On Dec 31, 4:16*am, harry wrote:
On Dec 31, 12:47*am, Dean Hoffman "
wrote:

On 12/30/12 6:36 PM, wrote:

The supposition is it would be one nobody was supposed to know about,
ours or theirs.
The reality is they did bring the Hubble into the cargo bay and fix
it. That may have been the most useful thing the Shuttle ever did.

Harry is right that the shuttle had a 40% failure rate and it sucked
most of the money out of the NASA budget, stifling further rocket
development and putting us where we are today. (riding with the
Ruskies)

* * *Would the International Space Station have been possible without
the Shuttle? *I haven't heard much about it lately.

Failure is not talked about in America.
I think there is an American up there right now.
The US finds it cheaper to pay the Russians than do their *own thing.

How's the UK space program doing?

Oh, and BTW, your boasting about how smart the Britts are
got me thinking again about the Concorde disaster. I looked into
it a bit more. Actually quite interesting. Yeah, it was a small
piece
of metal from a Continental plane that left Paris CDG 5 mins
earlier that was the initiating event. But I had thought that the
metal was what cut the wing fuel tank and caused the fire.
It was not.

The metal only caused one of the tires to blow. Tires that
already had a high rate of blowouts from takeoffs and landings
The Concorde puts much higher stress on them. A 10 lb
piece of tire flew up and hit the wing. But even that didn't
puncture the wing. It just created a shock wave in the wing
fuel tank that the tank could not handle and burst. That
released the fuel that somehow ignited, most likely they
think by electrical wiring that was also severed in the landing
gear. The designers had never considered the possibility
that a decent size chunk of tire from a blowout could do
that. All the planes were grounded for 18 months while
major design changes were made to the tires and the
fuel tanks were reinforced.

In other words, without major design defects, the accident
never would have happened. It's remarkably similar to the
space shuttle accident where the effects of insulation hitting
the vehicle during takeoff were thought to be insignificant.