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This article requires a thorough rewrite. Anyone wishing to undertake this task will benefit from reading a comprehensive history of the Centaur program prepared by NASA's Glenn Research Center, GRC, entitled Taming Liquid Hydrogen: The Centaur Upper Stage Rocket, 1958-2002, 308 pages, available at history.nasa.gov/SP-4230.pdf (No, you do not need to buy it--for a ridiculous price--from Amazon.com). Centaur began as an Air Force program and was then transferred to Marshall Space Flight Center, MSFC, after NASA was formed. The story gets pretty juicy at that point. Centaur's development was plagued—-and delayed—-by both technical difficulties and political infighting. Centaur was developed and built by Convair, the same company which produced Atlas. Convair gave Centaur the same lightweight stainless steel “balloon” tanks as Atlas, a feature that was especially well suited to a very low-density fuel such as liquid H2 which would invariably require a large tank. The rub came from the fact that administration of the Centaur contract was given to the Marshall Spaceflight Center headed by Wernher von Braun, who had previously ridiculed the Atlas balloon tank design declaring that Atlas would "never work". At Convair, von Braun’s Marshall Spaceflight Center was referred to as “the Chicago Bridge and Iron Works” because of their conservative design practices and outspokenness against competing design philosophies. When von Braun “clearly, strongly and unequivocally” insisted Atlas Centaur should be replaced with Saturn 1C, NASA headquarters transferred Centaur to the Lewis Research Center in Ohio, a rebuke to MSFC and von Braun in particular for not supporting program decisions made by NASA headquarters. The rest is history, as they say.166.70.15.248 (talk) 07:49, 25 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Definition of "Atlas Centaur"
The article defines the Atlas Centaur up-front as being an "expendable launch system." While undoubtedly correct, this to me at least seems to be a "bureaucratic" label applied by NASA. While admittedly it places some emphasis on this equipment's function for the organization, I wonder if it might be better to just simply call it what it is, which is a "rocket" or "rocketship?" After all, it pretty much goes without saying that the vehicle wasn't re-usable and therefore "expendable." It's a definition used internally at NASA and therefore non-neutral.
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