Perhaps we could have gotten money for the Shuttle by not actually launching the later lunar missions, and filming them on a soundstage instead, like the conspiracy theorists think we did anyway.
Could the Space Shuttle have succeeded?
- Thread starter kernals12
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No, apparently not seriously. I'm looking at the Jenkins book, and although it's proven somewhat frustrating to actually get information on the development of the Shuttle TPS (there's no entry for TPS in the index...) it doesn't appear that there was serious interest in transpiration cooling (or the similar film cooling) by the time that the shuttle was being developed. The focus was largely on passive systems since those appeared to be a route to create something that was lighter, simpler, and easier to maintain than an actively-cooled heat shield.
Oh no, I do understand that - it was a radical re-working (and downsizing) of the entire architecture. Just as Voyager was a whole lot more modest than TOPS had been...
But there's not much more I can say until I can track down Proxmire's votes or comments on the funding for the final version of Viking, or for that matter, Voyager 1 & 2.
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This reminds me of Stanely Kubrick's quip, which may be apocryphal, that he had told NASA he would be delighted to film the Moon missions, but only if he could do it on location.
P.S. In all seriousness, the cancellation of Apollo 15 and 19 likely saved NASA only $40 million - the hardware was virtually all built, and all paid for. NASA ended up buying itself the world's most expensive lawn ornaments. Of course, saving money wasn't the sole motivation for cancelling these missions...
What was the main motivation, then? Also, don't you mean Apollo 18?
1. I don't know about "main" motivation - it's hard to say just exactly how the matrix of concerns played out in Paine's mind.
There were senior NASA managers who were deeply concerned about the safety risks of continuing to fly lunar missions. I think if it had been up to Bob Gilruth, NASA would have stopped after Apollo 11:
Even before the Apollo 13 accident, some senior NASA managers had wondered how long they could get away with the grave risks posed by going to the Moon. Given all of the different aspects of a lunar flight—from the Saturn V launch vehicle, to the Command and Service Modules, and finally the Lunar Modules—an awful lot of very complicated components had to work just right for mission success.
At the outset of the program, NASA had formally established the target probability of overall success for each Apollo mission—a landing and return—at 90 percent. Overall crew safety was estimated at 99.9 percent. But a 1965 assessment of these risks had found that, based upon the current plans and technology, the probability of mission success for each flight was only around 73 percent, while rated per-mission crew safety sat at 96 percent.
Few people lived day-to-day with these risks and concerns more than Robert Gilruth. His fame may have receded in recent decades, but Gilruth stood above all others in America’s efforts to send humans to the Moon and back. After NASA’s creation, the fledgling agency had turned to Gilruth to lead the Space Task Group to put a human into space before the Soviet Union. Later, after President John F. Kennedy called for Moon landings, that task fell to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, which Gilruth directed.
...Gilruth had no illusions about the challenge of reaching the Moon. Moreover, once Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the Moon before a global television audience, NASA had achieved Kennedy’s mandate. If each mission had a one-quarter chance of not landing on the Moon and a non-negligible chance of losing a crew, why keep at it? That feeling only grew within Gilruth as NASA accomplished more Moon landings.
“I put up my back and said, ‘We must stop,’” Gilruth said. “There are so many chances for us losing a crew. We just know that we’re going to do that if we keep going.”
At the outset of the program, NASA had formally established the target probability of overall success for each Apollo mission—a landing and return—at 90 percent. Overall crew safety was estimated at 99.9 percent. But a 1965 assessment of these risks had found that, based upon the current plans and technology, the probability of mission success for each flight was only around 73 percent, while rated per-mission crew safety sat at 96 percent.
Few people lived day-to-day with these risks and concerns more than Robert Gilruth. His fame may have receded in recent decades, but Gilruth stood above all others in America’s efforts to send humans to the Moon and back. After NASA’s creation, the fledgling agency had turned to Gilruth to lead the Space Task Group to put a human into space before the Soviet Union. Later, after President John F. Kennedy called for Moon landings, that task fell to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, which Gilruth directed.
...Gilruth had no illusions about the challenge of reaching the Moon. Moreover, once Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the Moon before a global television audience, NASA had achieved Kennedy’s mandate. If each mission had a one-quarter chance of not landing on the Moon and a non-negligible chance of losing a crew, why keep at it? That feeling only grew within Gilruth as NASA accomplished more Moon landings.
