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Most Useless Megaprojects In The World · Be Amazed

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[SPEAKER_01]: Countries around the world have pumped millions and even billions of dollars into huge construction projects that make our lives better.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But some mega projects should have been thrown into the garbage at the planning stage.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So grab a hard hat and a hive is jacket because it's time to check out the most useless mega projects in the world.
0:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Hawaii is a beautiful place, it's got beaches, grass skirts, coconut bras, and a super expensive blight on the landscape, the H3 Interstate.
0:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Now I know what you're thinking, interstate, oh why?
0:51
[SPEAKER_01]: That's one big highway.
0:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, here's the thing, it doesn't connect to any other state.
0:57
[SPEAKER_01]: The name just means it's been funded by the federal government, so rather than spanning 2,500 miles to the nearest state, California, it spans just 15.
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[SPEAKER_01]: From northwest of downtown Honolulu to the Marine Corps base Hawaii.
1:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh-oh.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Even so, it's still cost a colossal $1.3 billion to build, or $80 million a mile.
1:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Jeez!
1:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Back in 1960, when the road was first authorized, people weren't happy.
1:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Not only was it set to level vest numbers of trees, but there were also sacred temples and funerary bounds in the area that were super significant to Native Hawaiians.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because of this,
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[SPEAKER_01]: But constructors eventually got legal authorization anyway, and in 1989 they started building.
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[SPEAKER_01]: 7 contractors and 8 years later it finally opened in 1997.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So despite age 3 taking 37 years and blowing the budget by shocking amount, are Hawaiians happy?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Not at all.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Construction destroyed many of the sacred sights throughout the valley, now lots of people won't drive anywhere near the road for fear of being cursed by that dead, so it's hardly even used.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If you were thinking of taking a smooth cruise through the Hawaiian countryside then, best be checking your bank seat before you set off.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's the real highway to hell.
2:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Man all this talking can be thirsty work.
2:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes I wish I had a giant reservoir to serve all my hydration needs.
2:35
[SPEAKER_01]: The City of Los Angeles faced the same problem in the early 1900s, though it wasn't because they all took too much.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They needed a reliable one-a-reserve for the growing needs of the city, so they hired self-taught civil engineer William Mulholland to set about designing and building the largest arch-supported dam in the world.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Construction started in 1924 and was finished suspiciously quickly in 1926.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Located in San Francisco, Canyon about 40 miles outside downtown LA,
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[SPEAKER_01]: 185 feet tall, big enough to hold more than 12 billion gallons of water.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's over 18,000 Olympic swimming pools.
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[SPEAKER_01]: However, as it began to fill the cracks and self-taught mollons experience, started showing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: very literally.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Several leaks began appearing which the engineer dismissed as totally normal, but in reality the foundations of the dam were woefully unsuitable for supporting such a huge weight of water.
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[SPEAKER_01]: On March 12, 1928, only five days after the reservoir reached max capacity, the giant concrete wall collapsed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: sending all 12 billion gallons of water heardling towards the Pacific Ocean.
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[SPEAKER_01]: After just five minutes, the 120-foot wave had violently creamed one-and-a-half miles from the collapse wall destroying everything in its bad.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It went down as one of the worst engineering catastrophes in U.S. history, destroying a thousand homes and leaving at least 431 people sleeping with the fishes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Although he was relieved of anywhere I'm doing while Holland never worked again, and all I can say is
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[SPEAKER_01]: Damn.
4:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Ugh.
4:21
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't sleep too good last night.
4:24
[SPEAKER_01]: My neighbor was jumping up and down on their bed for hours.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If only I lived somewhere quite alone at, oh by myself, actually I think I know just the place.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Shingyun International Project is an 1800 acre development in Shikyach Wung China, and it's completely empty.
4:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Over the course of several years, developers splashed a monstrous three billion dollars on creating a new high and residential super community.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But when the construction company CEO was arrested in 2014 for briving state officials, the company fell into crisis and incurred billions of dollars in debts.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They were forced to declare bankruptcy, and Shen Yong was seized by the government, leaving thousands who'd already bought properties there, seriously out of pocket.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now the huge city is eerily empty like a ghost town, and though the European town buildings and statues might look great from the outside, the inside tells a different story.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One company has expressed an interest in taking the failed city over, but it's gonna take some really big bucks to save this place.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's a shame if it had worked out, it'd be a pretty awesome place to live.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I know and even more awesome place though, my podcast.
