[Daniel_Newby]

The Air Force hijacked the Space Shuttle design process and forced it to deliver gigantic loads to polar orbit (a very tricky task). Then they abandoned the Shuttle, leaving it misdesigned for a nonexistent mission.

Morton Thiokol is a solid rocket company in the northwestern U.S. The Shuttle launched from the southwest U.S. The solid rockets, with tubes of propellant inside, had to be cut into sections to make the long journey. The joints were heavy (very bad for rockets), and a leaky joint destroyed the Challenger.

The horrible Air Force requirements made refurbishing very expensive and slow. Everything had been stripped of so much weight that it was too fragile and needed detailed inspection and repairs for each launch.

Morton Thiokol was crammed into the program to get Shuttle votes from their state's senators. The catch is that the crammin-crap-in process doomed the program. But if Morton Thiokol had threatened to cancel the program unless it was reinvented, they could have come out as a real rocket company supporting a fleet that launched every month. Honestly, the innovations SpaceX is coming out with could and should have been done by the Shuttle program, instead of the idiot business "leaders" chaining themselves to the worst possible ideas

[nkoren]

I will never forget seeing a Lockheed Martin presentation about their bid for the X-33 contract. They had a slide titled "technical features", which looked roughly like this:

  * Linear aerospike engine
  * Conformal carbon-composite LH2 tanks
  * Integrated metallic TPS
  * Subcontractors in 38 states and 122 congressional districts

As far as I was concerned, the rest of the programme was a foregone conclusion from that point forward. Lockheed Martin of course won the bid -- the other bidders, with much simpler and more technically sound proposals that weren't driven by the need to split the project across as many districts as possible, of course lost -- and spent $1.3B without putting a single piece of hardware in the air.

The shuttle was a similarly foregone conclusion with a lot more money behind it. You're absolutely right that one of SpaceX's primary innovations, thus far, has simply been to not let politics get anywhere near the engineering process.

[Daniel_Newby]

Indeed. The bitterest thing is that cheap access to space would have flowed forth a river of money to tech companies in every voting district. They could have sold uncancellable payloads like it was going out of style, and instead they crucified themselves on a single doomed political game.