[fso301]

I was in Minuteman missiles in the late 1970's. At that time the Soviet Union had so many warheads they were targeting Individuals with weapons.

Fine but if launch orders went out from either side, how many missles would work as designed versus malfunctioning? Not very many. That's why so many are needed. More systems are needed than targets in order to compensate for system unreliability.

More air dropped nuclear bombs were needed than targets existed because of expected losses due to enemy air defenses. More subs were needed than targets because some subs might be destroyed by enemy action and some subs could be expected to be lost due to missles malfunctioning in the tube resulting in loss of sub (similar to the Kursk)

Using NASA as a metric, the space agency probably does no better than 50/50 at getting a satellite launch off on time. Unlike a minuteman sitting in a remote silo years on end, NASA missiles are of fresh manufacture and are attended to by swarms of engineers and technicians. All this for no better than a coins toss chance of launching on time.

[Ben Mugged]

The last metric I had before I retired from active duty was the Minuteman (systems have evolved since then) had a launch success probability of 97.83%. The missiles were randomly extracted from alert status and test launched out of Vandenberg. Not one failure in the last 10 years I was involved. Since the Minuteman program was upgraded, some older missiles were sold to private industry (Orbital Sciences) and have been used successfully for satellite launch for a lot of years. These systems are highly reliable and survivable.

Comparing NASA launches to military EWO launches is apples to oranges. NASA has to worry about space traffic, weather, plume, debris, and having people in the crash zone. Military launches under war conditions (EWO) have none of those restraints.