>>10891388>Why did they think the old design was usable?I don't think that the old tank was ever considered other than in the Jupiter proposal. It's just that getting the tooling in the Shuttle tank factory redone was a pain.
>Why didn't they know its structural limits, or notice that it needed reinforcement?No clue. My guess is that they were practicing the old aerospace philosophy of only adding extra mass where absolutely necessary, so they decided to take the extra time to look into the data to find exactly where they need to reinforce the structure. I had a small tour of the place where NASA was testing the structure and they told me that it takes a month or two to look over the data from each test.
>Why did they think it would work in the first place?Absolutely no clue. Management misunderstanding computing limitations and expecting the code monkeys to figure it out? I recall a discussion on NASA Watch where a supposed person working on the SLS avionics code (I can't find it now), and they said that management originally just wanted the Shuttle code to be quickly adapted to SLS.
>Did they just get a conference of managers together with a Senate committee to design the thing? Was there no oversight on the initial design?Hard to say exactly what went on in the initial design of SLS without sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but I'd imagine that SLS was politically designed rather than practically designed.
>How is any of this a "legitimate" reason?Are you referring to the avionics point or all of them. I mean, any of them result in delays which are understandable. Retooling is a pain in the ass. Testing stuff very carefully takes time. And management misunderstanding software limitations and just expect IT to fix everything. But my final point really was that these reasonable delays were overblown by poor management by NASA.
