New Spaceships Should Be Safer Than The Space Shuttle

NASA sets higher safety standards, and private rocketeers say they can meet them

NASA says private-sector spaceships will have to satisfy safety standards that the space shuttle can’t meet — and the companies building those spaceships say they'll rise to the challenge.

Friday's 25th anniversary of the Challenger shuttle explosion is focusing fresh attention on the issue of spaceflight safety, with good reason. The loss of the shuttle and its crew of seven, including educator-astronaut Christa McAuliffe, dramatically highlighted the risks associated with the world's most complex flying machine.

Those risks were brought home again with the catastrophic breakup of the shuttle Columbia in 2003. Once again, seven astronauts were lost, due to inherent problems with the space shuttle's design as well as lapses in NASA's "safety culture."

The Challenger and Columbia disasters led risk analysts to estimate that flying the space shuttle carried a roughly 1-in-100 chance that the crew and the spaceship would be lost during a given mission. In the wake of the Columbia tragedy, NASA and the White House decided to retire the shuttle fleet and move on to a simpler, safer launch system.

When NASA was working on plans for its own crew launch system to replace the shuttle and service the International Space Station, the agency set standards that lowered the chance of crew loss to 1-in-1,000.

"Neither the shuttle nor the Russian Soyuz could meet these standards," said John Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University and a member of the NASA Advisory Council's Exploration Committee.

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