5:38
[SPEAKER_01]: just follow me and you'll never miss another one of my incredible episodes again.
5:42
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, let's get back to it.
5:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I hate sitting in traffic.
5:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone needs to hurry up and invent a teleporter so I never get stuck during rush hour again.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, China might have made the next mess thing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The keyword being might have.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The HZWB Bridge system has reduced the transportation time between three of the world's most popular cities Hong Kong, Zhuhai, and Macau from four hours to just 30 minutes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's the longest sea crossing in the world at over 34 miles long, meaning it could stretch the entire width of Los Angeles and still have bridge despair.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, what's the catch?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, considering the whole thing cost a gargantuan 18.8 billion dollars, you'd imagine it'd be put to good use.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But uh, hardly anyone actually drives down it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You need a crossing permit and it's almost impossible to obtain one.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Hmm.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Weird.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Only high tech investors taught a cat omissions, politicians, or philanthropists are even considered for the permits, and your vehicle must be registered in all three cities.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Even then.
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[SPEAKER_01]: that daily limit for applicants is only 400.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's Hellestangie.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It seems like they're doing everything they can to stop people crossing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Some people reckon that because of Hong Kong's overcrowding problem, they're trying to limit traffic flow into the city.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But if that's the case, why spend nine years and almost $19 billion building this thing, just to stop people from using it?
7:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Something seems suspicious to me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What do you think?
7:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Ever dreamed of having a giant statue belt of you when you die?
7:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Mr. Bartollum, you like Bernabez!
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[SPEAKER_01]: Make her of the finest fake content!
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I like the sound of that.
7:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, one statue and Custer County South Dakota takes this concept to the extreme.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Back in 1877, Native American War Hero crazy horse led the Lakota people into battle to protect native territory from the federal government, but was fatally wounded.
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[SPEAKER_01]: 62 years later, in 1939, Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear Commissioned Polish American sculptor Khorzag Zilkolsky, who previously worked on nearby Mount Rushmore to carve the heroes' likeness and a thunderhead mountain.
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[SPEAKER_01]: With those credentials, nothing could go wrong, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, course-axe original plans were for the statue to be 641 feet long and 563 feet tall, overtaking the entire mountain, jump to present day and err, there hasn't been much progress.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The vase is the only part that's been finished, and that wasn't completed until 1998, 50 years after Kurzex started, and there's been practically no progress sets.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Though Kurzex himself worked tirelessly to try and complete it after his passing, his family took the baton, and
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[SPEAKER_01]: They were less than enthusiastic.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Despite rigging in millions of dollars and donations and tourist fees from the incomplete monument, they've added very little to it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Even worse, the underhand mountain was a sacred burial ground.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Destroying the land, crazy horse-dipertacting goes against everything he stood for.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The Lakota people seem to have been left behind for an egotistical money-making project by the Sokowski's, and that's really messed up.
9:12
[SPEAKER_01]: With three and a half billion supporters around the world, it's safe to say soccer is the most popular sport on Earth.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So in 2014, when Brazil hosted the first Digis World Cup, they said about building a bunch of new stadiums to impress all the global spectators.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But one stadium left fans scratching their heads, and the city of Manau and the Amazon rainforest, the Abley named Aurena de Amazonia, might be the worst location for a giant soccer stadium ever.
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[SPEAKER_01]: See there's no roads from Manau to the coast, and
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[SPEAKER_01]: that was where the building supplies were delivered, so all the materials had to be shipped up the Amazon River, which was a super expensive journey.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Then during construction, the blazing hot rain force temperatures proved too much for the grass on the pitch, which turned browned and died.
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[SPEAKER_01]: At this event organizers took two painting a green.
10:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Not exactly what you'd expect from a $300 million stadium, but its postworld kept life has proven even more miserable.
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[SPEAKER_01]: See the most successful team in Manau, National are all the way down in the fifth tier of Brazilian soccer.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So whilst they have taken the stadium as their own audience attendance really hits over 3000, a tiny fraction of the 44,300 total capacity, they literally have no fans.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Aside from the occasional Christian concert held here, the place remains pretty empty.
10:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And sadly, I think even the big man upstairs would say it's a complete waste.
10:41
[SPEAKER_01]: The Robotics race has really ramped up in recent years, we've had the good the bad and the downright
10:46
[SPEAKER_01]: but that giant Gundam suit and Yoko Hama Japan might be the most ridiculous of them all.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Based on the RX-782 Mx suit from the popular Gundam anime series, this does scale model as a tremendous 59 feet tall.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now I'm not saying getting a 25 ton robot the size of 3 giraffes to move is an easy feat.