“I put up my back and said, ‘We must stop,’” Gilruth said. “There are so many chances for us losing a crew. We just know that we’re going to do that if we keep going.”
And Gilruth was certainly not alone in this fear.
(I'm not saying I agree, just noting what we know about how managers like Gilruth were thinking.)
All that said, I think budgets were a very big motivation for Paine. I think he was aware that the hardware was all paid for; but it seems he was looking for some sacrificial lambs for the Nixon Administration, to improve his positioning in the fight for the post-Apollo HSF architecture for NASA.
2. The numbering of cancelled missions can be a little confusing!
There was enough hardware to execute Apollo flights to the Moon up to Apollo 20, as things stood in 1969.
In January 1970, Paine cancelled Apollo 20, because he needed a Saturn V to launch Skylab, and he was not in a position to order (or terribly interested in ordering) any additional Saturn V's beyond the batch of 15 launchers already in the pipeline.
In September 1970, he decided to cancel two more Apollo lunar missions. The ones he actually cancelled were Apollo 15 and Apollo 19. Apollo 15 was at that point an H class mission (like Apollo 12, 13, and 14); Apollo 19 was slated to be a J class mission, with the improved LM that could sustain stays of up to three days and included the lunar roving vehicle. Of course, he still wanted Apollo 15's crew (commanded by David Scott) to be next in the queue, but they'd have to have their mission profile changed. This meant changing Apollo 15 as it stood into the first J class mission (originally meant to be Apollo 16), and renumbering the remaining missions (17 and 18) to 16 and 17. Which meant there would be no Apollo 18, since its hardware and slot were now taken over by Apollo 17. This made David Scott's crew pretty happy, but was obviously bad news for the crews of Dick Gordon and Fred Haise...
As it turned out, of course, the Saturn V's, CSM's and LM's for those two cancelled flights ended up never being used, save for the original Apollo 15 CSM (CSM-111), which ended up being used for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975. On the other hand, though there were other CSM's in the pipeline which ended upnever being used. There was, in short, no lo lack of hardware which was completed or at least in prospect of being completed with which to fly two more Apollo lunar missions, had NASA really wanted to do so.
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NASA has never done much with active systems, preferring passive systems when at all possible. Now NASA contractors of course DID work on studies and tests using active systems such as transpiration cooling, quite a lot in fact. Somewhere in my paper files, (I'm still trying to find the site which cited the paper so I can look it up again) where a test was run on 1/2 of sintered nickel ball with transpiration channels drilled in it. There was no damage to it after being exposed to a simulated re-entry heating of around two to three times its melting point (the exact temps were recorded in the paper and I should note this greatly exceeded ballistic or lifting reentry temps
) for an hour using less than a gallon of distilled water. The work was sponsored by the DoD in the early late-50s and early 60s.The water reservoir was 'self-pressurizing' in planning though the test used a pressure fed flask.
But this is the Shuttle Orbiter so we're talking a LOT more water to handle those big, thick leading edges, lower wing area, the bottom of the body and aft flat and the nose cap itself , and it wouldn't be 'steel' of any kind, (IRRC Musk is assuming a VERY light reentry loading which 'may' allow such but not the Orbiter’s mass. The more area the more water needed and then there's the requirement to have a materials that itself can take some temperature and not deform, (which metal tends to hit long before it melts) which as above nickel melts at around 2647F/1453C and Stainless around 2750F/1510C but will begin to deform under pressure well below those temps. (Hence the 1/2 sphere which only has water passages to reduce the structural integrity of the metal. Now imagine how much those big, fat leading edges on the Orbiter would weigh built the same way. And they actually HAVE to be pretty big due to the required radius of curve to help alleviate the heating in the first place)
(Info from here: https://www.steelforge.com/custom-forged-shapes/forging-capabilities-chart/#stainlesssteel, and a list of different metals and properties here: https://www.steelforge.com/custom-forged-shapes/forging-capabilities-chart/#stainlesssteel)
I haven't been following Starship/BFR as I should, mostly because Musk's, (and therefore SpaceX's) obsessive focus on Mars is taking it in a direction where access to Earth orbit if far less important that the ability to land on Mars with the most direct flight architecture possible and minimum in space infrastructure. While getting to LEO is pretty much half-way-to-anywhere energy wise the focus on Mars worries me. That plus there look to be a LOT of near-parallels to the Shuttle’s over-promise and hype.
