GhostPain

Blue MAGA baby, they can't help it.

I mean, sure hindsight is 20/20.

But Columbia would have never happened if Congress hadn't pulled funding for the titanium heat shield they wanted.

Cons: Expensive vehicles means we still don't have Medicare for All.

Cons:

Trading with "the enemy" used to be considered treasonous.

Cons:

It HAS to be made out of prohibitively expensive and difficult to acquire titanium.

Not a rocket scientist so I can't say.

But I'm betting a room full of them and NASA engineers thought through all of their options based on the criteria and current tech.

Ok, buddy, if you say so.

Correct.

Mea culpa, you're right. I was misremembering.

So with the original titanium heat shield the Columbia crew wouldn't have died such gruesome deaths. All because Congress was cheap.

Again, completely agree.

But like the A10, sometimes tech just passes you by.

And swing wings are like biplanes. Old obsolete tech.

Except the US doesn't have a cheap, easily available source of titanium.

The stuff we used for the SR-71 and F-14 had to be gotten surreptitiously from the Russians.

That's why the Space Shuttle didn't have the titanium heat shield it was designed with and had to rely on the newly invented, much more delicate, ceramic heat shields. Which, it can be argued, resulted in the all of the deaths of the Challenger crew.

While I agree they look cool, they're an engineering nightmare and absolutely require titanium to build and that shit is too expensive for very little benefit.

The point of a variable wing was to increase the effective flight envelope and there's no point now that the same thing can be done with modern avionics and materials.

Sorry.