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[SPEAKER_01]: However, I wouldn't rely on this Gundam to protect Earth from any alien invasions like the ones from the show.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Aside from taking a few slow steps forward and bending down on one knee like a sluggish grandma, it doesn't really do a lot.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's just a big shunny tourist attraction.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So if you're not that end again to me, it does seem pretty pointless.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Whilst the official price hasn't been revealed, a similar size statue in Tokyo costs around $100,000.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But that can only move its head, whereas the Yokohama Gundam can move its entire body.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that means a much bigger price tag.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, it's not really doing it for me, but hey, the fancy mavi, so who am I to judge?
11:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Whether you love or hate President Donald Trump, there's no denying that one particular policy from back in his initial 2016 election didn't exactly turn out as he'd promised.
11:58
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, reinforcing the border wall between the USA and Mexico, this new wall was supposed to be made of a thousand miles of big, beautiful cancree.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And Mexico was going to cover the whopping $8 to $12 billion in voice.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's not exactly gone to plan.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So far, the border wall is only 450 miles long, less than half what was promised, and only 47 miles of that is actually now.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The rest of it is just the previous wall bolstered with steel ballards, which isn't that great at keeping people out.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Some of the new parts were made so badly,
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[SPEAKER_01]: you just need to wait until they fall over.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Jeez!
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[SPEAKER_01]: So far, this ludicrous project has caused an outrageous $15 billion.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's almost 320 billion per new mile built.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Plus, some estimates say that yearly maintenance costs could be up to $28 billion.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And as for Mexico fronting the bill, well, they haven't coughed up a dime.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's all been covered by the taxpayers.
13:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Man, sounds like that time my date ordered $150 stake then realized she'd left her purse so I had to pay.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She's so silly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If I'm procrastinating, I do 15 minutes of work max before getting bored.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But I've got nothing on the failures of Munchu, nuclear power, station and Japan's Fukui prefecture, since getting the go ahead in 1983, it's only reduced one measly hour of power.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What hour?
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[SPEAKER_01]: In several decades.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I take longer to wake up every morning.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Maju is a prototype fast breeder reactor.
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[SPEAKER_01]: By jiggling the reaction process, the creators had hoped the plant would recycle use nuclear fuel to create even more energy, making production way more efficient.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Which sounds great on paper except it turned out to be anything but efficient.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Major fonts were discovered in 14,000 individual components, some controlling critical safety features on the station.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Hey yikes, in 1995 a fire broke out which staff tried to hide by editing the security footage.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Double Yikes, and in 2010 a 3.3 ton refueling machine fell into the reactor vessel and got so busted up it wouldn't fit back through the top.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Man, what a comedy of ours.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yet somehow the plant limped on,
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[SPEAKER_01]: In 2011, nuclear disaster struck Fukushima, when a tsunami hit the Fukushima nuclear power station, and caused a radiation leak.
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[SPEAKER_01]: After that, public opinion turned firmly against nuclear power, especially Majo, which by that point had devoured almost $12 billion of government spending with nothing to show for it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Five years later, in 2016, it was closed for good and authorized for deconstruction.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But guess what?
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's going to take until 247 and cost another $3.4 billion.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So well and on, this has been a shameful $15 billion 60-year demonstration of how not to make something.
14:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, and if you were wondering where the name Monju came from, it was named after the Buddhist deity of Wisdom.
15:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Haha, the irony.
15:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Recently, I've been trying to live a little more sustainably, my recycled, donate old stuff, and I've stopped making petrol fires in my backyard.
15:14
[SPEAKER_01]: But some countries like Malaysia have struggled implementing environmental changes.
15:19
[SPEAKER_01]: An ounce in 2006 Malaysia's Forest City was meant to be an incredible role model of future cities consisting of four artificial islands off the coast of wetlands of your heart.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Concept pictures showed beautiful towers drape with plants, carless roads and smart technology, apartments that can maintain your home with no intervention, but since the grand opening in 2016, things haven't exactly taken off.
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[SPEAKER_01]: By 2019, only 15,000 units had been sold embarrassingly short of their target of 700,000, and as few as 500 people actually live there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Uckward.
