NASA Commemorates Three Space Tragedies - space.com, 26 January 2007
This article describes NASA's commemoration of three tragedies: accidental fire in Apollo I spacecraft when three astonauts died on Jan. 27, 1967, Challenger rocket booster seal failure on Jan. 28, 1986 when 7 people died, and 2003 loss of Columbia orbiter when seven STS-107 astronauts died during landing. After more than two years of recovery efforts, NASA resumed shuttle flights in July 2005. The space agency plans to retire its remaining three orbiters-Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour-after ISS assembly is completed by September 2010. "We have an opportunity to show once again that NASA can do what it says it's going to do," NASA chief Michael Griffin told space agency employees this month during an agency-wide update.
To me those three tragic accidents show that there's no sure safe way to achieve anything, especially in such a new area as space research. However tragic are these events, we have to remember that any human endeavour involves some risk, and space flights by comparison are not the most dangerous enterprise ever. Strangely enough, three most dangerous jobs are actually fisherman, logger, and rancher
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