The Space Shuttle Challenger blew up because the rocket motors were built in segments, so they could go through Utah's curvy railroad tracks, and that everyone knows you don't build rockets in segments. He implies that government corruption led the motors to be segmented, because certain political interests wanted them built in Utah.
Is this true? I don't know. A basic google finds various ranty websites and message board posts. How does their version of the story go? The Aerojet company wanted to build one-piece booster rockets, which couldn't have broken apart and killed the Astronauts, but instead Thiokol got the job because of senators from Utah, wanting to build it there, and bring jobs and money back home. Sort of like Pournelle's story. Is any of it true? I don't know. Here is an interesting book though.
The Challenger launch decision: risky technology, culture, and deviance at NASA by Diane Vaughan, University of Chicago Press, 1996, Page 431.
She discusses the question over several pages of her book. It is very complicated. But the basic facts are like this: Thiokol was the company that made the solid rocket boosters. According to this book, they based the "segmented design" on the Titan III rockets of the Air Force. She says that the Titan III's were very reliable. And so. It is good to look up 'Titan III rocket'.
Titan Rocket Family, Wikipedia
The first few Titan IIIs used liquid motors, not solid. The later ones, though, used solid booster rockets. That's according to wikipedia. Is there a better source? Yes, yes there is, and you can find it with a bit of digging.
Rocket Propulsion Elements By George P. Sutton, Oscar Biblarz John Wiley and Sons, 2010 p 441
To paraphrase Mr Sutton, there are several types of 'case design' for a 'rocket motor':
Steel Monolithic - once-piece steel case
Fiber Monolithic - high-strength fiber stuck together with plastic
Segmented - 'Case' and 'Grain' (burn-powder) are built and transported in pieces, assembled at launch site
Is that true? I'm going to go and ahead and accept that it is true. What does it tell me about my original question, about Pournelle's assertions?
Nothing. But that's not the point. The point is that I have confirmed the 'magic words' that I can go searching for. "Monolithic" versus "Segmented". Stick them with 'Rocket' and so forth.
OK.
Business Week, 1973, Google Books hit.
"Aerojet is the only one of the four bidders to propose a monolithic, or one- piece, block of rocket fuel for the shuttle. It claims that its design would be cheaper and more reliable than the segmented rockets"
Unfortunately I don't have access to a university library, so I'm not able to track down which edition of Business Week this is nor am I able to read the rest of the article.
Bingo
To reach the high frontier: a history of U.S. launch vehicles By Dennis R. Jenkins, University Press of Kentucky, 2002. page 59.
But not only is the content of the book interesting, so are the bibliography notes, for they list other sources. For example:
Karl Klager, "Segmented Rocket Demonstration: Historical Development Prior to the Use as Space Boosters," in J.D. Hunley, ed., History of Rocketry and Astronautics: Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth History Symposium of the International Academy of Astronautics (San Diego: Univelt, 1997) pp. 159-70
Willbur C. Andrepont and Rafael M. Felix, "The History of Large Solid Rocket Motor Development in the United States", AIAA paper 94-3057, presented at the 30th AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference, 27-29 June 1994, p. 2;
The content of the book is as follows:
In the early 1960s, "The Air Force added segmented solid rocket motors to create the Titan IIIC. ". They were built by a company named United Research Corporation, which had people with links to Jet Propulsion Lab and the Air Force and so forth and so on. Why did they want to build segments? Because the rockets were getting too damned big, and it was hard to transport them.
Aerojet was the first known company to test segmented rockets. The tests apparently went very well. The same company that allegedly was against them in the 1970s? Little accidents of history like that fascinate me, I guess I am easily amused.
Bingo 2
The book contains another Magic Word to go searching on:
"The Air Force's Large Segmented Solid Rocket Motor Program
That's how new wikipedia articles get started. You can envision the stub article so easily:
Wiki Page Title: Large Segmented Solid Rocket Motor Program
Wiki Intro paragraph: The Large Segmented Solid Rocket Motor Program was a US Air Force program started in the early 1960s to explore the possibility of building rocket motors in segments instead of all-in-one-piece (monolithic). It was used from blah blah blah to blah blah blah. It influenced later blah blah blah and blah blah blah.
History: It grew out of the Air Force's need to build larger and larger rockets; part of the ICBM program during the Cold War. Rockets over size xyz couldn't be transported on existing infrastructure; rocket planets could not be built only at places with access to barges because of xyz.
One of the first companies to test the segmented rocket motors was Aerojet. Blha blah blah lah blahl blah blah
References:
Copy/paste the above mentioned books, quotes, etc.
This is where googles quotation-mark feature comes in handy.
"Large Segmented Solid Rocket Motor Program"
gives much different results than
Large Segmented Solid Rocket Motor Program
In fact, it gives only 7 results. This indicates a wikipedia page might be good - it's a "thing" that almost nobody knows about, that there is very little publicly available, easy to read summarization-style information about. But it's a fascinating topic; it's directly related to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. There are probably a lot more documents buried in paper archives somewhere, waiting for a librarian to dig them out and give them to somebody interested in looking at them.
Then the ideas start bubbling. What other information is out there? Where? Once you read it, how do you break it down into sections? What did the Soviets do with their rockets? What is the Russian word for 'solid rocket motor'? What happens when you google search it? What Soviet books were written about the topic? Was the first test really in the 50s? Why did Aerojet want a monolithic instead of segmented, if they had tested segmented rockets earlier?
You could go on for days, weeks, months, answering such a question. But to start the wikipedia article, you only need a handful of reliable, verifiable sources, and a few paragraphs to string together, and the '{stub}' marker.
And so. There it is. That, dear reader, is how Wikipedia articles are born.
And this is where I run out of gas and bring an end to this little internet adventure.
The End.
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