[QUOTE=riker1384]
Every pound of weight put towards making things pretty is a pound of weight taken away from something else, such as mission payload, food or water, structural strength, or safety equipment. There’s a maximum takeoff weight for any craft. If you look at the general cost of launching things into space, it’s on the order of thousands of dollars a pound. They would never add a bunch of panels just to make things look pretty.
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This and similar responses regarding the weight of interior trim are all true, but there’s an even more fundamental reason why the interior of the Shuttle looks like an amateur inventor’s workshop: the Shuttles are all essentially experimental vehicles. They’re each handmade, essentially one of a kind craft, and much of the equipment used for various experiments was cobbled up, subjected to sufficient loads to assure it wouldn’t come apart in flight, and bolted in place with little concern for asthetics. Heck, the same thing is true even for production military hardware; climb inside the cargo bay of a C-17 and you won’t see smooth panels and padded chairs; you’ll see open bulkheads and stringers, exposed wiring and conduit, and tie-down chains hanging everywhere like something out of an Aliens movie.
And if you think that’s bad, take a look at the interior of a Gemini capsule; they put those things together so fast that stuff was often wiretied in place to expose bulkheads and covered with a layer of electrical tape or spiral wrap. They make the DeLorean in the Back To The Future movies look like a professional job.
Making things sleek and polished-looking costs money, a lot of money, especially if you’re only making one or two at a time. Imagine how much it would cost, for instance, to make the interior of your car if it the injection-molded dash and the contoured leather seats were all made by hand, from scratch, rather than in lots of ten thousand. And of course, everything has to be spec’d, TRD’d, sourced, confirmed, pedigreed, qualified, checked, catalogued, integrated, rechecked, stamped, signed, certified, and prayed over. It’s not just the weight of adding stuff to the payload; you’re also upping the cost. To large measure, it doesn’t matter if it’s a flight critical bolt or an incidental plastic straw; NASA, a true bureaucracy, is going to hold it to the same procurement and quality control standard, and all of that costs money. You’d be sensitive about it, too, if your every decision and purchase were being second and third guessed by every critic and politician.
When Stanley Kubrick can make his own spacecraft as sleek as he likes. Of course, his craft are 1:50 scale models, and his interiors are built inside a soundstage; if something breaks, or fails, or is difficult to access, he just stops filming and has the carpenter get a new bit from supply and fix it. For NASA, getting the Shuttle to fly up and come back without shaking apart is the major priority; appearance is (mostly) way far down on the list.
Stranger
