ISS leaking air

On Jan 10, 2004, at 5:34 PM, ANTIcarrot wrote:

> 3) NASA's dumb minimum weight obsession means things are over design,
> over tested and under reliable once they get in orbit.
>

If your system weight goes over you can't get into orbit, at all.

Of 36 objects sent to Mars by humans, only 7 have worked correctly. 6
from NASA and 1 from Europe. All of Japan's and Russia's probes have
failed. Some of the US probes that failed avoided NASA's ... "over
design, over tested, ..." approach --- oops. Based on the evidence it
seems the level of testing and design needs to be very high.

As to unreliability, many of NASA's systems have lived far beyond their
design life. Other's have failed prematurely. I'm not aware of any
other organization that does a lot of space work that has a better
reliability record. I know of some that have a worse record.

If the dinosaurs had a space program, they'd still be here.

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