In article , "Steve W."
wrote:

John Husvar wrote:
In article ,
Bruce L. Bergman wrote:

You don't want to make a Lawn Dart or a Daisy Cutter out of a
spacecraft if there are people aboard. That kind of wild ride tends
to be immediately deleterious to life and health.

(Ain't that an understatement...)

NASA has never made a Lawn Dart or a Daisy Cutter out of a spacecraft.
NASA has, however, shown very bad stringing when shotgunning a couple of
shuttles and egregious CYA the like of which has never been heard on any
trap range when explaining them both.

Go back and look at the tests done using the Atlas rockets... More than
a few went TU just off the pad, when they made it off the pad at all....

I'll say one thing for ANY of the crews, it takes MAJOR LEAGUE guts to
willingly strap your ass to the top of a multi billion dollar machine
that was built out of parts procured through the lowest bidder program...

Those weren't spacecraft. Those were attempts to catch up with Russian
rockets which had made it into orbit and, thus, were spacecraft.

Fireworks displays, mere fireworks displays.

I wonder what the reactions would have been if the USSR's space teams
had conducted their tries, tests, and failures as openly as the USA did.
The USSR could sit back in Baikal and smash ever so much hardware into
lawn darts and nobody the wiser. Not us, oh, no! As usual, we had to
hang all our dirty laundry out for the whole neighborhood to see! Still
doing it, too.