Mayf here,
Yep I spent a long, long time fiddling around in the launch business. I have
seen and been a part of many Minuteman I, II, and III, Peacekeeper launches.
I had the great pleasure, as Test Program Manager of the International Space
Station Program to be up close and personal with the Space Shuttle. I was
able to get in the cock pit, into the cargo bay, under the fuselage, in the
engine bay in the shuttle processing facility. Funny that the outer skin is
very rough due to the ablation materials applied. Doesn't look as if it would
even fly. Had the opportunity to be a part of the main engine processing as
well as stacking the large solid segements in the VAB. This puppy is is big.
Crawled all over the transporter that moves the assembled Orbiter and
boosters to the launch site. Crawled all over the launch site. It likewise is
huge. Our Space Station habitable volumes are packaged and installed into
the orbitor at the pad. Hey, LSR content, each piece of tread on the tractor
crawler weighs about a ton...ballast for LSR? Launches are spectacular to say
the least. No shuttles of this design will be launched from VAFB. Even though
they have the runway for return the site design itself was bad. The design
there used flame tunnels for getting the flame of the motors away from the
orbitor. Unfortunately, the hydrogen boil off is very cold and settled into
the tunnel. This is bad because when the main engines are started the cold
hydrogen would also ignite destoying the Orbitor. Not good. They tried
everything to get the hydrogen out of the tunnel but nothing worked. SLC 6 is
now being used for something else now, I guess. Because the orbit established
from VAFB is polar, it has a significantly less payload capability also. The
orbitor payload was down to an almost useless amount. This also helped to
kill off shuttle launces at VAFB.
But, man they have a fine 15000 ft runway that would make a wonderful LSR
track...
mayf
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