The beginning of the end for the Shuttle
- Tuesday, August 16 2005 @ 02:05 PM CST
- Contributed by: filbert
- Views: 3,504
A fine brief review of how we got here, by space.com.
The melding of civil and military requirements—coupled with the budgetary and political pressures that affect all large aerospace programs—produced the engineering compromises that haunt the space shuttle program to this day. These include the use of an external fuel tank whose foam-shedding problems doomed Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003 and cast a cloud over Discovery’s mission.The future of near-space transportation is private.