Re: Challenger doc on 4

[Default] On Fri, 03 Feb 2006 10:49:48 -0000, SteveW
<sj_walton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> told us that:

This is better than I thought, and brought several new points about the
design faults that I wasn't aware of.

I didn't realise the position of the shuttle had been moved (relative to
the boosters), and that as the company making the boosters was not able to
deliver them by sea, they had to make them in seperate units that were
connected together. It was these seals between units that failed!

At the end, they mentioned how certain bits of the shuttle had been
re-designed to prevent this kind of thing happening again. That must
have cost them quite a bit, when there was a far cheaper solution
staring them in the face all along.

1. Don't fly the thing when there's fucking great chunks of ice
hanging off it!
2. When the engineers tell you it's not a good idea to launch
it...DON'T FUCKING LAUNCH IT!!!!

Not exactly..er...rocket science, is it? :-)

John Glen's words about sitting on top of the components provided on
lowest tender - came to mind.

And why not? Everyone knows that the cheaper the components, the
better the quality and reliability tends to be.

Though I think the company building the boosters got the job because Nasa
had apolicy of distributing the work around the country.

Typical PR - Nasa had to launch to keep face, and on track - a further
delay due to weather would delay for signifcant time.

Yes, but when you've got the lives of seven people, not to mention
millions of dollars worth of spacecraft at stake, a significant delay
doesn't seem like that big a deal.

My favourite bit in the whole documentary was when one of the people
sat round the table was told to "take off his engineer's hat, and put
on his management hat". Presumably that's the conical one, with the
big letter "D" painted on it.

;-)
.

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