How many of us remember...

[damocles]

Richard Feynmann testifying before the Challenger commission and dipping that sample of solid rocket booster rubber O ring gasket into a glass of ice water to demonstrate the materials and applied engineering failures that led to the starboard SRB blowtorching the Challenger's discardable fuel tank?

 

How many of us saw the video of NASA engineers firing fuel tank insulating foam chunks out the USAF's famous "chicken gun" at a sample starboard leading wing edge covered with thermal tiles used to simulate Columbia's wing and knocking nice big holes in the test target?

 

Does anybody else recall incidents like these showing in retrospect that there were incompetent NASA management decisions made that were intuitively obvious to even a schmuck(like me) at the time?

[UncleAl]

The Space Scuttle is a low-orbit nuclear bomber. It originally came with woven ferrite memory resistant to EMP. It was a use-once vehicle, though they wouldn't mind if it came back to the glowing remains of the US.

 

NOTHING about the Space Scuttle is a heavy lifter. It's major payload is its own worthless self. it costs $30/gram to boost net mass into low earth orbit - by far the most expensive lifter in any nation at any time. It cannot go very high best case and the dimensions of its cargo can be no greater than... a rack of nuclear warheads. Recycling its SSBs costs more than their original fabrication. Reliability over multiple launches is 1% catastrophic failures.

 

The Space Scuttle exists to build International Space Station Freedom FUBAR Space Hole One. It could have been boosted in a very few Saturn V launches within 12 months for some 0.1% the current cumulative cost. ISS FUBAR exists to justify the Space Scuttle. ISS FUBAR has no mission. NASA has even run out of grade school proposals. Nothing that was done there has any value.

 

Here's a diagnostic! NASA spent more than $1 million creating a zero-gee pen. Ultra-viscous thixotropic ink in a nitrogen-pressurized cartridge did not need gravity for ink feed and did not leak (much). The Russians used pencils. A fiber tip pen doesn't need gravity either.

[Eclogite]

Here's a diagnostic! NASA spent more than $1 million creating a zero-gee pen. Ultra-viscous thixotropic ink in a nitrogen-pressurized cartridge did not need gravity for ink feed and did not leak (much). The Russians used pencils. A fiber tip pen doesn't need gravity either.

Oh, dear. While I share your scorn for the shuttle and the ISS, I really thought you would have recognised an urban myth when you saw one. One more mistake like that and people will think you are human.