wrote:

Your point is only applicable to an extreme situation and trivializes
the effort involved. It's kind of like saying, "If the US needed to put
10,000 tons in orbit in a couple of years, the challenges are not
insurmountable."

No, it's nothing like that. Adding thousands of tons of titanium
manufacturing capacity is not an effort on the same scale as the
straw man you have just constructed. In fact, it would be a small
investment compared to what was invested in the shuttle program overall.

What we can conclude from the fact that they didn't do this is
not that making titanium is impossibly hard, but that the benefits
of that metal, if any, for the shuttle wouldn't have justified
the cost.

Paul