles barely into their planned service life of 200 missions each, two catastrophic (and predicted) failures already killed fourteen people and destroyed forty percent of the shuttle fleet.

If the commerical airline industry had a safety record like that, I wouldn't leave the house without a hardhat.

But it gets worse. The fact is, every time a shuttle flew, it lost heat shield tiles. Replacing lost tiles became a standard part of shuttle refurbishment between missions. Apparently we just got lucky that it didn't kill anyone before Columbia's last flight. So NASA's real shuttle accident rate is a whopping 100%.

Can you imagine having to replace your bumper or windshield every time you drove your car? And considering that normal? Welcome to the world of NASA; you can pick up your rose-colored glasses from the bin by the door.

Or you can demand that NASA be shut down, and space access opened to private enterprise. For going on forty-five years, NASA promised to open space to mankind. They haven't. In fact, they've deliberately blocked any private effort to reach orbit. They lied, and stole your tax dollars to do it.

What NASA has done is restrict space to an elite and privileged few, and killed off a significant percentage of them, at that.

Abolish NASA. Try its management for their crimes, including first degree murder: NASA management intentionally ignored warnings of exactly the safety and engineering problems that appear to have destroyed Challenger and Columbia.

Once convicted, sentence can be carried out by loading them aboard one of the remaining shuttles, and conducting a final mission of ultimate restitution.