james_nicoll

After all these years, I still winced when I heard "Challenger, go at throttle up".

You weren't the only one.

Not the only one by a long shot...

Amen.

Am I the only one who cried again at the explosion?

Or felt their heart break at the "contingency procedures are in effect" as all the other ones disappeared from the screen...

The Shuttle tragedies are another example of where context is so important. I would guess that there's at least one road accident in North America each month that kills as many people as died in one of the Shuttle accidents. But because the Challenger and Discovery crashes were so public, even if they were only two out of 135 flights, they linger in our minds, versus something like the van accident in Ontario this year that killed eleven.

The shuttle accidents don't look so trivial versus road accidents if you compare the death rate per trip.

But the numbers look pretty reasonable as death rate per passenger mile.

The second one was Columbia, not Discovery. Which really just makes your point: it was heartbreaking enough but didn't have anything like the social effect of the first accident.

Ideally it wouldn't have any social impact at all - something like a light airplane crash. Devastating to those close, but irrelevant to pretty much everyone else.

Ideally it wouldn't have any social impact at all

WHAT.

Little to no social impact means it's no big deal. Space flight is routine background, like air travel, and the occasional loss merits just a few minutes on the six o'clock news.

"Space flight is routine background" would mean the social impact had already happened.

We're discussing the social impact of accidents, a different matter entirely.