Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "The Insane Engineering of the Space Shuttle" video.

Aerospace Engineer here - this is easily the BEST VIDEO I have seen on the Space Shuttle in a very long time and easily one of the best videos I have ever seen on the Space Shuttle because without being verbose, over-hyped or over-geeky. Its simply explains some of the complexities used to make it work like with the way they controlled the thrust of the boosters. What I particularly like is that for some time I have been trying to tell people that the Space Shuttle was BOTH an amazing technical achievement and tragic failure. Its so easy to simply say the shuttle failed because of the 2 disasters. Yes that is true but in some ways that wasn't its biggest failure. Without ignoring or being callous to the loss of life in those disasters and that was to me and my classmates very personal. Being objective the Space Shuttles bigger failure was it stifled development of many other technologies because it consumed so much money and required so many more people that first planned to keep it working. Just so you all know. I did my degree in the late 80s Graduating in early 88. On 12 January 1986 I was in Orlando Florida with my swimming team for a training camp. A few of us stood on our motels balcony and watched the Space Shuttle Columbia take off. Despite being about 60 miles away it was still incredibly impressive to watch. Even though it must have been 100s of miles down range we could still see the trails of the boosters after they detached and even minutes later still clearly see the glow of the main engines. 16 days later my classmates, professors and I all had our futures broken when Challenger happened. It especially hit one of my aerodynamics professors as he lost a good friend in that disaster. But what happened to us paled in comparison to those directly involved at NASA and that all paled in comparison to the families involved in Challenger or Columbia (16 January 2003). So, please, don't anyone think for an instant I am ignoring that disasters. However being objective the worst outcome of the shuttle years was the denial of money and personnel to other programs. One of the main reasons we have not been back to the Moon and set up a permanent outpost is because there's literally 100s of technologies yet to be developed to a point where they can be deployed. Chief among those are life support, but there's also power and logistics. Human beings need oxygen, water and food and a means to re-process waste back into more oxygen, water and food. We actually live on a solar powered self sustaining human life support system called Mother Earth. We haven't yet (despite some amazing efforts) been able to replicate that or even just enough of it to make any permanent off-world base viable. So the Space Shuttle was as this video shows an amazing technological achievement but also a tragic failure.
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