On Shuttle explosions

The US has just scrapped its return to moon plans, on the basis, more or less, that there simply isn't enough money. Said plans will be replaced with rather fluffy initiatives aimed at funding private space launch facilities, and developing a super-heavy lifter and an orbital tug. 

Interestingly, a contract is to be awarded to develop a 'hydrocarbon' (so, in practice, kerosene) engine for the lifter, with performance equal to or better than that of the RD-180, a Soviet/Russian engine used in the US Atlas V rocket and derived from the RD-170 used in the Energia super-heavy lifter. The American company P&W has the rights to manufacture these, though it doesn't currently exercise them; Atlas V engines are made in Moscow. Until quite recently it was planned that it would by 2011, though. The two front-runners for this contract are apparently SpaceX, which has already developed a kerosene engine (though one of considerably lower performance than the RD-180) for its Falcon 9 rocket, and... P&W. Somehow, I suspect that the contract money will be spent in printing a 'this is definitely not an RD-180, goodness no!' sticker. I can't help wondering whether it mightn't be more cost effective to just build the RD-180s, or, if better performance is required, license the RD-170 or 171 (used in Zenit launchers), or the newer RD-190.

Anyway, this isn't the first time the US space programme has ground abruptly to a halt. There have been at least two, and arguably three, previous incidents. The first was the Apollo to Shuttle transition, when the US lost manned capabilities for some time. The second was the Challenger disaster, when the Western world lost all space launch abilities briefly; the Shuttle was grounded, a Titan and an Atlas had recently exploded, grounding both vehicles, and an Ariane 2 had also recently failed and been remotely destroyed, grounding that. The third was the Columbia disaster, which grounded the Shuttle for some time; it had a lesser effect on overall capacity, because most payloads had by then shifted to launching on Atlas or Deltas, or European Arianes or Russian Protons or Ukrainian Zenits; to a large extent the collapse of the Soviet Union saved the commercial space industry, there.

The Challenger failure was particularly interesting; the Shuttle was being operated at an unprecedented frequency, and NASA wasn't being as careful as it might have been. Here's Richard Feynman's appendix to the official report on the matter; it's fascinating and if you haven't already seen it you really should take a look. Amongst other gems, we learn that NASA management thought that the chances of catestrophic failure of the whole stack was 1 in 100,000, and that, while the solid boosters, in testing, had a failure rate of 1 in 25, each, that didn't matter because the Shuttle was a manned vehicle, and thus "the probability of mission success is necessarily very close to 1.0". Getting cause and effect mixed up there a bit, I feel. Boggles the mind, really.

I wonder have things improved, at all?