"Henry Spencer" wrote in message
...
In article .com,
Roger Coppock wrote:
But it definitely was not all politics.

What nonpolitical reason caused Utah to be picked then?

The fact that Thiokol was bidding segmented SRBs -- an established
technology that was well proven on Titan IIIC -- against the novel and
uncertain technology of big one-piece SRBs. Remember, the #1 priority
for the shuttle boosters was low development cost; had that not been the
dominant issue, they would have been liquids, not solids.


And that's probably still one of the biggest short-sighted mistakes with the
Shuttle.


Also not insignificant was that segmented SRBs could fit within the
existing KSC infrastructure, while the handling problems of the immensely
massive one-piece SRBs would have required a number of changes, e.g.
heavier cranes in the VAB. (And there were technical unknowns there too:
you can *damage* a big solid if you don't handle it just so -- as witness
the Delta II explosion some years ago -- and solids are quite
spectacularly
intolerant of even minor damage.)

Yeah, the idea of transporting such a large SRB, and if necessary rotating
it from vertical to horizontal to vertical again (I'm assuming they would
have rotated it horizontally for transport from the casting pit to the SRB,
though I could be wrong) scares the bejesus out of me.


--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |



Hey Henry, I've got a good Windows server I can setup spsystems.net for you
on. :-)


--
Greg Moore
SQL Server DBA Consulting Remote and Onsite available!
Email: sql (at) greenms.com http://www.greenms.com/sqlserver.html