27 years ago today .... The Challenger Explosion .... thanx to St. Ronald Reagan

[backscatter712]

24. The military also added to the clusterfuck.

The Pentagon wanted a shuttle with an enormous payload bay for two reasons: So they could use it to launch Keyhole spy satellites, which were as big as the Hubble, and the real unstated Cold War reason - that payload bay was also a bomb bay, and they wanted the Space Shuttle to be convertible into an orbital bomber.

Because the shuttle was intended to be carrying sensitive military and intelligence payloads, they demanded the Shuttle have a huge downrange reentry capability, which led to the winged design, so the shuttle could in theory take off, and land back at it's point of origin after one orbit.

The result: An enormous shuttle that was bigger than it really should have been, the winged design with those fragile reentry tiles that made the Shuttle insanely difficult and labor-intensive to maintain, huge expenses, for a ship that was pretty dangerous to fly.

If the military had stayed out, the Shuttle may have been a smaller craft, about the size of a business jet, that carries three or four astronauts, and a more modest payload, which would have been cheaper to fly, maybe could have had the manned, liquid-fueled, first-stage to make it safer and more reusable.