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“Why don’t rocket engines melt” review!

🕑 Added 2022-01-10 05:00:36 +0000 UTC

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NASA in a sense caught a hail-Mary pass out of the disaster by finding a much less embarrassing public excuse for pulling the plug on SLC-6 than having it get out that their astronauts balked at absorbing a life-time radiation dose in one flight. Since our military polar-orbiting satellites are radiation hardened verses low-inclination or geo-sync satellites, it made sense when I heard it. Anyway, something I wanted to pass along when I heard you pop Jared that question.

Tim, about your question of doing the first manned polar orbit mission ... I was stationed at Vandenberg AFB when Challenger happened. NASA had poured billions into Space Launch Complex 6 (originally built for the defunct Manned Orbiting Laboratory program) and Shuttle Enterprise had made its SLC-6 pathfinder fit checks. When NASA stated there weren't enough Shuttles to continue with the Vandenberg spaceport, California central coast real estate tanked overnight. Years later I was commiserating with an aerospace executive in the airline seat next to me who provided a backstory. Apparently astronauts would have gotten such a high dose of radiation crossing the poles multiple times on a typical shuttle mission, they would have accumulated a life-time dose. The military astronauts were supposedly OK with that, but NASA's civilian astronauts who wanted to make space a career balked. Shielding options were unattractive from payload standpoint (Vandenberg's south westerly polar trajectories were already disadvantaged verses KSC's easterly trajectories) and a practical standpoint for usable space inside the cabin space.

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