Having worked at UTC/CSD, San Jose,CA, with a 20 year gravy monopoly, built
and tested(nozzle up) the Titan SRB segments and as such had the most
powerful radiography (x-ray) facility in the free world. The segments were
just barely able to fit on a railroad flat car to be shipped to VAFB@ SLC-6
and the Cape.
An historic side note and memory refresher, For the cancelled NOVA moon
rocket, Aerojet built and hot fired the worlds largest monolithic solid
rocket in Florida, the 260". It was cast and fired in the same cell so
transportation wasn't an issue,at least for the prototypes but would of
been problematic for the flight motors even if ultimately they were
segmented at~22 feet in diameter. Fortunately level (engineering) heads
prevailed this time.
Personally I think liquids should have a monopoly with these gigantic
booster requirements, manned or unmanned. The Russians think so, less
politics I guess.
On Fri, Mar 27, 2020 at 1:05 PM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Fri, 27 Mar 2020, Nels Anderson wrote:
Speaking of the Shuttle and solids, I vaguely recall having read
somewhere that in the mid-1960's a corporate predecessor of Morton
Thiokol (UTC?) suffered an explosion while testing a large, monolithic
solid and thereafter switched to segmented solids. Is there any truth
to my recollection?
Doesn't sound familiar, although the history of solids is something I'm
not really up on...
In any case, in the mid-60s, big segmented solids were already flying on
Titan IIIC. The USAF, which sponsored much of the big-solids work (both
for Titan and for general technology work), preferred segmented solids
because big monolithic solids are so heavy (and somewhat fragile) that
they're difficult to handle and transport. The Shuttle SRB segments --
somewhat larger than the Titan SRB segments -- are just under the limits
of what can be moved by rail.
At the time of the Shuttle booster selection, the state of the art in big
solids was almost all segmented. Big monolithic solids were a much less
mature technology. Aerojet, I think it was, did propose monolithic SRBs
for the Shuttle, but between the immaturity of the technology, and various
complications like having to beef up the VAB cranes, they didn't win.
Henry