Sorry, I meant that nobody was talking about the Flyback Booster on this thread. I was always for the concept.
You ‘lived’ through that period. I ‘worked’ through that period.
And we were not talking about What If’s.
As in what if Congress had allowed the boosters to be built in Fla? They would not have been segmented, thus no joints, no gaskets.
What if the fact that NASA needed more funding, meant that the military got to dictate the size of the cargo bay, thus making design changes all the way down the line?
What if the EPA hadn’t mandated a change to the foam insulation?
And yes, all that was politics.
But the proximate cause was bad luck. Higher winds than ever recorded before at exactly the wrong time, and sheer bad luck on the location of the burnthru.
Take away one of these and accident probably would not have happened. Take away both and it certainly wouldn’t have happened, politics, or no politics.
\ Bullshit. Even the "as built" shuttle disaster was caused by politics. As in, launching anyway in spite of record cold at the launch site. You "do" recall that the reason the "o" ring failed was thermal embrittlement due to those same low temperatures. You might also call to mind the fact that the non-political engineers were telling anyone who would listen DO NOT LAUNCH.
So stop trying to defend the indefensible and saying it was all "just bad luck". It wasn't.