Utah vs. NASA On Heavy-Lift Rocket Design

Posted by Soulskill on Monday November 22, 2010 @10:29PM from the my-money's-on-the-dudes-with-rockets dept.

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."

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My recollection is that this is not new by dr2chase · 2010-11-23 00:36 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.