Word: fleetly
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Most important, the space shuttle was designed under the highly unrealistic assumption that the fleet would fly to space once a week and that each shuttle would need to be big enough to carry 50,000 lbs. of payload. In actual use, the shuttle fleet has averaged five flights a year; this year flights were to be cut back to four. The maximum payload is almost never carried. Yet to accommodate the highly unrealistic initial goals, engineers made the shuttle huge and expensive. The Soviet space program also built a shuttle, called Buran, with almost exactly the same dimensions...
...contractors, killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Just a few weeks ago, NASA canceled a program called the Space Launch Initiative, whose goal was to design a much cheaper and more reliable replacement for the shuttle. Along with the cancellation, NASA announced that the shuttle fleet would remain in operation until 2020, meaning that Columbia was supposed to continue flying into outer space even when its airframe was more than 40 years old! True, B-52s have flown as long. But they don't endure three times the force of gravity on takeoff and 2000[degrees...
...name our shuttles for our aspirations--Atlantis, Challenger, Discovery, Endeavour--the risks built into the very idea. Columbia, the fleet's pioneer, was named after an old Boston sloop that was the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe, carrying a cargo of otter skins to China. Any risk much repeated can become routine, and so it was for shuttle flights, except when they become tragic. That's when we are reminded that knowledge doesn't come easy and that many consequences are unintended, especially when we set off on an adventure...
...full inquest into the death of the shuttle Columbia--the second of the star-crossed fleet of five to be lost in flight--will take months if not years. Investigators will be looking at everything from a loss of insulating tiles to an explosion in the fuel tanks to a structural failure in the bones of the ship itself, as Columbia juked and torqued its way through the atmosphere. In a flying machine with more than 2.5 million parts, even a 99.9% reliability level would still leave 2,500 things to go wrong...
...four orbiters were temporarily grounded last June when cracks were found in their liquid-hydrogen fuel lines, damage that may have been caused by vibration, temperature changes or other stressors accumulated over repeated flights. Columbia, as the granddad of all the ships, could have been the brittlest of the fleet. But NASA, for all its alleged shortcomings, leaves little to chance in the regular physicals it gives its shuttles, and the fact that these tiny cracks were found in fuel lines makes it all the less likely that larger, lethal cracks could have gone unnoticed. A fuel explosion is also...