On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:26:23 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>>> NASA?
>> 
>>> Aren't they those guys who tried to launch a rocket with a faulty
>>> O-ring?
>> 
>>   Take two programs of comparable size made in Microsoft and in NASA,
>> and compare the total amount of bugs found during testing. The former
>> will have in the order of thousands, while the latter will have
>> something like 10.
>> 
>>   And the latter while never exceeding budgets nor deadlines.
> 
> A NASA rocket exploding is something like an M$ product having a severe
> security vulnerability.

NO, it isn't.  People haven't died because of MS security vulnerabilities.

> So far, NASA has had, what, 2 major incidents like this? In its entire
> history?

Three that caused fatalities.  The first was a fire in a Mercury 7 
capsule during a test - pure oxygen atmosphere + spark = fire.  All three 
crew members were killed.  The most recent two were the Challenger and 
the Columbia - the first exploded about 23 seconds into the launch, the 
second burned up on re-entry.

Now, if you count the rockets that were unmanned that blew up, there were 
a fairly significant number of very spectacular failures.  Find a copy of 
"When We Left Earth:  The NASA Missions" to see some archive footage.

Jim

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