In a message dated 3/20/01 7:59:35 PM, spike66@attglobal.net writes:
>a private
>organization may accept higher levels of risk than
>NASA. Remember that *all* astronauts are volunteers.
>Furthermore, we have volunteers taking crazy risks, just
>for the hell of it: such as climbing Mt. Everest, where the
>chances of perishing are more than 10%. In some years
>the death toll has exceeded 20%, yet off they go. spike
I suspect NASA's motivation is not getting astronauts - that
would be easy even with high mortality, as you observe. Rather,
I think they're concerned with PR. Killing a hero is very, very
bad PR, especially for those who hear little of NASA. If
somebody died as a result of the kinds of goofs that have
done in several recent Mars missions, it could be the end
of public funding of manned space missions.
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