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Much has been said recently about how losing a crew during a manned mission to Mars would be disastrous.
How so? We' ve lost two space shuttles now with all aboard and there has been MINIMAL erosion of public support for a manned space program.
A few years ago, someone warned that if another space shuttle was lost that it would be the last time NASA flew. Yet we are probably just a few months from a return to flight now.
I think lots of space advocates have gotten tremendously cynical about public support. Yet I think that the American public have come to "expect" manned space exploration and make allowances for the risk.
Losing a crew on Mars or en route would probably just stimulate public support in the short term.
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I think that the public would tollerate losing one crew over the course of a 10-year program, but not two and not the first.
I think the public has gone from being neuteral to the current program to outright hostile after Columbia. If not NASA's teary-eyed insistance and determination to finish in the days following the disaster, that would have been it. Once NASA ignored its better judgement to its detriment to push and save and cut an inherintly flawed vehicle, twice has put them on parole. Shuttle has always been an American icon, but now after Columbia even its celebrity status isn't enough to prevent the public from desiring its grounding.
[i]"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw[/i]
[i]The glass is at 50% of capacity[/i]
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The level of ongoing public support would depend on the number of failures and deaths. At the moment the shuttle has had two major incidents in over twenty years, which the public can to some degree accept, if the death/incident rate increased too much that support would quickly drop away.
Graeme
There was a young lady named Bright.
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day
in a relative way
And returned on the previous night.
--Arthur Buller--
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