Acceptable Risk
So it seems like every time an anniversary of Challenger or Columbia comes around, there are always a few people who regret that we ended the shuttle program. If anything, I believe we should of ended the shuttle program sooner. I believe that to be true for a few reasons from cost, efficiency, and flexibility of mission; but today I want to focus on safety in remembrance of the loss of Challenger 30 years ago.
To be blunt, the risks of flying the shuttle were simply too great. Sure, it was getting safer by the end of the program, but the risk of a foam strike was still there (Which is what happened to Columbia). As well as the risk of a failure of one of the solid boosters (Which is what happened to Challenger), and there was still no way to survive what happened to Challenger, while what happened to Columbia depended on a rescue shuttle. Assuming of course that your rescue shuttle wasn’t similarly damaged on liftoff.
I know what you’re thinking, but isn’t risk part of the job of being an astronaut? Sure.
That being said, we owe it to these men and women that risk their lives to give them the very best engineering possible. We are moving back to capsules because simply put they are safer among other advantages.
If something happens to the launcher as with Challenger, the capsule simply rockets away from the launcher with an escape abort system. This has only ever been used in practice one time, three years before the loss of Challenger in fact in 1983.
Video of Soyuz T-10-1 Launch Escape System
Capsules are also safe from debris strikes because they are on top of the launcher, instead of on the side attached to a huge fuel tank like with the shuttle.
That doesn’t mean nothing will never go wrong when it comes to manned spaceflight of course, but the reality is that the astronauts of Challenger and Columbia were given an intentionally flawed spacecraft from an engineering standpoint. Indeed all of NASA’s missions where there was loss of life from Apollo 1 to Columbia have been the result of flawed engineering.
Flawed engineering intentional or otherwise is simply not an acceptable risk. Thus keeping the shuttle flying would have been another disaster waiting to happen, no matter how much safer you try to make it because at the end of the day there is only so much you can do to compensate for the flaws of the original design.
We need to accept that manned spaceflight is risky but minimize the risks as much as possible, however possible through sound engineering. That is the lesson from Apollo 1, Apollo 13, Columbia, and most especially Challenger.











