It is one of those procedures that Capt. Young used to describe as “keeping busy while you wait to die.”

I mean, after a launch abort, I swear, you could take a gun and point it right at somebody’s forehead, and they’re not even going to blink, because they don’t have any adrenaline left in them; it’s all been used up. To be strapped in out there and then to be told, “Oh, the weather’s bad. We got a mechanical problem,” and to be pulled out of the cockpit, and now it’s all going to start over. Twenty-four hours you go back, you’re exhausted, you go back, have a shower, meet your wife, say goodbye again, and then start the process all over the next day. And you do that two or three times in a row, and you’re ready for the funny farm. It really is a very emotionally draining thing.

What was also a factor in the design of solid rockets was that you can't make them but so long. The length-to-diameter ratio is a limiting design factor, and consequently we limited the total amount of impulse, thrust times time. The total amount of propellant in the solid rockets was limited by that, which meant that the solid rockets would only be able to help during the first couple of minutes of flight, as opposed to being attached longer. We staged those solid rockets at only a little over 4,000 feet a second, which really meant that the Shuttle and its tank had a big job to do, and it really limited the performance and inhibited any growth in the payload capability, which the program has had to suffer with all this time.

archived copy of 2003 wapo article

antenna box might come loose on launch, hard to fix on pad

nasa pretty much oficially throws up its hands on the foam issue

more info on the severe constraints of the shuttle's (discontinued) "getaway special" program

early escape system for in-orbit transfer of people from shuttle A to shuttle B

foam ramp redesign actually makes things worse. More evidence that no one understands the process of foam shedding

A master class in bad information design

why do they hate us?

apparently the foam is more sensitive than previously thought to damage in handling

Griffin appears to be seriously considering serial processing of shuttles, which would cut total future flights to eight (seven ISS, one Hubble)

it's like the Shuttle never happened. Note horribly inconsistent lighting in the topmost artist's rendering, too

shuttle rant has landed

horribly designed but excellent reference page on the Soviet air/space vehicle program

1994 directive on space policy

includes detailed shuttle launch cost spreadsheet

John Glenn launch was some kind of Masonic comet conspiracy

John Glenn slags Dennis Tito for frivolous space flight

good all-in-one summary of shuttle payload capabilities, launch and landing weights, and other minutia

1965 Soviet design for a badass military two-stage space plane

article describes the team of people whose job it is to smell-test spaceborne materials

Mormon conspiracy: in charge of NASA, the Shuttle program, and piloting an orbiter

Taken from the Rogers commission report

guide to observing space shuttle launch and re-entry

mentions the politics around omitting auto-land capability from the orbiter (it exists, except gear can't be dropped)

assessment of probablities and methodology for calculating risk of collisions

catalog of designs for advanced launch vehicles

download and play

a whole stack of low-res quick time Shuttle porn movies

apparently shuttle external tanks are free for the taking, if you promise not to drop them on anyone

A lot of broken links, but the Shuttle images are stunning

some lovely shock wave shots of the shuttle and various rockets and aircraft

slide sheet of shuttle photos from the Kennedy Space Center

specs on the tricked out (but production, not custom-built!) 747s used to ferry the Shuttle

Great piece of shuttle porn

beefy after-Challenger report in clunky ebook format

internal risk assessment said to assign half of all mission risk to debris strikes while in orbit (1 in 200 chance)

very good Zurbin critique of the Bush Moon/Mars 'vision'

Tufte would have a seizure

28 launches planned through 2010

silly-looking precursor to the Buran, shelved because of engineering problems

Columbia high-altitude launch plume apparently migrated to antarctic within four days

Company develops perfume fragrance from massively subsidized launch of rose into space

self-parodying official NASA page on benefits the shuttle brings to you and me

the Vandenberg facility was never used, and the Shuttle has never launched in a polar orbit

weird NASA program leasing a trash-can sized experiment bin on shuttles for about 10k

stitched together video coverage of the Columbia re-entry, with mission control audio and some explanatory graphics

NASA history of the decision to use H2 in the space program, and the development of the technology

Easterbrook later became an idiot but this is a very good shuttle-bashing article from 1980

chronology page of the Soviet shuttle with a nice set of photos

Feb 2001 SciAm article about sloppiness and worker error in the shuttle program (drill bit left in a main engine, for example)

more detailed description, with photos, of how the main shuttle rocket engines work

full text of the famous appendix

1999 incident in which a pin used to plug cooling tubes came loose and nearly caused a main engine shutdown

There have been five pad aborts (launch aborted after main engine ignition)

spreadsheet for probabilistic risk assessment of changes to shuttle booster configuration

"if the only engine you've got running is one of the side engines, it's problematical and nobody has a whole lot of success in completing those in the simulator"

brief Boeing email message about the catastrophic effects of asymmetrical solid rocket booster ignition

I'm curious to find out what the shuttle trajectory redlines are that would prompt use of this. Also, hope it's encrypted

technical low-down on all aspects of the space shuttle