In article , says...


The Boston Globe was big on this conspiracy theory for more than a year
after the Challenger disaster. That it gets repeated in Feynman's book
(if true, I haven't read it yet) is unfortunate. After a year of harping
and w/o any evidence whatsoever that the White House was pressuring NASA
in any way, shape or form to pull of this supposed SOTUS PR stunt, the
Globe quietly buried "the story".

I put as much credibility in that story as I did all the Globe stories
that ran in the 80's penned by one Fred Kaplan, about money wastage on
cruise missile technology of highly doubtful efficacy. Then came Desert
Storm. And yet another series of "stories" quietly disappears. Esp. when
said weapons were the tool of choice in the Clinton administration and
were in fact, in the manner deployed, largely ineffective....

At the time, there was huge internal (management) pressure to up the
flight rate. Unfortunately, safety issues were being glossed over and
parts were being routinely cannibalized from other orbiters to prepare
the next for flight. Lack of critical flight spares should have been
one, of many, red flags for the program. The projected flight rate was
a fantasy, plain and simple.

It's worth noting that during the downtime after Challenger *many*
problems were fixed in addition to the SRB related issues. For the SRB,
the SRB field joint was redesigned, heaters were added to keep the o-
rings flexible, and etc.

Jeff
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