(Starship/BFR is going to have to fly a LOT to meet its economic goals, it also has a huge payload/cargo capacity which a lot of folks like but I don’t think they are thinking it all the way through since the Shuttle met a lot of the same payload goals and therefore had to be the ONLY alternative so that ALL cargo would fly on it, which is why Falcon-9 has to go away ASAP, so that it could meet its economic goals which it never did, is only ONE example)
Being able to fly in a single ship from the Surface of Earth to the Surface of Mars and back in a single ship is nice, but it’s far from essential unless your whole architecture is designed from the start that way. Mars Direct was as is Musk’s plans which are based on it and for certain levels of operations it makes some sense but it’s not going to be anywhere near as effective or economic as mature discreet transportation system would be. I understand the parallels between Starship and the age of Explorations Caravel but those are very, very loose at best.
Randy
One other thing which is really striking about the locations that SpaceX (and NASA) are looking at for the first crewed landings, and the places that NASA and other agencies have been actively exploring with landers and rovers: they're all focused (save for Mars Insight) in looking for signs of life, rather than locations with water (at present). This means they're of limited help in preparing the way for eventual crewed exploration. As Bob Zimmerman notes:
As I noted in describing the Mars2020 landing site, the location of the bulk of these landing sites, along the transition zone from the southern highlands and the northern lowlands, demonstrates the areas of the planet that interest geologists the most. It is here that we find many shoreline features, suggestive of the ocean that many scientists theorize existed intermittently in the northern lowlands. It is here that planetary scientists can quickly gather the most information about Martian geological history. And it is here that they have the opportunity to study the widest range of rock types.
From an explorer’s perspective, however, this approach has its limits. It does not provide us a look at a wide variety of locations. It is not directly aimed at finding lower latitude locations where ice might actually exist. And it is decidedly not focused in studying the planet from the perspective of future colonists. I am sometimes frustrated that we have as yet no plans to send any rovers into Marineris Valles, or to the western slopes of Arsia Mons, the southern most volcano in the chain of three giant volcanoes where there are indications that ice might exist underground, or to any of the places where caves are known to exist where a colony could be built more easily. In fact, the caves on the slopes of Arsia Mons seems a prime exploration target.
From an explorer’s perspective, however, this approach has its limits. It does not provide us a look at a wide variety of locations. It is not directly aimed at finding lower latitude locations where ice might actually exist. And it is decidedly not focused in studying the planet from the perspective of future colonists. I am sometimes frustrated that we have as yet no plans to send any rovers into Marineris Valles, or to the western slopes of Arsia Mons, the southern most volcano in the chain of three giant volcanoes where there are indications that ice might exist underground, or to any of the places where caves are known to exist where a colony could be built more easily. In fact, the caves on the slopes of Arsia Mons seems a prime exploration target.
It's hard to say how accurate this is until we see the final form of the Starship architecture...and that is, as we all know, still in a state of evolution.
But given that Elon Musk has always been quite clear that he's undertaken all of SpaceX with the objective of puttin people on Mars in a serious way, and that he is in complete control of the company, I think you simply have to take that as a non-negotiable. Seizing control of a big chunk of the global competitive launch market has always been a means to an end, just as Starlink is a means to an end. It's the entire reason he founded the company.
And given all this - and SPaceX's limited resources - going with an architecture like this makes sense. They only have so much development money to go around. I think this is something Bob Zubrin really does not get. Maybe it won't work - that's not impossible - but we can understand why Musk has decided to go this direction with BFR.
Even so, however, it's certainly not impossible that SpaceX could achieve a pretty high cadence with Starship/SuperHeavy, if indeed it turns out to be anything close to a) as cheap as they claim, and b) as rapidly reusable as they hope.
I completely agree with your assessment of why NASA passed on transpirational cooling for Shuttle. TPS tiles were from NASA's perspective a safer bet at the time, given the reentry profile and shape of the vehicle.
Last first: The tiles really are a marvel they just needed a LOT more work on how to attach them given their properties to the Orbiter. Glue... Well it kinda worked
As you say it's Musk's show and his money so his rules... (Black Adder line: "It's my Army and those are my conditions!"
