757 question aside one issue here is whether anyone should have ever tried to claim normal engineering standards or practices mentioned earlier in this thread could ever have been applied to the Shuttle?
It’s a given that the decision to launch Challenger on that day was flawed for all the reasons everybody has previously mentioned...but I wonder what the public mood and perception of the program would have been, post the Challenger accident, if right from the start the Shuttle (STS) had been portrayed as a follow on to Apollo, that Apollo really had involved massive massive risk taking, and that the Shuttle was very very much an experimental vehicle with it’s own inherent risks.....Instead NASA tried for political/financial reasons to sell the STS to all and sundry (but mainly Washington and the military) as a “space plane” that would be almost as easy to turnaround between “sectors” as a contemporary airliner and just as safe to fly in......
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, the below relates to a meeting involving astronaut candidates that took place in 2000...that’s before the Columbia accident....(there is comment later in the full article about the perceived risk post Columbia)
.....One of (Alvin) Drew’s first encounters with (John Young) was in January 2000, when he was applying to NASA. Among the first things on the agenda was a briefing from John Young, “to give you a reality check.” Young wasted no time, showing some numbers on an overhead projector to the group of 19 candidates. “You have a 1-in-258 chance of a catastrophic failure on any given shuttle mission,” he told them. Drew wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad. Then Young put up risk numbers for air combat, “things like fighters over the top of Hanoi.” Drew was surprised by Young’s next remark: “Flying one shuttle mission is as dangerous as any 60 combat missions you would fly.”
Drew, a veteran of 90 helicopter combat missions in Panama and the first Iraq war, remembers thinking, “These were not generic missions where nobody’s shooting at you, but real ‘no kidding there’s bullets flying’-type combat missions.” Young’s statistics didn’t deter anyone in the class, he says, but it made them think.
Read more at
https://www.airspacemag.com/space/sp...HKxdJxHGQgL.99