https://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/recycle2.htm
WE WRITE THE SONG, YOU DANCE THE DANCE
The political and economic disaster that is President Slick Willy Clinton and his traveling medical care sideshow Hitlery Ramrod Clinton shed spin and persevered unabated. Marathon media retellings of intimate scandal so popular during the primaries have been displaced by plebeian whining about refractory unemployment, natural disasters like the Midwest floods, and brobdingnagian political ineptitude re the White House and Congress. Reeling from moral and intellectual trespass, Americans now suffer additional slurs of environmental butchery!
Saturn launch vehicles got us to the moon by brute force. They were used once and thrown away at substantial cost. They burned kerosene and liquid oxygen first stage, then liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen second stage to produce steam as the only product. They were engineering projects and they worked. NASA bowed to increasing bureaucratic pressure to design and build a political launcher rich with minority groups, reusability, and a proper message. The Space Scuttle is not only an infinite sink for cash appropriations of ghastly magnitude. It does a poor job of accomplishing its limited missions of hoisting small payloads into low Earth orbit at a per pound cost three times exceeding that of the Saturn launch vehicle. It is also occasionally lethal.
(We won't condemn an entire program for a couple of $80 billion oopsies.)
Each Space Scuttle launch injects millions of grams of chlorine and refractory microparticulates into the stratosphere, depleting ozone. Solid fuel, burned once and tossed away, is formulated from virgin resins, oxidizers and metals. No recycle here, not on a GOVERNMENT project! Studies decrying the carcinogenic, mutagenic, teratogenic, allergenic, abortifacient, and behavioral dysphoric side effects of Space Scuttle emissions are denied funding. The thing violates every OSHA, DOT, and EPA regulation of chemical and sonic pollution emission in existence, yet still it launches.
The solid fuel boosters are too big to transport. Rather than being fabricated near their Florida launch point they are constructed in sections in California and Texas and assembled in Florida. What could be an elegant single piece steel tube enclosing a monolith of solid propellant is instead a daisy chain of segments with double-reinforced joints of ponderous weight - especially after the Challenger disaster - lessening the useful payload of the integrated launch vehicle and providing for a proven mechanism of utter destruction of the vehicle.
Those boosters are "recycled" by parachuting into the ocean and being recovered, refurbished, and refilled. The recovery system lessens the Space Scuttle's payload - a sickening NASA refrain. The cost of recovering and refurbishing to specification a used booster exceeds its cost of original manufacture while adding the exciting possibility of cumulative material and mechanical degradation leading to failure in its future use. It would be interesting to trace the chain of managerial oversight that led to this political idiocy - sending a message - against the officers and shareholders of the companies who profit by it.
The folks who first meet the Space Scuttle after its landing are swaddled in more chemical protective gear and breathing apparatus than a Desert Storm troopie expecting nerve gas. Volatiles outgassing from a freshly landed Space Scuttle, despite its having glowed at white heat while being hypersonically scrubbed though the thickening atmosphere during its descent, are considerable. This is interesting in itself. From where do they originate? We know where they go: Into our breathing air. Whisper it softly: "acute, chronic, and reproductive toxicity."
As with the lies promulgated under the Enviro-whiner rhetoric of garbage recycling, so has our near-trillion dollar space program been converted into a wastrel puff piece sending a message of beneficent social engineering while accomplishing little and definitively damaging the efforts of competent scientists, engineers, and businessmen. Space is rich with material resources - metals are not present as ores but as the reduced elements. Valuable siderophilic elements that have been trapped in the Earth's lower mantle and core - ruthenium, rhodium, rhenium, osmium, and iridium - are out there in their undepleted cosmic abundances. Space is rich with energy free for the taking - all that is needed to cleanly generate sustained temperatures in excess of 2000 degrees is a tracking parabolic mirror or array of plane mirrors. Space is a mammoth clean, hard vacuum - and it does not require a rotary fore pump, Roots pump, or piston pump; or a backing oil vapor pump, ion pump, cryogenic pump, sputtering pump, adsorption pump... to maintain it.
Let us rear up upon our hind legs to consign NASA and its bloated budgets sustaining bloated bureaucrats doing lunch to a landfill. Let private enterprise get busy designing an effective and inexpensive lift vehicle to get us off the planet. It is raining soup out there. We wear our soup bowls as rain hats, complain about our hunger, and "recycle" our wastes. Bah, humbug!
As for the Space Scuttle, plaster the thing with dead spotted owls and fetuses and have done with it.