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It's not evil, not per se. Evil would be murdering people deliberately. This is incompetence, complacency, and apathy. It's negligence. But it's exactly what we should expect from an agency that knowingly ran an unsurvivable death trap of a launch vehicle for thirty years. During the early stages of a shuttle launch, prior to SRB separation, the only abort mode available was RTLS--"return to launch site". Unlike Apollo, Soyuz, Dragon, or any other capsule-based spacecraft, which had a launch escape system that could immediately separate the crew capsule from the rest of the launch vehicle and place it in a safe vector to parachute back to the surface, the Shuttle was expected to pitch end-over-end, with the external fuel tank still attached, in an attempt to return to a runway near the launch pad. John Young, the pilot of the first Space Shuttle mission, declined the suggestion to perform a manned test of the RTLS abort mode, stating, "let's not practice Russian roulette." He also noted, "RTLS requires continuous miracles interspersed with acts of God to be successful". It's not as though a LES would have necessarily saved Challenger, mind you. The explosion was too fast. But if the craft were mounted vertically with the booster stage rather than tandem, and if the abort mode didn't require having a fully intact orbiter and external fuel tank that could perform aerobatic maneuvers at the edge of possibility, there would have at least been a chance. Likewise, such a vertical-stacked design would have completely eliminated the risk of anything like the Columbia disaster. This isn't to minimize the real, compounding negligence in how the program was executed over the years. But the program was damned to begin with. |