This piece at today's issue of The Space Review seems to be...incoherent.

I know that this isn't something that someone in Safety and Mission Assurance (S&MA) wants to hear, but in fact safety should not be the highest priority of an agency charged with opening the final frontier to humankind.

The STS-5 decision was needed to solve a problem that seemed simple enough. With the first four flights of the Space Shuttle, only two “test pilots” were on the rocket. With STS-5, NASA wanted to fly four astronauts. But only the pilot and co-pilot had ejection seats. What was NASA to do? The two choices seem rather obvious: you can add two more ejection seats, or remove the two existing ejection seats. The Apollo-era management chose to remove the two existing ejection seats.

If there are no longer ejection seats, then the vehicle needs to be declared “operational”, and the astronauts no longer referred to as “test pilots”. In right stuff irrational exuberance, thinking failure not an option, the Apollo-era management steered a new course for NASA. If not already over with the launch of STS-1, NASA officially ended the “right stuff era” with the launch of STS-5 and entered a new era of “right stuff irrational exuberance”. That is the era NASA is currently in, and will remain until the shuttle is retired.

Pardon me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the "right-stuff era" the era in which test pilots were allowed to get themselves killed without it being front-page news, all over the world, and in which their loved ones were allowed to grieve privately, without having to involve the whole nation, and being pestered by news reporters shoving videocams in their face demanding to know how they felt about their loss?

Also unlearned—not forgotten—was the reason for Apollo 13 success. The independent, redundant lunar module allowed the Apollo 13 crew to escape, even with all of the mistakes and blunders made by management. And, according to NASA, more people watched the Apollo 13 splashdown worldwide than the first Apollo lunar landing. No doubt if the Challenger or Columbia crews had the equivalent escape system and had survived, the world would have cheered NASA. NASA is indeed an organization that does not seem to know what it takes to succeed.

No doubt, indeed. But such an escape system would have added a lot of weight to an Orbiter that was already incapable of meeting its performance requirements, and was viewed as sufficiently reliable that it would have been overkill, and not worth the weight penalty.*

Now, of course, we know now that they were wrong (and in fact, some of us knew it at the time). It wasn't that reliable. And yes, perhaps it was a mistake to build another Orbiter and continue the program after Challenger.

But here's the thing, that S&MA types don't get. Their job is to ensure that no one is injured or killed. But other people, at higher pay grades, have a more important job--to make sure that the mission gets accomplished. Harsh as it sounds, whether or not we killed astronauts in the Shuttle wasn't the point. Once we decided to build a "reusable" vehicle, we had already made a decision that it has to be reliable (particularly when we made the decision, or at least Walter Mondale did, during the Carter administration to only build four operational vehicles).

A reusable vehicle that is unreliable is unaffordable, regardless of whether or not there are people aboard. The very premise of the program was that we weren't going to lose Orbiters, because we couldn't afford to lose Orbiters. We finally recognized that in 2004, after the loss of Columbia, when we recognized that we had to limp along with a short fleet until the ISS was complete, and then retire the system, because it was simply unaffordable (partly, but only partly) because it was unreliable. So, in that context, it made perfect sense, once they'd had a few "shakedown cruises," to say that the system was ready for passengers (in the sense that they weren't piloting the vehicle, but going up in it for some other mission purpose). If the system as flown was safe enough for the Orbiters themselves, it was certainly safe enough to put other people in.

That is why the notion of "man-rating" a reusable spacecraft is an oxymoron, just as it is with aircraft. We don't give every passenger in an airliner a parachute, because it makes no sense to do so. The airliner is designed to not crash, because airliners are expensive to replace, as is the loss of good will that crashes cause for the operator or manufacturer of the aircraft. The same will be (and should have been) true of space transports. That it wasn't with the Shuttle was a failure to design and operate it properly, but that doesn't mean that it should have had an escape system. It means that they should have either designed it better, or told Congress that it couldn't be, at least within the budget and schedule provided, and taken a different approach.

Mr. Torrance makes the classic S&MA mistake of thinking that "safe" is a binary condition. It is not. It is always relative. There is no "safe." The best you can do is minimize the risk within the constraints of the system. If he wants to argue that the Shuttle was a mistake, he'll find a lot fewer people to argue about that with today than he would have a couple decades ago. But his comparisons with Apollo, and "the right stuff" shed much more heat, and mud, on the issue than they do light.

* Note: His thesis also ignores the fact that NASA wanted to carry seven, not four astronauts on the vehicle, which would have meant adding five more seats, with no assurance that they would really add safety--ejection seats have been described as "attempted suicide to avoid certain death," and that statement goes much more than double for a hypersonic launch vehicle during ascent.

Damn Rand,

I was just considering sending you an email about how incoherent and rambling that piece was and you beat me to it.

Totured reading I would describe it.