> Some interesting NASA trivia for your grand children ...Long but worth it.
> >
> Does the expression, "We've always done it that way!" ring any bells?
> >
> The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet,
> 8.5 inches. That is an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge
> used? Because that is the way they built them in England, and English
> expatriates built the US railroads. Why did the English build them like
> that?
>
> Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the
> pre railroad tramways, and that is the gauge they used. Why did "they"
> use that gauge then?
>
> Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools
> that they used for building wagons, which used the same wheel spacing.
>
> Okay!
>
> Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
>
> Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would
> break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's
> the spacing of the wheel ruts. So who built those old rutted roads?
>
> Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and
> England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And
> the ruts in the roads?
>
> Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to
> match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots
> were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they all had the same wheel
> spacing. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5
> inches is derived from the original specification for an Imperial Roman
> war chariot.
>
> Specifications and bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are
> handed a specification and wonder what horses ass came up with it, you
> may be exactly right. This is because the Imperial Roman war chariots
> were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two
> war-horses.
>
> Now, the twist to the story...
>
> There is an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges and
> horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad,
> there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel
> tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. Thiokol makes the SRBs
> at their factory at Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might
> have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped
> by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from
> the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs
> had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the
> railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses'
> behinds. So, a major design feature of what is arguably the world's
> most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand
> years go by the width of a horse's ass.
> >
> Howard Winsett
> NASA Dryden Flight Research Center
> 661.276.2262
> P.O. Box 273
> Edwards, CA 93523
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