tneff@dasys1.UUCP (Tom Neff) (08/29/88)
All this chatter about how to take out a shuttle is going to have ears waggling at NSA, folks. Watch your backs! That said, I second Jim Meritt's concern - was just about to say the same thing. You don't need to wait for boost phase. Once cryos are aboard, STS is a huge bomb. It wouldn't take much to do the job right there on the pad. Nor do you really need such direct technicolor methods to "deny" the US access to space. There are a zillion failure points in the whole system. How many people wondered where the ammonium perchlorate came from until last month? Do we have another crawler handy? How's the guard on the OPF or VAB during off-mission cycles? Are things pretty stable politically in, say, Dakar? As we know from nail-biting current experience, a stray puff of H2 or an out-of-round clamp can set the schedule back days or weeks. You have just got to believe that if some sinister Unseen Presence ever gave the order, we could be set back half a year or more. Maybe a critical half year depending on what's going on. Nor would there likely be any conveniently incriminating Cuban SAM tailfin lying around afterwards. More likely you'd have yet another "terrorist incident" with no one to go to war against. -- Tom Neff UUCP: ...!cmcl2!phri!dasys1!tneff "None of your toys CIS: 76556,2536 MCI: TNEFF will function..." GEnie: TOMNEFF BIX: t.neff (no kidding)
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (08/30/88)
In article <6138@dasys1.UUCP> tneff@dasys1.UUCP (Tom Neff) writes: >... Do we have another crawler handy? There are two of them, as I recall. >How's the >guard on the OPF or VAB during off-mission cycles? Fairly tight, and getting tighter. Not perfect, there are too many people in and out, but getting in there isn't trivial. Actually, I think the major remaining single-point failure mode in the system is the VAB itself. This wouldn't be a significant issue, were it not that the shuttle design requires live SRBs within the VAB. (NASA used to have an ironclad no-fuel-in-the-VAB rule.) An accidental ignition could really make a mess of the place. -- Intel CPUs are not defective, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology they just act that way. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu