Horses Asses designed Solid Rocket Boosters

RAILROAD TRACKS ARE HOW WIDE APART? Does the statement, "We've always
done it like that" ring any bells?

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 built 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 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 (and
England) for their legions. The 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 it?" you may be exactly right.
Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate
the back ends of the rear ends of two warhorses. (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 at 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 a horse's ass.