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Comment by sam_goody | Hacker News Reader

The double entendre is what made it so catchy. The saying was first [1] and the company is now trying to rewrite history.

Another fun fact:

Morton (tehnically, Morton Norwich) made other chemicals as well, including rocket fuel. The fuels were marked up so highly, that - together with a company called Thiokol - they decided they could make and fly the whole rocket engine cheaper than NASA could.

Their first attempt at rocket building was the Challenger, which blew up less than two minutes after launch, and took with it 7 people, and the Morton-Thiokol partnership.

[1]: From 1892, called an "old saying": https://books.google.co.il/books?id=gwFCAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA733&dq...

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> Morton (tehnically, Morton Norwich) made other chemicals as well, including rocket fuel. The fuels were marked up so highly, that - together with a company called Thiokol - they decided they could make and fly the whole rocket engine cheaper than NASA could.

That's...not really true. Thiokol and Morton Norwich merged in 1982; Morton-Thiokol did a lot, wasn't centered on a proposal to “make and fly the whole rocket engine cheaper than NASA could”, and, in fact, the rocket engine business they had after the merger was the same one Thiokol had before the merger, just with the new entity’s name. Thiokol had been a contractor on the shuttle program since the 1970s.

> Their first attempt at rocket building was the Challenger, which blew up less than two minutes after launch

No, it wasn't. Thiokol was the contractor for the SRB motor segments from well before the merger, and Thiokol and then Morton-Thiokol made the motor segments for the SRBs for all of the launches before the 1986 Challenger disaster (and all of them after, though some under different names, after Thiokol was purchased.)

> and the Morton-Thiokol partnership.

Morton-Thiokol wasn't a partnership, but it's true that most of the chemical business was spun out as Morton in 1989, with the propulsion business staying as Thiokol. This wasn't really an unwinding of the merger; Thiokol had a substantial chemic business before the merger. It was a novel split of the combined business that happened to use the branding from the old components because it was available.

Thanks for the added info.

> Their first attempt at rocket building was the Challenger

>> No, it wasn't. Thiokol was the contractor for the SRB motor segments from well before the merger

I don't see how that differs. The first rocket made by Morton after the --partnership-- merger was the Challenger.

My great uncle was the CEO of Morton, and from him I heard (as a child) that the decision to make the engine was a direct result of the huge markup they had on the fuel. But the details are obviously fuzzy [like, maybe he was really CTO...], and its good to have some more facts.

IMO, The whole "Morton makes rockets" is interesting, no matter how you spin it.

> The first rocket made by Morton after the --partnership-- merger was the Challenger.

Sorry, but that's just too inaccurate. Challenger was the name of an orbiter (one of several), the whole system was called the Space Shuttle, and one part of the system were the SRBs (Solid Rocket Boosters), and Morton-Thiokol was responsible for the actual rocket motor part of the SRBs.

Language is funny, “the Challenger” can refer to different things depending on context.

In this context it's "Their first attempt at rocket building was the Challenger, which blew up less than two minutes after launch."

The companies merged in the summer of 1982, right? The first Shuttle launch after the merger was STS-5, when Columbia launched in November 1982. Doesn't that count as Morton-Thiokol's first attempt?

(FWIW, Tiokol's first attempts were in the 1940s. And of course MTI had many successful attempts before the Challenger explosion.)

Yep, clearly it wasn’t referring to the disaster not the orbiter. Further what’s important for accuracy of the statement was when the SRB’s used in each launch where built or refurbished not when the actual launch occurred.

Thus it turns the quote is completely unambiguous and factually accurate.

Okay, so having the contract wasn't the key factor.

Instead, the proper interpretation of sam_goody's comment requires us knowing ... what, exactly? When the last Thiokol employee touched the the engine? When Morton Thiokol made the first design change? (https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v1ch6.htm says there was a design change when 'new Randolph putty was eventually substituted for the old putty in the summer of 1983', but that started in 1982, before the merger.)

So, when exactly was that?

What decided the moment when we can say the SRB motor units were something was Morton Thiokol's first attempt at rocket building, and not Thiokol's?

Sure, not Challenger, but what do you think an SRB is in itself?

There is no rocket motor on an SRB. It's a giant firework. The whole SRB was Morton-Thiokoi if I'm not mistaken

And when it lights up, the shuttle is flying. No ifs, and or buts (or holding bolts).

> There is no rocket motor on an SRB.

Yes, there is.

> The whole SRB was Morton-Thiokoi if I'm not mistaken

You are mistaken. The rest of the SRB besides the rocket motor was Pratt and Whitney.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Solid_Rocket_Boo...

