Jake McGuire wrote:

wrote:


Apparantly he left out the part where large segmented solids have


gone
"boom" in the past.

That has never happened with the Shuttle motors in either flight or
groudn test.



True, but "The shuttle RSRMs have never gone BOOM" is a much weaker
statement than "solid rocket motors don't go BOOM." I seem to recall a
Delta solid going BOOM and raining bits of GPS satellite all over a
bunch of parked cars a few years back as well.


I recall lots of liquid boosters raining payload all over the landscape.
In fact, it's one of my current tasks... working on a historical summary
of launch vehicle reliability. A whole fo of rockets going BOOM for a
whole lot of reasons.

Without hearing Horowitz's defense of the SRBs word-for-word it's hard
to be specific, but claiming that "if there wasn't a fuel tank in the
way, Challenger would still have probably made orbit, as most of the
thrust was still going out the nozzle" strikes me as verging on
dishonest.

It's true. The analyses showed that Challenger should have made orbit,
had the burn-though been outboard. Performance would have been affected,
and thrust vectoring systems on both the SRBs and the SSMEs would ahve
been nearly maxed out, but Challenger would ahve made orbit.