Space Shuttle

um and uh once we have that rocket tested and flying um your people will see gradual changes to it similar to a lot of other rockets out there we're not very interested in being a static company where we want to be dynamic uh we want to be focused on our you know bread and butter industry but there's going to be improvements made to it to make it more reusable, more reliable, and we want to be rolling these out continuously, improving the product line.

You take a look at a platform like the Space Shuttle, there was very little change over its program life.

You take a look at your run-of-the-mill four-door sedan, they're putting out a redesign every couple of years, and every year there's some kind of improvement on it, and that's the sort of thing that we want to be doing.

Yeah.

They're one-time use.

You can't reuse them.

You could refurbish them, which is what they did with the space shuttle ones, but you can't really reuse them.

So this is really the ideal solution.

Now granted, it's not in great condition, partly because of the conditions at sea and partly because the recovery crews were trying to figure out how to tow this thing and damage it along the way.

But for three decades, NASA was towing large pieces of space hardware back to land after they landed in the ocean after every single space shuttle launch.

They went out into the Atlantic and they found a pair of 100 ton solid rocket boosters and brought them home so they could fly again.

The majority of the launch thrust for the Space Shuttle came from those two massive solid rocket motors.

Each developed about 1,500 tons of thrust and together they massed about 1,200 tons and that's over half the mass of the Space Shuttle liftoff.

Now, two minutes after liftoff, they've burned through most of their propellant and they burn out and they are separated from the external tank.

And at that point, they're moving at something like 3,000 miles an hour or 4,800 kilometers per hour.

So across 135 shuttle missions, 266 of the 270 boosters that flew were successfully recovered and returned for refurbishment.

You know, I had a chance to meet Wally years ago and that's the question I certainly would have asked him because it's the question I came to ask pretty much every astronaut I met in the process of writing my dissertation and then what became the book is, You know, were you the family photographer? Were you the person that, you know, wanted to kind of capture those behind the scenes moments?

Dr. Jennifer Levasseur is the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum curator for the Space Shuttle, International Space Station and astronaut cameras.

And my impression is that, yes, he was sort of that person in his family.

He had certainly a level of knowledge that was above and beyond the rest of the astronauts in terms of camera technology.