) And you certainly can't argue the near-term results it's just that I'd hate to see everything riding on one vehicle and one method of getting the job done that ALSO has to do numerous other jobs if they have the time. And as you also say and I noted there's that whole 'seizing control of a big chunk of the global launch market' thing but it being subordinate to Mars at some point. As I noted up-thread the Falcon 9 with some tweaks and Dragon II could give you early and often LEO access for both personnel and cargo for a rather cheap price. Go for a Falcon Heavy and expendable upper stage and you've got some decent throw mass to Mars (and the rest of the Solar System) and combine that with a good space-based, high efficiency propulsion tug/stage and you really open up both Cis-Lunar and Interplanetary Space. But again as you say there's only so much Musk can pay for and nobody else is really looking to capitalize on what he's done so far.I’m just bemoaning tossing away an obvious and know architecture that can reach LEO on a fairly regular basis and that could be modified to do more over time at a good price for something more focused on being a lot “more” than we currently need in the hopes that it will grow to encompass the launch market to justify its economic and operational planning… Oh wait a second, I think I’ve heard this one before J
Randy
Could the space shuttle have succeeded, yes.
The shuttle was too large satellite launch would have been more efficiently performed by standard boosters. A smaller shuttle would have been more efficient for delivering crew and small specialty payloads into Orbit , not to mention cheaper.
The shuttle was too large satellite launch would have been more efficiently performed by standard boosters. A smaller shuttle would have been more efficient for delivering crew and small specialty payloads into Orbit , not to mention cheaper.
kernals12
Banned
That's just playing with margins. The Shuttle's biggest expense came from the maintenance of those ceramic tiles.
As you say it's Musk's show and his money so his rules... (Black Adder line: "It's my Army and those are my conditions!"
I’m just bemoaning tossing away an obvious and know architecture that can reach LEO on a fairly regular basis and that could be modified to do more over time at a good price for something more focused on being a lot “more” than we currently need in the hopes that it will grow to encompass the launch market to justify its economic and operational planning… Oh wait a second, I think I’ve heard this one before J
Well, as you may know, this is has been Jonathan Goff's line all along. Delighted as he is with the idea of pursuing a *completely* reusable launch vehicle, he thinks Superheavy/Starship in all of its incarnations is still much too ambitious, still too big. But his interest is in very low cost heavy lift access to orbit which might also have some value for BEO destinations, rather than a heavy lift vehicle intended for a quite specific BEO destination which happens to have value for very low cost heavy lift access to orbit.
Worse come to worst though, let us say Starship is a huge failure. That still leaves SpaceX operating a very cheap, high cadence family of heavy lift launch vehicles (enough to remain in business), and you have another one coming online from Blue Origin in a couple years. And none of it (unlike the Shuttle) involving any appreciable outlay of tax dollars, save in the form of launch contracts. That's far from the worse place to be, and filled with more promise for a bright future of low cost access to space - and even BEO destinations - than we have seen at any point in the past - certainly far more than the Space Shuttle ever delivered! And if Starship starts turning into a bust, we also know that Elon Musk is is as far removed from a believer in sunk cost fallacy as it is possible to be.
I do think Starship *will* become a reality. But it might take longer, have more detours, and more costs and limitations than SpaceX is presently declaiming.
It has been obvious for a while now that combining cargo and crew in the same vehicle was a wrong turn for the program.
kernals12
Banned
And even less payload. When you increase the size of a 3d shape, its volume rises faster than its surface area. So a smaller shuttle might have 10% less surface area and 20% less interior volume.
Yup. The future is hazy, shake ball again and again.
We may know a little more at the end of the month when Musk makes his big presentation, but haziness will remain until SpaceX actually starts sending it up to orbit in some form.
I don't see any reasonable prospect that Musk will land humans on the Moon in 2024, but then again, I don't see NASA doing it, either.
Not really that I'm aware of. Most of the technology Shuttle needed as far as TPS and the like it had to develop itself and very little of it saw outside development beyond that that I'm aware of. Meanwhile, there was a certain "use it or lose it" about the budget for Shuttle. If they put it off, I don't know how long it would take for conditions to align to resume it--Shuttle being apporved had some pretty near-run aspects IOTL.