WIederling wrote:ssteve wrote:CRJockey wrote:Getting to see weaknesses of designs by recovering the booster over and over again might do wonders for reliability. That, after all, is how safety improvements in aviation work on the design reliability side.
That was the line before Challenger... turns out you also have to pay attention to what you're seeing.
Before that you have to care and actually look ( and/or heed advice from engineers.)
Both shuttle crashes were "dumb mishaps". unnecessary. caused by self-serving bureaucrats.
Jerry Pournelle, paleo conservative, SF-Author:
Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy
His best-known "law" is "Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy":
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
I would argue that it was flawed from it's inception, yes and politics, originally the SRB's were to be one piece, built by UTC, to be refurbished at the Cape.
In 1972 the contracts were going out and Tricky Dicky wanted others to benefit, hence the choice of contractor, who were experts in small solid rockets but these things? Solution, and for their re-furb at their plant out West, make them into segments and put them on a train.
The segmenting really came back to bite in Jan 1986, for a frivolous flight.
No escape system.
By removing the paint from the external tank you got more payload, fine until Feb 2003.
Conclusion, they wanted to do a huge leap in engineering, a reusable orbiter but do it on the cheap, at least cheap for what they were asking, hence the use of massive SRB's, not fully reusable with the ET.