Accepting Risk

NASA approves Hubble repair, Nature

“If the shuttle were damaged on assent by falling foam or other debris, then mission planners would have a maximum of three weeks to get a second shuttle into orbit a relatively short period of time. … It’s the sort of mission that the agency would never have bothered planning before the 2003 accident, but in the wake of the disaster, [Keith] Cowing says, such contingency work has become almost routine: “NASA has come a great distance in accepting the real risk of what they are doing,” he says.”