Shuttle crew faces 1-in-100 chance of dying
WASHINGTON (AP) — The seven crew members of the space shuttle Discovery arrived at Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday to begin training for a spaceflight next month in which each will have a 1-in-100 chance of dying. Those are the official odds that NASA has long given. Exactly what the real odds are is a question that looms larger than normal this time.
Jeez, how would you like it if every time you left for work, your employer laid odds on whether or not you’d make it home alive that evening? That NASA is willing to do so when if comes to the Discovery astronauts is something that strikes me as both tacky and highly inappropriate. Talk about the dangers, certainly…but discussing the odds of a disaster prior to the shuttle even being aloft? How disrespectful is that?
What’s next? Ladbroke’s setting a betting line on Discovery’s safe return? Las Vegas sports book doing the same? Am I the only one who sees this whole idea setting odds at NASA as ghoulish in the extreme? And if you really feel the need to lay odds on the likelihood of Discovery’s crew returning in one piece, why are you even sending them into space to begin with? Are we so short of martyrs (uh…Iraq, anyone??) that we now have to create more?
