Caltrops - The Knuckle Shuffle





	[quote name="corax"][quote name="laudablepuss"][quote name="corax"][quote name="laudablepuss"][quote name="corax"][quote name="laudablepuss"]<a href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2086811">!!!</a>[/quote] Anyone who saw the explosion on live TV probably would have named the the booster rockets as the most likely culprit. Wall Street jumped to the most obvious conclusion, and happened to be right. No mystery there.[/quote] How the hell do you come to that conclusion? The solid boosters were intact and flew away from the debris. How was it obvious that the boosters were to blame? Nobody saw the little jet and puff of smoke on the SRB until later, just as nobody saw the chunk of foam hit the shuttle until the footage was reviewed after <i>Columbia</i> was already on orbit.[/quote] It's much more difficult to control the combustion in a solid fuel rocket, so it's not a huge leap of intuition to guess that a solid booster right up against a flimsy fuel tank was the initial point of failure.[/quote] Fascinating. You know, the orbiter's main engine fires at the same time, right? And it's up against the flimsy fuel tank too. Why Thiokol and not Rockwell?[/quote] The main engines run on liquid fuel, which stays very cold until it gets to the engines, and can be precisely controlled by the fuel delivery system. Solid rockets develop very high temperatures and pressures over a large area, and can't be throttled back in the event of a malfunction. As I said, it's tricky to make them work right. The Soviets, who had no trouble cloning the H-bomb within a few years, took a long time to get the hang of solid-fueled ICBMs.[/quote]