Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle
Path: utzoo!kcarroll
From: kcarroll@zoo.toronto.edu (Kieran A. Carroll)
Subject: Re: Skeptical Shuttle Enquirer
Message-ID: <1991Apr9.172200.13427@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: Tue, 9 Apr 1991 17:22:00 GMT
References: <910@idacrd.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

heskett@titan.tsd.arlut.utexas.edu (Donald Heskett) writes:

> If you were a truly cynical person, and you were extremely worried about the
> manned space budgets during these times, and if you needed a GOLDEN opportunity
> to demonstrate why man needs to be launching satellites ...
> . . . .   I hate to be such a cynic and a skeptic
> but it is just too much like a choreographed melodrama for me.

There is no need to invoke deliberate mis-design of the GRO's antenna
release latch (a near-libelous statement, I might point out),
to explain the failure of the latch on-orbit. Accidental mis-design
has happened many times in the past with spacecraft mechanisms.
The only reason the present situation seemed like a ``choreagraphed melodrama''
was that there happened to be people nearby to perform a repair.
Otherwise, it would merely have seemed like an ``unmitigated disaster''.

Do not underestimate the perversity of nature. It's >hard<
to design things that work! Especially first time. For ``hard'',
read ``incredibly expensive''. This is a point that the
members of the anti-manned-spaceflight camp don't seem to want
to acknowledge, despite a continual string of failures
of robot probes, and despite an on-going string of satellite
repairs on-orbit by astronauts.
-- 

     Kieran A. Carroll @ U of Toronto Aerospace Institute
     uunet!attcan!utzoo!kcarroll kcarroll@zoo.toronto.edu