Comments by "MRA" (@yassassin6425) on "History Of The Dangerous Space Shuttle Program" video.

  1. A well articulated post, to which I partially agree. Much of the innate design problems lay in the inception of the stack and the prone position of the shuttle at launch. The fact remains that the heat shield was intrinsically vulnerable to damage. STS-27 was infamous and STS-118 is just one of multiple examples of such tile issues that the Shuttle fleet sustained during its operational lifetime. However, irrespective of this, the orbiter itself came close to disaster on multiple occasions due to other failures - STS-9 in particular was terrifying. In addition to the inherent design flaws, the costings and launch cadence were not as pledged and all things considered, remarkable machine that it was, the shuttle became a white elephant that detracted from the continuation of manned deep space exploration. The Saturn V was a remarkable machine and heavy lift capability that would have made short work of constructing the ISS. Whether is would have catastrophically failed during 135 launches we will never know. We can only wonder at the reliability and duration of the Roscosmos Soyuz workhorse which came from a similar era.
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  2.  @robinm1729  "Let's not forget the fact that Apollo-13 was as equal a catastrophic failure as the two shuttle incidents." It wasn't though. Also, the cause could not be solely attributed to an innate design flaw, rather a chain of failures related to process and procedure. The No.2 tank had originally been fitted to Apollo 10 but was removed to rectify a fault. It was not rated for 65 volt ground testing at KSC rather the 28 volt DC power of the CM which the automatic shut-off switches on the tank’s heater to fail due to the surge. It was also dropped and although tested, the internal damage did not show up during subsequent inspections. Fortunately the force of the blast blew off the panel which exposed the interior to the vacuum of space and extinguished the fire. The enquiry do however criticise the highly questionable use of teflon and other highly flammable materials in the tank. "It was a million percent sheer luck that those three astronauts survived the initial explosion." Million percent sheer luck? What does this even mean?
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  3. Actually, by design, the shuttle was inherently dangerous due to the prone position of the orbiter on the stack and the lack of an escape system.
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