Thanks for the info

So, a solid-rocket motor is not exactly a motor (like a liquid-fuel one) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-propellant_rocket but if that's the term used I'm happy with it, especially given there's a nozzle with directional control.

I stand corrected on MT making the whole thing!

> The first rocket made by Morton after the --partnership-- merger was the Challenger

Challenger technically was a rocket, but Morton Thiokol didn't make it. They did make SRB motors (which were the cause of the disaster), but the merger was in 1982. The Challenger disaster was in 1986. There were a lot of shuttle flights in between, and there wasn't a four year stockpile of SRB motors (there was some stockpile, though, which was a problem with the disaster.) The first flight with M-T manufactured SRB motors wasn't the Challenger disaster. (It may have been one of many of the earlier flights of Challenger, though.)

Heck, the disaster wasn't even the first shuttle flight with M-T SRB motors after NASA and M-T had identified the design problem, and M-T engineers had come up with a redesign (the first flight after that was Challenger, but not the disaster.) But it was a flight while they were still using pre-redesign SRBs, which was part of the problem.

> My great uncle was the CEO of Morton, and from him I heard (as a child) that the decision to make the engine was a direct result of the huge markup they had on the fuel.

Thiokol was in propulsion before the merger, and was chosen as the contractor for the SRB motors before the merger. It's possible that among the reasons for the merger was something Morton brought which enhanced the economics of that, but the merger had nothing to do with the decision to make rocket engines for the shuttle (which had nothing to do with doing it “better than NASA“, NASA’s use of contractors was routine for spaceflight programs, not something Thiokol sold them on uniquely for the shuttle program.)

The claim that the saying originated with the Morton slogan seemed fishy to me too.

So thanks for doing the digging. I upvoted you, and everyone else who linked to earlier usages.

If Morton Salt is trying to take credit for coming up with the saying, shame on them, but somehow I doubt they are. So doubly shame on historydaily.org for pushing a false narrative.

It goes to show that you can't blindly trust whatever you read, even on a .org site.

> It goes to show that you can't blindly trust whatever you read, even on a .org site.

A domain ending in .org tells you that the owner chose a .org. Nothing else.

Very early on people were taught (in school!) that .com meant it was a business, and would likely be moderately correct about that business, .net was for networks, and .org was a organization that would very likely be truthful. Fake information would only come from .coms, and you could certainly trust .gov.

Of course, even then slashdot.org existed so the distinction wasn't really effective; later it DID become a bit of a signal because the "big three" were more expensive than .biz and friends so the latter became known for scam/spam sites.

Now it's all completely random and doesn't matter at all.

Is it a common perception that .org is somehow more trustworthy? And was it ever the case that it actually was?

As your sibling comment mentions, people used to be taught (apparently in school, but I went to school a bit early for TLDs to be part of the curriculum) about the meaning of the TLDs.

It has never been the case that you needed to be any particular kind of organisation (or an organisation at all) to get a .org, but in the early days it did tend to be used more by non-profits and the like.

It was a failed o-ring from launching in too cold of temperatures that caused the Challenger disaster though, not a failure of the rocket fuel. The engineers that understood the danger to the o-rings objected to the launch and would not sign off on it, but they were overruled by NASA's broken management culture at the time and the rest is history. There was a thorough investigation and it placed the blame squarely on NASA management for the root cause of launching under conditions that were dangerous to the shuttle design.

This was the investigation largely carried out by Richard Feynman, who ignored much of the other investigators to actually get to the root of the issue.

The real question is why they had o-rings. Because it was built in parts.

Why was it built in parts? Because it was built in Utah.

This is a reference to it requiring shipment to the launch site right? That shipment was more practical under bite sized chunks no?

Yep, shipped by rail, so that jobs were more evenly distributed, and thus cost twice as much, worked half as well, and killed way more people

This sounds like a good time to insert the very old joke about how the size of a horse's ass determined the size of the booster rockets.

https://cs.trains.com/trn/f/111/t/256024.aspx

Built in as many congressional districts as possible for "job creation"

And because the Shuttle had two launch sites, one on either coast. And because the different segments had different propellant profiles for different stages of flight. And because inspection and manufacturing in segments is a lot easier.

Thanks for this! That being said, I think that makes it an even better slogan. Taking something that was well known and using it in a new context where the meaning was, in fact, reversed. Kind of brilliant.

> Morton (tehnically, Morton Norwich) made other chemicals as well, including rocket fuel.

If anyone wants to learn the history of rocket fuel(s) (not rockets, just rocket fuels), see the book Ignition! by John Drury Clark:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/677285.Ignition_

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