Richard Cook's new take on Challenger

[brotherofthemoon]

I'm about 3/4 of the way through Richard C. Cook's new book Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age[/u]. I have to say I'm extremely disappointed in this book and I'm glad I borrowed it from the library. It was mostly completed in 1991 but only released recently because Cook was afraid of being fired from his government job. It's extremely dry (the entire middle section consists of transcripts from the Rogers commission, interjected with the author's comments), poorly sourced (only 95 notes in the appendix!), partisan (randomly inserted Reagan-bashing), and mostly just self-serving. Cook even includes a letter sent to him calling him a guardian angel for leaking one of his memos to the New York Times!

But what caught my eye was Cook's assertion that the Space Shuttles would be converted into orbital weapons platforms. He says the eventually they'd be armed with "city incinerating" lasers, command and control facilities, and equipment to guide nuclear weapons. Naturally, he doesn't give any references for this, so in the end it's just a minor footnote and in a remarkably uninvolving volume. I can't wait to read the last 100 pages and put this thing behind me!

[JayUtah]

I'd read it in the smallest room in my house and put it behind me a page at a time.

Weapons platforms in low Earth orbit are sitting ducks. They are carried over their targets at predictable and avoidable times. They have limited lines of travel to targets on Earth, and any battle coordination activity would need an extensive orbital communication system that would serve a hidden and fortified ground-based center just as well. You can certainly use a laser to incinerate a city, but you'd better be pretty patient.

The Air Force did have some sway over the space shuttle design, but only because Congress took away all their other boosters. The shuttle had to be designed to carry classified payloads because it was the only heavy-lift booster for the entire country. Foolish? You bet, but those are the apples.

[sts60]

You can certainly use a laser to incinerate a city, but you'd better be pretty patient.

Yeah, you'd pretty much have a hard time keeping them from rebuilding it faster than you can destroy it.

Nothing like a weapons system that takes an army (so to speak) and months of preparation to launch, has an on-orbit endurance of a couple of weeks maximum, and whose launch is severely constrained by weather. And exactly where is the power for this gozanga laser supposed to come from?

The Shuttle really is a marvelous and flexible spacecraft, even though the launch rates and operational costs promised during its development were nothing more than wishful thinking at best. But using it as a weapons platform, especially the Star Wars type stuff listed above? That's Hollywood, not reality.

[JayUtah]

As I reported at BAUT, Richard Cook is a fiscal analyst. He deals with budgets and financial forecasts, not with engineering or safety issues. His memos on the O-rings were ostensibly recommendations on how to adjust NASA's budgets to prepare for various ways in which the issue might play out. His post-accident memo was a realization of the worst-case budgetary scenario in which STS would be grounded for up to two years pending an SRB retrofit.

Unfortunately his post-accident memo contained inappropriate language that sounded as if he were criticizing engineers for inattention to flight safety. His pre-accident memo was worded more objectively, but when both were released to the media the hindsight-powered spin made Cook seem like a whistle-blower. The commission's questioning naturally centered around whether Cook had any basis from which to judge the engineering efforts to diagnose and correct the O-ring erosions, and the management effort to oversee and drive accountability for it. Under oath he admitted he had no such basis, that he was not an engineer, and that he had full faith in both engineering and management. He even went so far as to praise NASA for being the most professional of all the government agencies he had worked for. Cook also admitted under oath that he was not qualified to judge whether budgetary concerns were being weighed inappropriately against flight safety.

This line of questioning was meant to shed light on what the media were calling a smoking gun. Cook's post-accident memo was not written under oath, and under oath he was forced to back away from all the bogus engineering and management analysis he had put into it. Perhaps Cook thinks that 20-year-old testimony will simply go away.