Space Shuttle Program - Criticism

Criticism

The space shuttle program has been criticized for failing to achieve its promised cost and utility goals, as well as design, cost, management, and safety issues. Others have argued that the shuttle program was a step backwards from the Apollo Program, which, while extremely dangerous, accomplished far more scientific and space exploration endeavors than the shuttle ever could. If Apollo had continued, it may have evolved into manned missions to other planets.

After both the Challenger disaster and the Columbia disaster, high profile boards convened to investigate the accidents with both committees returning praise and serious critiques to the program and NASA management. Some of the most famous of the criticisms, most of management, came from Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, in his report that followed his appointment to the commission responsible for investigating the Challenger disaster.

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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:

    The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.
    George Steiner (b. 1929)

    ...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.
    Mary Pickford (1893–1979)

    Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)