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Utah vs. NASA On Heavy-Lift Rocket Design
FleaPlus writes "Utah congressmen Orrin Hatch, Bob Bennett, Rob Bishop, and Jim Matheson issued a statement claiming that NASA's design process for a new congressionally-mandated heavy-lift rocket system may be trying to circumvent the law. According to the congressmen and their advisors from solid rocket producer ATK, the heavy-lift legislation's requirements can only be met by rockets utilizing ATK's solid rocket boosters. They are alarmed that NASA is also considering other approaches, such as all-liquid designs based on the rockets operated by the United Launch Alliance and SpaceX. ATK's solid rockets were arguably responsible for many of the safety and cost problems which plagued NASA's canceled Ares rocket system."
ATK lobbied for the laws, and now NASA is trying to circumvent the laws (read: circumvent ATK's monopoly), so ATK's bought congressmen are crying foul to preserve ATK's profits. All is well in capitalist America.
I recall, from reading Aviation Week as a wee lad (my dad was a guidance systems engineer), that the then-senators from Utah managed to get the SRBs for the Space Shuttle (mostly) built in Utah. The preferred design was a one-piece booster, built in Alabama, barged around to Florida, but because it was built in Utah and could not travel by barge, it was instead built in segments, with O-rings between the segments. O-rings, that get hard in the cold weather, and leak gasses.
I've been trying to confirm this for years, because hey, I could have remembered it wrong, but decades-old back issues of Aviation Week are still not online in searchable form.
As I recall, the reason the boosters were not a safer one-piece design was because Hatch had to have Morton Thiokol in Utah get the contract. MT could only build them in segments using the questionable O-ring joints because a whole booster could not be shipped from Utah to Florida.
Seven people would still be alive today if Hatch had kept his sanctimonious oinky nose out of NASA's engineering process.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
After the disaster in 1986, everyone knew about the role of Utah's senators in the disaster - but as you say, it's hard to find now. Between the fact that much data from that era was never put online, and possibly some gaming of search results to steer searchers elsewhere, I don't see anything now. I imagine that certain rocket companies in Utah would prefer that no one knew about that.
Anyway, it was common knowledge at the time.