Xah Lee's Unixism

[Joe Pfeiffer]

Alan Balmer <albalmer at att.net> writes:

> On Fri, 03 Sep 2004 16:12:52 GMT, "John W. Kennedy"
> <jwkenne at attglobal.net> wrote:
> 
> >Anne & Lynn Wheeler wrote:
> >> i have some recollection of competing bids building single unit
> >> assemblies at sea coast sites allowing them to be barged to
> >> florida. supposedly the shuttle boosters were sectioned specifically
> >> because they were being fabricated in utah and there were
> >> transportation constraints.
> >
> >Yes.  A vastly inferior design was used, which ended up killing seven 
> >astronauts, because Orrin Hatch had to be appeased with boodle for Utah.
> 
> The first disaster was due to (possibly inferior) gaskets and inferior
> judgment on launch day. The second was falling foam, and inferior
> realization of the gravity of the problem. I'm not clear on what
> either had to do with Utah.

IIRC (always risky), the use of a segmented booster calling for
o-rings in the first place came from the need to transport the
boosters from Utah.
-- 
Joseph J. Pfeiffer, Jr., Ph.D.       Phone -- (505) 646-1605
Department of Computer Science       FAX   -- (505) 646-1002
New Mexico State University          http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~pfeiffer