Rene-NASA-Mooned-America

The Numbers Game / Chap. 9 p. 75
THE NUMBERS GAME
NASA has one of the best public relations (PR) departments of any agency in the country.
Our taxes pay for the propaganda produced by this bureaucracy to keep us convinced at
all times that NASA is 100 percent for the flag, God, science, motherhood, and the American
way. The only thing they seemed to have missed in the button pushing was apple pie! And
they probably claimed somewhere that space research helps make better apples. No matter
what transpired over the last 35 years, in the end, NASA came out smelling like a lilac bush
in bloom.
Never mind the normal disasters of incredible cost overruns. Forget the snail-like
progress. Down through the years there were only two problems that really set NASA back
on their heels. The first and worst was the barbecue that someone threw for Grissom,
Chaffee and White. The second occurred almost 20 years later on January 28, 1986 when a
few million pounds of liquid hydrogen and oxygen exploded, searing the Florida skies and
destroying the Challenger Shuttle and its full crew.
Since only fools refuse to realize that in blazing new technologies there "be" hidden
dragons with diamond-hard flesh-ripping teeth, the second disaster worked its way out of the
public's system in short order. The Challenger explosion called for another government
committee. This one was the Rogers Commission, and its job was to point the fickle finger
of fate at a culpable culprit.
This turned out to be the people who made the sectional gaskets for the solid fuel rocket
booster called an SRB. You may remember committee member and Nobel Prize winner
Richard Feynman demonstrating on TV how the gasket material cracks when placed in a
glass of ice water. The committee claimed that the cold temperatures that morning allowed
the "lower" gasket to leak, thus allowing the burning rocket fuel to slice through the gasket
and the joint when the burn line reached that level. Then the blazing hot gases lanced across
the separation and stabbed into the cryogenic storage tank. Simple case, spectacular and
deadly effect. Right Wrong!
Collins reports that four sections comprise an SRB. 1 He also tells us, "On the other hand,
the pieces of the right SRB corroborated the fact that a failure had occurred in the joint
between the two lower segments — the aft field joint." 2
In Liftoff the Collins book, on page 226, there is a very clear three-dimensional illustration,
labeled "SRB joint cross-section" which shows the joint in great detail. Right next to it
is a drawing of the shuttle before launch. A bold arrow starts at the joint detail and extends
to the SRB's "lower" joint. He states, "The Rogers Commission interviewed more than 160
individuals and amassed 12,000 pages of transcript." 3 It is too bad they didn't look at the TV
pictures of that launch that clearly showed the spear of flame emanating near the top of the
SRB rocket.
As usual with government committees, their conclusion seems neither fits the facts nor
the photographs. As another example, the Warren Commission told us that President Kennedy
was shot from the rear, but the films taken at the time show his head to be the only object in
NASA MOONED AMERICA! / Rene