Paper Session II-A - Nuts and Bolts

Imagine Kennedy Space Center in mothball status, weeds choking walkways, buildings crumbling back to nature, launch towers red with rust. Imagine what was once a critical mass of the world's finest space engineers and scientists now dispersed, their collective synergy lost forever. Imagine that they counted down to the millennium in 1999, launching it with fanfare and high hopes, but learned too late that the launch vehicle was flawed, an undetected self-destruct mechanism activating and slowly, yet inexorably, shutting down critical systems.This is not a science-fiction story, nor is it a doomsday prediction. It is, however, a tale about keeping the plant running, about trying to reduce the high cost of sending up rocket ships, about the nuts and bolts of enhancing our nation's space lift capability,