The Space Shuttle Discovery rolled out of the Vehicle Assembly Building Wednesday afternoon and arrived at the launch pad just after Midnight. It will sit in place until launch sometime after May 15.
It underwent 286 modifications to improve the safety. One of those improvements is a heat tile repair kit. With it, astronauts could (theroetically) repair damaged or replace lost heat tiles that protect the Shuttle upon reentry.
While I think that we should always strive to make vehicles (all vehicles) as safe as possible, I think that there is a point at which we decide that there are risks in life that can't be avoided. We should look at the Shuttle for what it is: A complex, hulking, tin can sitting on top of 500,000 gallons of fuel. And, as we saw with Challenger, it can become a bomb.
The men and women who make up the astronaut force are well aware of the dangers that they are taking. They very well know that if they set foot on board a space shuttle, they may not step off again. They also know that when they step into the airplane that transports them to the Kennedy Space Center, they may not step off of it either.
There is no way possible to remove all danger from space travel. Likewise, there is no way to remove all danger from driving your car to work every day.
40,000 people die in car accidents in the U.S. every year. When you compare that with 14 atronauts lost on Space Shuttle flights over the past 25 years, I think that's a pretty good record. Sure, no one likes to watch people explode or burn up, especially our most revered explorers.
So, while I agree that reasonable precautions should be taken to protect the shuttle and the astronauts aboard, I don't agree with all of the unnecessary hand-wringing that has been going on at NASA and in the government over the past two years.
Let's get on with sending astronauts not to the space station, but to the moon -- and beyond.
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