I was pissed off that the bolt on rocket booster contract went to a company in Utah, Morton Thiokol, to please Senator Jake Garn of Utah.
I was arguing against the design LONG before the disaster because it meant that solid rocket boosters had to be segmented which meant they had to HAVE the joints and seals in the first place, a POINT OF FAILURE IF I EVER SAW ONE!
What really galled me was that the Utah company was not even the lowest qualified bidder, but one of the higher bidders! Not only that, the unassembled booster sections had to be shipped from Utah to Florida. . . WHICH WAS THE REASON FOR THE SEGMENTED DESIGN! They had to be loaded on railroad flat cars and they needed to be short enough to take the curves of the railroad without hanging over too far! Ergo, segmented design.
The best design was from a company IN FLORIDA that would make them full length, no segments, solid from one end to the other. . . no O ring seals. No O rings, no Columbia disaster. . . and their design was about 20% per booster CHEAPER! And they were located about 20 miles away from Canaveral and the boosters could be delivered by barge. WOW! What a brilliant design and solution. . . but their Senator was NOT Chairman of the Air and Space Committee...
Wow. So corruption killed our Shuttle and astronauts. How disgusting. :(
Yikes. Point most definitely taken.
I never made the connection between senator Jake Garn and Morton Thiokol before. Interesting. By the way he was a passenger on the last shuttle flight before the Challenger disaster. It was during the previous November. I think maybe during thanksgiving weekend. It was a night launch and quite an amazing sight. I was an engineer for Martin Marietta now Lockheed Martin in Orlando and made the trip to the coast with some family members. The trail was visible until the narrator over the PA system said it was off the west coast of Portugal.
OMG! What a waste! Those poor people never had a chance then. Gov’t sucks!
Damn auto correct... bolt = bid
How it got bolt out of bid I don't have a clue.
Great story about the forced choice of contractor for the Shuttle SRB. Pentagon is rife with similar stories. Much corruption.