I guess then it's best the general public doesn't know these facts as we
might not have any space program as flawed as it is and was.
For me, the inability to fully cope with the two shuttle tragedies has
plagued me, not just the loss of life but the people responsible not
being punished in any way, particularly Challenger. But there's reason to
believe that the extent of damage to Columbia's wing was known
in advance thru 'spy' imaging satellites. It's not my intention to get into
a heated discussion on this topic just venting among colleagues.
For what its worth, I had a 'premonition a few weeks before Challenger's
launch. I was being pummeled on the pad by flaming debris just
after launch, though in a not very realistic scenario, but as dreams
go, none the less. I awoke very disturbed and for days afterwards.
One of numerous reasons I get overly emotional about the demise of the
Saturn 5.
On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 5:24 PM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Thu, 26 Mar 2020, roxanna Mason wrote:
it turned out that shutdown
transient loads would be too high for the orbiter and ET structures.
Did not know this was ever a consideration. So instead of
shelving SRB's for liquid boosters they rolled the dice. Another
example of politics over engineering.
The Shuttle program, alas, had a bad case of one of the problems Nevil
Shute describes in the R-101 project: once a decision was made and money
started being spent based on it, admitting that the decision had been a
mistake and money had been wasted was deemed too embarrassing.
Earlier example: When NASA finally accepted non-reusable drop tank(s),
that should have made it possible to build something like the Lockheed
StarClipper concept -- with all the engines in the orbiter and no separate
booster -- which had previously been ruled unacceptable because it used a
drop tank. People did notice this, but the decision to build a two-stage
Shuttle with separate booster(s) could not be changed.
Later example: When the orbiter design came in considerably overweight,
reducing payload fraction and threatening a considerable loss in payload,
the right answer was to back up and design a somewhat larger Shuttle that
would have the desired payload despite the smaller payload fraction.
Instead an expensive and painful mass-reduction scrub was done, and one
consequence of that was that a lot of "operability" aids like built-in
work platforms were deleted, regardless of what it would do to ops cost.
And for a non-Shuttle example, the whole sad story of Ares I was one
instance after another of designers doggedly carrying on with a
fundamentally flawed basic design, because it could not be changed no
matter how difficult the implementation proved to be.
Henry