Mike Griffin has been spreading poison about the Shuttle for a long time.  In an email made public, he said that certain key individuals in the Bush administration ( OSTP and OMB) were conducting a "jihad" against the Shuttle.  (BTW, Griffin also)
 
Mike has been known to say publicly:  The Shuttle is "inherently flawed", and "aging Shuttle", "Unsafe to fly past 2010" (even though he said it is safe to fly through 2010).  The press picked up and repeatedly used the term "aging Shuttle".
 
In an earlier email to the Committee, I addressed flaws in Griffin's Shuttle Probabilistic Risk Assessment (SPRA).  Briefly, the PRA treats past system failures as random events.  Any experienced development engineer knows that very few failures are "random".  There is always a cause.  They find the cause and fix it. After the fix, the system is more reliable than before, but the PRA will forecast lowered reliability.  The Shuttle and the Soyuz are the most reliable human launch systems in the world, each achieving more than 100 launches, and benefiting from the experience of each launch.  The NTSB does not believe in random failures.  They nearly always find the cause of a failure, and see that it is fixed.
 
 
To those who continue to refer to the "aging space shuttle," I note that three of the most useful and productive military aircraft — the B-52, C-130, and KC-135 — have all been in service more than 50 years and are still performing today. Age itself is not an essential criterion.   Regular inspection and maintenance, plus implementation of selective systems upgrading keep vehicles like these three aircraft and the Shuttle healthy and really more reliable as experience accumulates..
 
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O Glenn Smith NASA/JSC retired
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