So many IRRATIONAL Statements---regressing to CAPSULES--not Right for USA

1.  Not necessary to re certify all parts---not logical

2.  Never going to get us to next era of HSF ---look at capability as compared to Orion which will never get us to next era-----aldrin correct --use & improve shuttle.

3. Everybody , everybody knew it was not an airliner & could not be operated as such.

4.  Bad engineering---haha---in any complex vehicle you have issues which require attention,  in shuttle's case attention/fixes were not made---simple as that.

Will be case for Orion, cots , etc.  We had much more capability with shuttle.   We needed to fix problems on shuttle & maintained the exceptional shuttle capability.

. Hal Gehman, investigator

When NASA flew its last shuttle mission in July 2011, the occasion was marked with reverence and even regret by some. But to retired Navy Adm. Hal Gehman, who led the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, the safe landing of Atlantis brought a sigh of relief.

"The more I think about it, the happier I am that we retired the shuttle program," said Gehman. "We would have gotten away with 30 or 40 [more] launches, and then we would have had another accident. The system was too dangerous."

The dangers were detailed in his board's 248-page report: from the lack of an effective escape system to constant pressure to launch despite shrinking NASA resources. Another factor: the mistaken belief the shuttle was "operational" — like an airliner — rather than a test vehicle that required constant vigilance.

Gehman said the board's recommendation that NASA "recertify" the shuttle before flying it beyond 2010 was — in essence — a call to mothball the shuttle as the cost of recertifying a vehicle with 2.5 million parts was prohibitively expensive.

"We knew we were effectively shutting down the program," he said. But "we were never going to get to the next [era] of human spaceflight until we shut it down."

Though NASA's next vehicle configuration, the Space Launch System and Orion capsule, is being designed to include an abort system, Gehman said it's still vulnerable to the same pressures of time and money that doomed Columbia:

"I can tell you that the pressures that caused bad engineering practices in the past … are still there."

Mike Ciannilli, searcher

Sent from my iPad