"Most Dangerous Manned Spacecraft Ever Flown"

He's flown on Discovery and Atlantis, and he'd do it again if asked... but that doesn't stop astronaut Richard M. (Mike) Mullane from questioning the safety of NASA's space shuttle in his memoirs.

In a Reuters interview publicizing his new autobiography, "Riding Rockets," Mullane (right) said the shuttle is "the most dangerous manned spacecraft ever flown, by anybody."

The reason? Because there is no system to pull astronauts away from the orbiter in the event of a launch disaster, a la Challenger.

"... [The space shuttle] has no powered flight escape system," said Mullane. "Basically the bailout system we have on the shuttle is the same bailout system a B-17 bomber pilot had in World War Two."

An escape method such as the launch escape system (LES) rocket used during the Mercury and Apollo missions -- and that NASA is reportedly considering for the agency's next generation CEV expendable space vehicle -- could have saved the seven astronauts aboard the ill-fated launch of the shuttle Challenger, according to Mullane.

"That was the true tragedy of Challenger: Nothing was learned. Columbia was a repeat of Challenger, where people had a known design problem" and launched anyway, Mullane told Reuters.

And at the heart of that problem, Mullane admits, were astronauts such as himself, who hesitated to raise questions for fear their questions would keep them from reaching orbit.

"I survived as we all survived: I kept my mouth shut, I endured...You walk in terrified of doing anything that might jeopardize your one chance to get to space," he said. "It's not like other jobs, where if you get frustrated you can go in to your boss and say, 'Take this job and shove it!' You can't do that at NASA because there's no other place to go fly shuttles."

Such an attitude -- called a "broken safety culture" -- was cited by investigators in the aftermath of the Columbia tragedy. Mullane agreed... even though he was a part of it.

"We were bitterly angry and disgusted with our management," Mullane writes in his book, on astronauts' attitudes after the Challenger accident. "In our criticisms, we ignored our own mad thirst for flight..."

"Only janitors and cafeteria workers at NASA were blameless in the deaths of the Challenger seven," writes Mullane, who was a member of the original 1978 class of shuttle astronauts.

While acknowledging the shuttle's heavy-hauler abilities allowed such projects as the ISS and the Hubble Space Telescope possible, Mullane maintains the shuttles have never lived up to their billing as reliable space workhorses (hardly a new criticism.)

NASA records state Mullane flew as a mission specialist on three shuttle flights -- STS-41D (August 30 to September 5, 1984), STS-27 (December 2-6, 1988), and STS-36 in (February 28 to March 4, 1990). He has logged 356 hours in space aboard Discovery and Atlantis.

Mullane says he supports NASA's efforts for a replacement manned space vehicle such as the CEV... as long as there is a powered escape system onboard.

Russian Soyuz capsules also utilize a launch escape system, which has been credited for saving the lives of two cosmonauts aboard Soyuz T-10A in 1983. The cosmonauts were pulled to safety by the escape rocket seconds before the booster exploded on the pad.

FMI: www.nasa.gov