Fiona Pepper

Yes.

So it turns out that this synthetic rubber that they come up with, it was also useful as a sealant during the war because scientists discovered that was also an excellent binder for solid rocket fuel.

Solid rockets need almost like a glue to hold their fuel together without, you know, to stop it from cracking under pressure.

And Thiokol knew how to make this.

So by the late 1950s, Thiokol was considered a leader in solid rocket motors.

The space shuttle program is kicking off.

This is a massive national space program to be involved in.

Thiokol won a contract with NASA to design and build the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttles for this program.

Now...

NASA had come up with this concept of a reusable spacecraft.

This was the first ever reusable spacecraft.

So this wasn't a one-off.

They were going to be making space shuttles for decades.

So to win this contract was a really big deal.

And so it wasn't just building these solid rocket boosters.

Because these solid rocket boosters were reusable, they would then restore them after they'd gone to space and back, prepare them and get them ready for another launch.

Okay, so the space shuttle is made up of three major components, and there are three contractors who are employed to build these separate components.

So first there's the orbiter, which people would be maybe familiar with.

It's the winged spacecraft that kind of looks like a plane where the astronauts spend all of their time.

Then there's the huge orange external tank, which holds the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to fuel the orbiter's main engines.