buran space bus?

Actually, solids are usually safer than liquid boosters -- they are much
simpler and less prone to failure. The shuttle disaster was simply a
massive screw up. The engineers knew *for sure* that the launch would
fail at low temperatures and told management so. Management, in their
infinite wisdom, launched anyway. There is a story that the solid's
engineers were watching the launch. At about 1 minute one of them
supposedly said "I can't believe it hasn't blown up, how could we be
wrong?" A few seconds later they were proven right.

On Wednesday, June 5, 2002, at 08:01 AM, panamabob wrote:

> On top of that, its uses liquid-fuel boosters rather than
> solid
> boosters. That means Buran's boosters are throttle-able and
> theoretically
> safer -- they can be regulated in intensity and turned on and off to
> avoid
> blow-up tragedies like Challenger.
>

The dinosaurs were destroyed by an asteroid because they weren't
space-faring. It's almost as if Gaia then thought "Well, dinosaurs
worked pretty well, but space-faring is necessary. Maybe I'll should
try mammals this time." Humanity is now developing systems to detect and
deflect asteroids, and could build orbital space colonies to spread
beyond Earth to insure life would survive a planetary catastrophe.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html