We lose the first two shuttles
- Thread starter tom
- Start date
Cancelled? Probably not. Delayed? Yes. Perhaps quite awhile. The headhunting would have gone on for quite some time. Ultimate political hardball would have happened. The truly guilty might have survived. Might not have also. Many innocent might have suffered. It would have been a very ugly political situation. In the final reflection better engineering would have happened but at the ultimate expense of many very brave astronauts. Just me.
I think the reason for the losses would drive things here.
If it was a system that could be re-designed or operating procedures that could be tightened, then the Shuttle program could survive. (Think OTL's Challenger disaster). However if both losses are due to design features that are inherent in the Shuttle stack - like OTL's ET foam hitting Columbia - then IMO the Shuttle is cancelled.
The most straightforward way to do this is having foam and/or ice shed from the ET & damage the Shuttle twice in a row. Then NASA comes to the conclusion (rightly or wrongly) that the existing Shuttle design is a death-trap, and appeals to Government for funding to build a replacement manned launch system with the crew on top of the stack, using some Shuttle hardware to save development costs.
I think you are drawing a false distinction between the two accidents - both had lax operating procedures playing a key role. And in both cases, those operating procedures had become lax due to pressure to "hurry up and launch" and in the case of Columbia's loss, cuts to the budget.
Those budget cuts under the Bush administration, led to ultrasound inspections of the tiles being discontinued (the only way to check if they are on the way to failing, since human senses can't see the micro-cracks and flaws that made a tile likely to fail when struck by foam) and inspection crews being downsized (while those who remained were put under pressure to downplay anything that came up during their inspections). The pressure on inspection crews was due to NASA trying to speed the flight schedule to impress the White House (and hopefully get more funding). This pressure also led to the weather before the launch being discounted as a risk (the ET had been out in the rain for something like 2 days before launch, which lead to that launch being more icy than normal).
Similarly, the loss of Challenger also involved a launch when NASA was under pressure to launch vehicles as fast as possible, leading to the vehicle being launched in weather outside the then-defined safe operating parameters.
In both accidents, problematic elements of the Shuttle's design played an important role, but both accidents could have been avoided without the "hurry up and launch" approach that led to the organization getting sloppy and ignoring inconvenient facts.
So for the first two Shuttle launches to be lost we can't simply rely on the Shuttle's design flaws (it's worth noting that even with its many flaws and kludges, the Shuttle has one of the best reliability records of any launch vehicle yet flown by man), we would also need the humans in NASA to be placed under pressure. Perhaps due to underfunding of the program (pretty easy to imagine PoDs for this, the shuttle program was underfunded from the start, so it's easy to imagine it getting too little money when they actually started to fly the things) or due to pressure being brought to bear to advance the Shuttle program with undue haste (I'm not sure why this might happen - maybe Reagan gets interested in SDI earlier?)
Also, for the first two Shuttle launches foam strike wouldn't have been as likely to be a cause of failure due to the early foam having a different composition. In the 90s, NASA changed the foam insulation, switching from a foam-blowing agent that used chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) to one using hydrofluorocarbon (HFC). The newer HFC-blown foam insulation produced a more brittle foam than the originally specified blowing agent. More brittle foam, meant foam was falling away in larger chunks as the foam ripped itself apart during launch.
fasquardon