Ex-Astronaut Story Musgrave Blasts NASA, Washington, Over Space Shuttle Program Failures
As the space shuttle Atlantis orbits Earth in the final mission of NASA’s 30-year reusable spacecraft legacy, at least one former astronaut — and six-time shuttle voyager — is lashing out at the space agency for what he deems as failures in the overall vision of the shuttle program.
“The shuttle did not turn out like we planned,” Dr. Story Musgrave told The Huffington Post. “It was going to [fly] 66 times a year and it ended up with about five times a year. It was going to cost $10 million a flight, and two months ago, an independent study showed that it cost $1.2 billion a flight. It was massively fragile, difficult to operate and exceedingly dangerous.”
Musgrave is a surgeon, mathematician, chemist, biophysicist, physiologist, computer scientist, artist and author of important scientific papers in the areas of aerospace medicine, physiology and clinical surgery.
via Ex-Astronaut Story Musgrave Blasts NASA, Washington, Over Space Shuttle Program Failures.
