Q: "Why did they use segmented SRBs?"
A: Because Morton-Thiokol is in Utah, without a sea-port, and the
pieces had to fit on trains or trucks.
Q: So why didn't they go with a company that did have ocean access, like Aerojet in Sacramento? A: James Feltcher was from Utah.
Actually, I think it's a problem that the anti-systemd forces keep going on about "the unix way" and what-not... haven't they been paying attention to the way things really work? (Hint: if esr says it, it's probably not quite right. [1])
Perl kicked Bourne butt by merging nearly everything you want into one process-- that's something you'd think a sysadmin would've noticed.
It is however a point that betting your system security on a new, gigantic project is kind of dubious, and I have a lot of sympathy with people objecting to gratuitious changes that obsolete decades worth of learning on how to manage a unix box.
[1] The actual "Unix Way" is "do one thing sort-of-okay and trick it out with options, configuration files and customization languages until you can't tell if it's going to fry eggs or go to the bathroom".
Weren't mirrors placed on the face of the moon by the Apollo astronauts that reflect light pointed from the earth? Doesn't this prove astronauts were up there? I'm curious how the deniers account for the mirrors.
Without being up on the state-of-the-art in this field, I would guess that there are many variant scenarios. Maybe Apollo 8 was real (lunar orbit without landing), but they were nervous about getting Apollo 11 to work on time, so they did another Apollo 8 with some faked telemetry, but they actually did do some real landings later, with Apollo 12 and so on. Or maybe they never did a human landing, but they dumped some crud on the surface so that people playing with telescopes would see something that looked like traces of landings.
The question I would ask is why is it on this particular subject that some people have chosen to treat with aggressive, extreme skepticism. What makes a lunar landing seem so absurd to them that they'd rather believe anything else happened? Needless to say, there's a certain satisfiaction with feeling like you're one of the elite that knows The Truth, but still, there's plenty of those around...
Here's a Truth for you: there really are no lunar landing denialists, that's actually all just a foreign conspiracy intended to undermine belief in the American government and American technology.
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.