It’s always easy to do the woulda-shoulda-coulda after the fact – even easier when it was someone else’s problem! – but this is an interesting read.
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Sometimes you find gems trolling the earlier articles. Imo, this is one of them. 
Wheels
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Great article revival there…and even more poignant now that we are once again on the verge of launching astronauts to space again on a relatively new, and relatively well tested rocket. It is still a very, very risky business…
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There is nothing routine about manned space travel. There is so much that can go wrong.
Of course, there should be nothing routine about strapping 300 people into an aluminum (aluminium?) tube while they are sat in close proximity to hundreds of gallons of flammable liquid, lighting a fire and propelling them 6 miles high, and hundreds of miles down range… but we do that thousands times a day, all over the world with an amazing safety record.
I wish them all the very best. I have a friend who works directly on the crew capsule in an engineering role. 
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I tell the wife every time we get on a plane (she hates flying, I hate driving): “Honey, you’re stepping into an environment with professionals - we were in a LOT more danger driving to the airport”. Sometimes it helps her. I’ve spent entire flights telling her just what was going on at any given moment, just to distract her.
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I mumble the same things to myself to keep me on task. 
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Was funny sometimes cuzz I’d see people in the seats behind/front/side kinda leaning over and eavesdropping. She’s gotten a lot better.
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That was an extraordinary article. Thanks EinsteinEP, wherever you are these days. It pretty solidly lays to rest some regrets and guilt that many have had about the response and inevitable outcome. Just damn!
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