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[SPEAKER_01]: See the Chinese developers targeted the project almost exclusively towards upper middle-class Chinese citizens as a place to store their wealth outside of China.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But this collapsed when the Chinese government introduced a yearly spending gap of $50,000 on purchases made outside the country.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Couple that with COVID and Malaysia having a political crisis and you're left with a ghost-own struggling for buyers.
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[SPEAKER_01]: With the most basic studio apartment costing almost $100,000, and the average Malaysian salary being less than $11,000, there's no chance of the locals affording it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But that's not all.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Despite being touted as an ecological marvel, it's construction has caused irreversible damage to protected wetlands off the coast of Malaysia.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yikes.
16:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Now you can't put a price on the environment, but you can't put a price on this, hunk of junk, and that's a ridiculous $100 billion.
16:50
[SPEAKER_01]: So, man, I feel woozy.
16:54
[SPEAKER_01]: The only residents are these tacky plastic animals everywhere.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm not surprised no one wants to live here.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It gives me the Hibi Jeebies.
17:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Buying your first house is a stressful experience full of highs and lows, but if your first property was in the Lotus Riverside project in Shanghai, it just had been one monumental low.
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[SPEAKER_01]: On June 27, 2009, one of the 11 13 story apartment blocks collapsed completely onto its side.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Fortunately, no one was living there at the time, but sadly, what unlucky worker was inside collecting his tools when the building gave way.
17:30
[SPEAKER_01]: They had been digging a pen to create an underground garage below the south side of the apartment block and piling all the excavated dirt on the north side.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But the huge, heavy mound of dirt shifted the structure of the soil putting loads of extra pressure on the concrete foundations, and these were vinyl for supporting the building from below.
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[SPEAKER_01]: unable to tolerate this increase in pressure they snapped in the whole building toppled over.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Miraculously, the 10 other blocks were undamaged, but can you imagine the domino rally that could have happened?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, 400 owners of the other apartments could and they demanded their money back or right away.
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[SPEAKER_01]: As a result, the developers had to pay out almost $2 million in damages and got hit with almost $3 million for the cleanup.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Phew!
18:17
[SPEAKER_01]: and might be that costly as pile of dirt I've ever heard of.
18:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Now let's talk about the Costa Concordia, a 114,000 ton, 950 foot long mega cruiser capable of carrying over 4,000 people.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The enormous ship went into service in 2006 and cost a whopping 570 million dollars.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I did hardly last six years.
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[SPEAKER_01]: On the last leg of a cruise around the Mediterranean in 2012, it struck a rock near Tuscany, Italy, and partly capsized.
18:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Captain Francesco Chetino had deviated from the planned course to perform a sail by salute, where a ship is brought close to shortest salute those on land.
18:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Confident of he could navigate the area by eye, Chetino had turned off the ship's computer navigation system before performing the maneuver.
19:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Big mistake.
19:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Less than 1,000 feet from the shore he suddenly noticed dangerous waves breaking on the reef and ordered the ship to turn.
19:14
[SPEAKER_01]: By then, however, it was too late.
19:16
[SPEAKER_01]: The ship turned all right and crashed straight into an unjudged rock in the sea bed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Despite the best efforts of the rescue team 34 people,
19:24
[SPEAKER_01]: never made it back to shore.
19:26
[SPEAKER_01]: As well as the tragic losses it took over two years for the ship to be refloaded and towed almost 200 miles to Genoa, where it was torn apart and scrapped.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The entire cost of the cleanup and scrapping plus the compensation payouts for the victims,
19:40
[SPEAKER_01]: came to around two billion dollars.
19:43
[SPEAKER_01]: You could buy nearly four new boats for that.
19:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Whoa, cost a concordia?
19:48
[SPEAKER_01]: We're like cost a flip in 4 China.
19:50
[SPEAKER_01]: For architect Thomas Wilson living in 1820s London was tough.
19:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Not because of the food, or the weather, but because of all the bodies battling up with nowhere to bury them.
20:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Ew, see from 1770 London had a massive industrial boom, so many people relocated into this city for work, but more people eventually means more bodies to bury, and allocating enough graveyard space to accommodate all of them was overlooked.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Until that is, Wilson came up with a seriously metal solution to London's corpsi can undrum.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A joy and pyramid of death.
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[SPEAKER_01]: By building up, Wilson theorized you could condense 1,000 acres of traditional graveyard space into just 18 acres capable of storing 5 million bodies.
20:36
[SPEAKER_01]: He planned a supple-curr, sorry, but you're a bit of death.
