The Times would have called for the Wright Brothers to be grounded after Lt. Thomas Selfridge died in a Wright Flyer.

I would suggest that the shuttle, as designed, is as safe or safer as any manned spacecraft ever built, given the ratio of operational hours to fatalities.

Both losses - and the 14 lives lost because of them - were due entirely to bad decisions made on the ground that were influenced by politics, not operational needs.

If the Times wants to know why seven people died aboard Columbia, start with the political decision to fly a non-ISS mission that revolved around putting an Israeli astronaut into orbit; that was a political decision that goes back to the Clinton Administration, at least, if not the first Bush Administration.

If the Times wants to know why seven people died aboard Challenger, start with the political decision to fly a civilian "teacher in space" and tie the flight to a pending State of the Union address; that one goes back to the Reagan Administration.

The shuttle, as designed, is as safe as any manned spacecraft with its operational requirements COULD BE; the managerial decisions that led to the losses of Challenger and Columbia asked for too much from the vehicle, essentially compounding known design weaknesses that were the required engineering trade-off to meet the shuttle's budget limitations.

And those budget limitations are the fault of every administration dating back to Richard Nixon's.

Without the shuttle, the International Space Station can not be completed as designed; relying on the Soyuz to support the station, as the Times suggests, means relying on a vehicle whose design FLAWS have led to the deaths of no less than four cosmonauts.

Holtz' series was well-done, and leads to the inexorable conclusion that a space program that can not be adequately funded is not one that should be attempted.

It does not, however, lead anyone with an engineering background to the conclusion that the shuttle is a flawed design, per se, only that its design pushed the edge of the envelope to accomplish its operational requirements.

The uses to which the vehicle has been put, however, most certainly have been flawed.

That is not the fault of the vehicle, or its designers; it is the fault of the political leaders who have nickle-and-dimed NASA repeatedly over the past 30 years.

Only the LA Times editorial board could - or would - confuse the two.

I don't know, Brad. The LA Times Editorial board is talking about what really happened, not what might be. Taking it as a given that you're correct about the politics, that still doesn't change anything. Politics are always going to be part of federally-funded space flight. Without politics we never would have even HAD a space program. So to speak of political pressure and technical parameters as if they're totally unrelated just strikes me as unrealistic.

Personally, I think that there's a personally reasonable arguement that space travel is important enough to merit the occassional loss of life -- after all we accept death as part of mountain climbing, deep sea diving, military flight training, etc. -- but if our community really thinks future shuttle crashes are totally unacceptable then it's also reasonable to say the shuttle should never fly again.

It is quite wrong to say "the public demanded too many things from NASA".

The most basic thing the public expected from NASA was honesty, which it didn't get from the bureaucrats at the top, who oversold the shuttle to protect their budgets and their careers. They did not have to do this, and people died as a result.

It's bad enough that we have to see the bureaucrats now get to retire with their fat pensions, without the gratuitous attempt to shift the blame to 'the public'.

Anyone interested in this issue, especially if you have an engineering, aerospace, or management background of any sort, should check out Volume 1 of the CAIB report at

http://www.caib.us/news/report/default.html

It's fascinating, and has the advantage of being more comprehensive, authoritative, and was out WAY EARLIER than the LAT series to boot (August vs. December). (As just one example, check out figure 3.7.1, in chapter 3, showing the reassembled recovered debris -- you can see right where the problem was. Beautiful work.)

Reading the CAIB report, I got a different impression than Brad states. The trouble was partly high-level politics, as he outlines. But the critical problem was base-level management, like the decisions to not request in-flight imagery from DoD, to not understand the mechanism for foam release from the external tank, and to not understand the effect of foam impact on the reinforced carbon wing panels. It sounds like petty details, but that's the way engineering works -- you have to prove the whole system will work, not just try it and be glad when it does happen to work.

One of the main points of the CAIB report is that the disaster was avoidable. So the question Brad and Ricey discuss, of "was the prestige/`science' worth the death toll?" is not salient in the case of Columbia -- the management mistakes were THAT egregious and prevalent. So we have to fix the obvious stuff as well as answer the "is it worth it" question.

Like Brad, I was surprised to see the LAT editorial because neither the series nor the CAIB report tried to show that the Shuttle is inherently too unsafe to fly. The CAIB report DOES take pains to explain why the Shuttle is NOT an "operational" program, but an "exploratory" program. It has been sold as a plane ride to space and that's just not the case. It may be as safe as Apollo was (as Brad says) ... but that's not very safe at all. For sure not safe enough to justify high-school science experiments and publicity stunts, but probably safe enough for Hubble repairs. That's probably still not worth the cost, but the LAT did not take up the issue directly in the series.

ATTENTON KFI AM: Who is the crazy now in charge of programming. Switch George Noory back immediately to his original slot of 10:00 p.m. John Ziegler should have been given the 1:00 a.m. slot. After all these years (personally since 1997 Art Bell listener and continued with Noory)with millions of listeners throughout the World. Terrific having Art Sat & Sun. WHAT IS THE REAL TRUTH BEHIND PUSHING GEORGE NOORY TO 1:00 P.M.? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that George Noory pulls more listeners on that show than his replacement as he is doing a terrific job in Art Bell's slot. Grateful for Art on Sat. & Sun. at least. Count another devoted weekly listener lost which must be adding up to thousands by now. thousands.