Wednesdays Weird Web Thievery: The Space Shuttle

Lovely photo of the Space Shuttle. It isn't actually from official web thievery, but rather from the official Nasa site which has a lovely feature of a free for all public downloads section. They want the world to use these nice images as screensavers as a testament to the technological glory that is the US Space Programme.

Fair enough. Click on the image to expand it to it's full glory where you can steal it from us and use it as a screen saver.

But what does this have to do with the horses arse?

Well what a story. It all makes sense at the end, and for those of you that know me, you will understand the attraction with this convoluted way of telling a story!
This story is the actual thievery bit. I am just going to reuse it as it came into the inbox.

Railroad tracks.

The  US  standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used ?

Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates designed 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's 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 had used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

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 (including  England ) for their legions. Those 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 Imperial  Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever....

So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with this ?' , you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' asses.)

Now, the twist to the story:
When you 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.

The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in  Utah.  The engineers who designed the SRBs would 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, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of two horses' asses. And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important ? Ancient horses' asses control almost everything.. and current Horses' Asses in government are controlling everything else !