Global Warming Kills Space Shuttle

NASA grounded the Shuttle again, after foam fell off and hit the Discovery.  The backstory here is the killer foam used to not be a problem - the Shuttle previously used foam with freon.  Environmental Correctness caused them to change, to save the ozone layer.  As early as 1997 NASA knew that the new foam could cause a problem: it falls off and causes much more damage than the prior foam.  It was one of the likely reasons for the loss of the Columbia (NASA possibility #3). The $Billions spent to "fix" the causes of the loss of the Columbia now appear to be largely wasted due to a lack of political courage to unwind this prior decision.  You have to wonder how the bureaucrats replaced the rocket scientists at NASA and traded the negligible impact of Shuttle freon vs. the much larger impact of effluents left in the upper atmosphere each launch, let alone the $Billions spent and lost since this change was made - one Shuttle gone, the fleet grounded, $B spent to 'fix' the wrong problem.  Is NASA just a big PR gig?  The real solution is to go back to the future - cheap disposable launch vehicles were always a better path than the 'reusable' Shuttle.  And waste the politically-correct PR-centric bureaucrats.  And get a private space program going.

Comments

[Rich Melmon]

This urban myth is amazingly durable. All of my right leaning friends believe it. This is silly. The shuttle is a deeply flawed design. Environmentalists haven't killed it, engineers who should have known better did. Apollo was reliable, and should have formed the basis for going forward. But military types wanted a space plane. So, the Apollo architecture lost out as old fashioned, and the new architecture, allowing flying won. But the new archtecture lead to complexity levels that were incapable of being addressed without adding additional complexity, which resulted in a complexity spiral that doomed the system to around a 2% to 5% overall failure rate regardless of of much was invested in corrective/reduntant systems. That reliability level can never be significantly reduced with this architecture. Said more simply, the shuttle is a kludge. Learn and move on. And don't blame phantoms.