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Comment by shardling | Hacker News Reader

This comment would be a lot more worthwhile if you could point to specific instances.

It's not that I find it terribly implausible, but I really get sick of rhetoric thrown around without any supporting details. As is it's just an anti-government rant.

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This is a great read: http://www.idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm . Talks about how the Air Force requirements for launching spy satellites, the Cold War and SDI madness affected NASA's Shuttle design.

I wouldn't make of it a shallow "government is incompetent by nature" argument, of course. For instance, the Apollo program was a complete success. It just turns out that massive, complex "enterprisey" projects lacking both focus on a clearly defined objective, and strong leadership with a vision, go badly. Not that unexpected in hindsight, I guess.

Have you ever wondered why Mission Control is in Houston rather than where the rockets take off from? It's inconvenient, but they needed the vote of a Texan senator who was on an important committee, so they moved mission control to Texas.

Do you have any source that spells this out?

Reading wikipedia, I get a fairly different story. I did a short search for other versions, but mostly just found inaccurate yahoo-answer type sites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_B._Johnson_Space_Center#...

I'm sure it's mentioned in Moon Shot[1]. Most books about the space race mention it. Houston was just one of several proposed locations which met NASA's official specifications for a mission control site.

One of those specifications was the minimum distance between mission control and the launch site. That specification was revised upward so that it just barely excluded the then-leading site after Rice University agreed to donate the land. It doesn't take a Von Braun to figure out what happened.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Shot

That's completely different than what the other poster (Symmetry) claimed -- that they otherwise would have been in the same location.

That politics plays into the decision making process of which site to use isn't too shocking, but Symmetry was claiming that the very creation of that site was political.

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4201/ch12-3.htm

NASA denied there was political influence, but it's hard to say since the stars lined up perfectly for them.

IIRC, parts of the shuttle were manufactured in about 400 different electoral districts of the USA. It's extremely unlikely all the best prices were that evenly distributed.

Indeed the infamous o-rings sealed connections between pieces which logically wouldn't have been separate.

I believe this is incorrect. If I remember correctly, transport was not the only issue with building the solid rocket boosters in one piece: physically pouring a solid rocket motor of that size was infeasible.

I of course don't remember the details so I looked them up. Here's an interesting document that doesn't actually go into the fundamental question of why the engines were built in one place, partially assembled in another, then snapped together in a third:

http://www.cedengineering.com/upload/Ethics%20Challenger%20D...

The point being that if the rockets were welded and fueled near the launch pad there would have been no need for o-rings. The reason for o-rings was that cylinders full of fuel needed to be shipped around and welding them together would have meant too big a lump of explosives. Casting a big engine had nothing to do with it.

That's definitely part of the B1-B program.

It's true. Just look at the state of NASA's next generation space architecture. Instead of designing an architecture based on performance and economics, they are building a large rocket that will keep employees at Kennedy Space Center and Johnson Space Center working, even though there are neither the funds or demand for such a rocket. Space Agencies are less concerned about the market than they are satisfying the policymakers that fund them.

One such instance, from the article:

France, which has traditionally led the launcher effort in Europe, wants development on a next-generation Ariane - often dubbed Ariane 6 - to start immediately. This would incorporate cheaper components and fabrication methods.

But Germany, the other major player within Esa, wants the current vehicle upgraded first before moving to a completely fresh design.

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