lovingboth

... given the thing was 20 years old I reckon could be more likely to be structural ("air" frame) failiure through stresses... But who knows.

How they are going to reconstruct the shuttle will be interesting, given that it fell 200,000 feet.
However, given the wonders they do with airplane disaster recovery - I am sure they will find something...

I assume they will have either black boxes or cockpit recorders too on the thing... Although I am sure that the "black boxes" will have taken some battering...

Bummer regardless...

Well, if the statistic was just taken on the basis of the history of the Shuttle missions, up until yesterday the record was 1 catastrophic incident in 106 launches... The BBC report yesterday had a comment about what a statistic of 2 in 107 would mean if applied to car journeys (they concluded that anyone who drives to work would be lucky to survive a month, IIRC).

I'm still trying to remember where it was - New Scientist?? - but it was five to ten years ago when the issue of a replacement came up (again).

Memory is telling me it was based on NASA information: the chances of something going wrong during launch, in flight and during landing.

Wouldn't it be nice if all those sending messages of condolence, which included Yasser Arafat, according to Sky News, decided to commemorate the astronauts who died by a new initiative to avoid war in the Middle East.

Syria, Eygpt and Saudi Arabia could take the lead and force Sadam to retire if that's what it takes to calm things down(or otherwise remove him). Libya can give him a home and the UN help Iraq establish a government who are acceptable tothe international community.