20:43
[SPEAKER_01]: store used to all.
20:44
[SPEAKER_01]: London's tallest building the shard is $95 store used to all or just over a thousand feet so this pyramid would have been colossal.
20:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Each sign would be covered in dark granite with stairs leading to an observatory at the top, unfortunately at $789 million in today's money the crazy scheme proved too dear.
21:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Plus, Londoners were understandably against having a nightmare-spear-middle-body's towering over their city.
21:09
[SPEAKER_01]: So, instead, the city privatized lands specifically for traditional graveyards.
21:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Blurring!
21:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Still, I get it.
21:17
[SPEAKER_01]: 5 million bodies ain't gonna smell so great.
21:20
[SPEAKER_01]: The big smoke would have been more like the big stink.
21:23
[SPEAKER_01]: This year I'm going to travel more, I want to eat good food, meet new people, and see some cool cities.
21:29
[SPEAKER_01]: But one place I won't be going is the capital city of Nippia, Tom and Mar.
21:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Despite being 8 times bigger than New York, less than 8 times the people live there.
21:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Whoa!
21:41
[SPEAKER_01]: So where'd they all go?
21:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, they were never there.
21:46
[SPEAKER_01]: What?
21:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Napiotol only became the capital in 2005 after Myanmar's military government became paranoid that the previous capital Yongeon was going to be a tag from the sea, and sure Napiotol is more central, but it's also a far less desirable place to live.
22:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Even though it covers almost 3,000 square miles, there's only one high school, very few shops and almost no public transport.
22:11
[SPEAKER_01]: What's more, most businesses are still located in the previous capital city, so unsurprisingly, people don't want to relocate.
22:19
[SPEAKER_01]: As such, their 20 lane highway is almost always, eerily empty, like something out of silent hill.
22:25
[SPEAKER_01]: It's pretty obvious who this city was really made for, though.
22:29
[SPEAKER_01]: There might be no public facilities, but there is a 100 room residential palace and a 31-building parliamentary complex.
22:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Hmm, the whole place caused a hard-breaking $4 billion, too, about 5% of all the money me and Marmakes in a year.
22:46
[SPEAKER_01]: The public essentially funded something utterly useless to them, so that corrupt government can hold on to their dictatorial power.
22:54
[SPEAKER_01]: So, simply put, you won't be catching me touristing and Nebula tall.
22:59
[SPEAKER_01]: It's crazy to think that nowadays, if you've got enough money, you can literally fly off into space.
23:04
[SPEAKER_01]: But our journey to conquer the cosmos has had some major hitches along the way.
23:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Back in 1986, NASA's Challenger Shuttle took off her space.
23:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Just 73 seconds later though, it broke apart and set completely of flame.
23:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Sadly all 7 crew members went down with it.
23:31
[SPEAKER_01]: The shuttle was intended to have a lifespan of 10 years, however, Challenger had only been an action for a measly 3.
23:38
[SPEAKER_01]: So what the heck happened?
23:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, O-rings in the right hand rocket booster malfunctioned.
23:44
[SPEAKER_01]: These are small rubber rings that create a tight seal to contain all the immense pressure that's produced when burning rocket fuel.
23:51
[SPEAKER_01]: But freezing temperatures on launch days stiff and the rubber preventing the seal from forming properly.
23:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Because of this, when the rocket took off flames burnt through the booster wall and prized it away from the external fuel tank.
24:05
[SPEAKER_01]: This ruptured the tank spilling highly flammable liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen,
24:10
[SPEAKER_01]: everywhere, and setting the entire shuttle a light.
24:13
[SPEAKER_01]: To add insult to injury engineers at NASA had flagged up flaws in the rocket boosters as early as 1977, as well as the dangers of launching in cold conditions.
24:24
[SPEAKER_01]: However, their concerns were ignored and the shuttle was allowed to fly.
24:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Because of this, the space shuttle program was put on hold for the next three years, and rightfully so.
24:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And the day's money challenges building plus the money used in the wake of the disaster would cost a whopping $15 billion in total.
24:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Now I'm sure plenty of lessons were learned from this terrible tragedy, but holy chupiter, that's one expensive air.
24:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Phew, we made it.
24:54
[SPEAKER_01]: I wouldn't trust these guys to make a sandwich, but alone build anything.
24:59
[SPEAKER_01]: So, which of those mega projects do you think should have been a mega reject?
25:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for listening.