Boldly Going: A History of an American Space Station
- Thread starter e of pi
- Start date
I think we're coming up on the end of the timeline now, looking forward to seeing the OV-300 Spirit series of shuttles rendered.
Once again a fantastic timeline, probably the most unreasonable thing about the whole thing has been Congressional willingness to fund the program (certainly mitigated by a steady set of concrete returns on investment)!
Once again a fantastic timeline, probably the most unreasonable thing about the whole thing has been Congressional willingness to fund the program (certainly mitigated by a steady set of concrete returns on investment)!
@nixonshead keeps hitting it out of the park with the renders. Amazing stuff!
Because of course they are.
Because of course they are.
Yes, this may be a slightly more fanciful aspect of the timeline...
But that's OK. I get to read about enough aerospace contractor greed and ineptitude in my news feed.
Did Boeing get taken over by MD with their own money in this tl? Because if they did it's very fanciful that they wouldn't completely mess up any project. If they avoided MD they might still be a vaguely functional organisation.
Do you have a source on this? I don't recall reading anything about electrodynamic tethers being restricted by orbital inclination.
The whole mechanism is to use the Earth's magnetic field. Which means you have to cross the field lines - so the only 'lift' is generated by that portion of your velocity perpendicular to the magnetic field.
Technically, it's not 'equatorial' but 'magnetic equatorial', to coin a phrase - an 'equator' to the magnetic poles, not the rotational poles.
Simple physics.
I read two articles in Analog back in the 80s - one a short story, the other explaining the physics.
Given Robert Forward (and Hoyt), took out the patent on the idea in 1986, it must have been Forward who wrote the articles.
I'd thought it was a bit earlier, actually.
Given the inclination of the magnetic pole to the geographical pole, I don't think there are any (useful) orbits where you don't cross the field lines. Especially since the Earth's magnetic field does not vary in a simple way by latitude, but shows some quite complicated patterns.
Sun synchronous orbits would be almost parallel to the magnetic field lines. Enough to really reduce the orbit raising possibilities.
OK. But since the original post was about maintaining or raising the orbits of used shuttle external tanks for future use, this limitation isn't much of a problem. The tanks are generally delivered to orbits that are less inclined than OTL's ISS, not polar.
More to the point, they accelerate the spacecraft perpendicular to the magnetic lines. Cross product and all.
So you still need other forms of propulsion for the parallel-to-magnetic lines portion of the velocity vector.
Otherwise you will end up in equatorial orbit even if you started with a midlatitude one!
The original post said ALL you need is tethers. For a 45 degree orbit you're still going to need 70% as much thrust sideways, which isn't a huge savings.
Shuttle 2 sounds very sexy. There better be pics.
Very surprised at the lack of a commercial angle in this timeline. What happens to Kistler, Paul Allen, etc.?
Very surprised at the lack of a commercial angle in this timeline. What happens to Kistler, Paul Allen, etc.?
I've been working on images for this TL for long enough now that I've kind of gotten used to the concept, but looking back at some of my renders I was suddenly struck again by just how weird it is seeing a shuttle orbiter and ET in orbit encrusted with ISS modules and tech! @e of pi and @TimothyC have navigated that fine line between madness and genius with skill, making the freakish seem not only normal, but almost inevitable.
I'm not sure they would be. The 300 series orbiter program has a 100% cost growth before the first vehicle is delivered, and by the time the fleet is delivered the procurement is going to be in the 10+ Billion USD range, which is in the same ballpark as SLS. The difference here is that Boeing-Rockwell is also likely to end up with a fleet to support for decades to come. I think that a 10B development program, followed by a steady half of a billion a year for decades is something most companies would salivate over.
The Boeing-Rockwell and Boeing-MDD mergers happened in universe. What doesn't happen is the move of headquarters to Chicago. There will still be some rot, but it won't be as fast moving or pervasive. The MDD outsourcing memo gets more widely read, and the Boeing-Rockwell division has forty years of experience building and maintaining the Shuttle and OPAM fleets at the start of the Shuttle-II program. All of these combine to limit the problems that seem endemic to modern OTL Boeing and the impacts on the Shuttle-II program.
That's a good question. While we've obliquely addressed SpaceX, we think that with a robust institutional program ongoing there are not the same drivers for NASA to run a COTS development program in the same time period. A lot of early COTS can be traced back to contracts given out as a part of SLI, which doesn't happen here. Part of the reason is that NASA is busy with getting the station 'finished' and keeping the Minerva program going, NASA insitutional focus is going in a different direction in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While there is going to be some support in the 1990s for smaller vehicles like Pegasus and Conestoga, with two large vehicles in the pipeline (Altas III and Heimdall), NASA has no interest in supporting the development of a third vehicle into that class. By the time they might have interest, NASA is going to start looking toward the replacement of the Orbiter fleet. A good paper on the life NASA expected to get out of the fleet can be found here, in this September 2000 presentation.
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This is always an issue with any "NASA does better" timeline because as an institution NASA, (and frankly the majority of other Space Agencies) will always have little incentive to support someone else playing in their sandbox. TTL NASA also has less reason to be defensive and defer to public/political pressure to 'open' access to space. The ARE supporting and using 'commercial' services and launches (as is the DoD in context) with Atlas III and Heimdal. Simply put at this point in time with all that's going on the perception and theory would be that anyone who can at a minimum match the performance, safety, and costs of the latter two LV's is welcome to jump into the game and 'compete' for launch contracts. While the DoD may kick some money and contracts towards 'alternate' launch vehicles of some types, (I'm willing to bet that "On-Demand-Launch" will still be a thing TTL and therefore get some funding for small launch vehicles) NASA obviously isn't going to have the budget to spare nor much incentive.
Politically there isn't much incentive either because Congress TTL has gone all-in on supporting SS-Enterprise and a return to the Moon already. Those also give them an excuse to delay Mars planning and operations due to the cost and time overruns. Coupled with the likely at least two economic 'downturns' that have happened in the background by the TTL year of 2017 and it's very likely that there is no efforts left in the US to develop strictly "commercial" space flight.
Any such would have to directly compete with the Shuttle, Shuttle-C, Atlas III, and Heimdal along with Soyuz or Ariane-launched Kepler's from Europe and maybe even Chinese launch services. There may be some demand for suborbital tourism as per OTL but in the face of the obvious "progress" NASA-et-al are making any significant delay, (such as we've seen OTL) is going to quickly lead to disappointment and backlash so anyone investing and pushing such efforts would have to greatly increase both their input and development effort. (If they are not flying a regular scheduled service by this point then they will be considered a scam and lose all public trust and attention) The DoD may kick some funding towards some of these efforts in a very low-key and general way, (lets face it some 'might' have applications the military might be interested in) but for the most part like many projects OTL, (Pegasus, QuickReach, FALCON in general, etc) the overall funding and effort is not likely to result in an operational vehicle or system.
On the gripping hand, a big legacy of Space Station Enterprise is that while "wet-lab" on-orbit structures are going to require a lot of expensive on-orbit labor, they have at least been 'proven' and also shown to be expandable in the future. In context that means the "pitch" for something like an ET derived commercial Space Station is a lot less of an uphill battle than it was OTL. And some of the more 'conservative' concepts were not that terribly difficult or expensive when you consider you have the Shuttle-C stack to launch them, and experience with SS-Enterprise to model things on.
Aka: A Shuttle-C launch puts an "ET-based-dry-Hab" with an attached Aft Cargo Carrier docking and transfer hab/hub (page 51, 52, 53) and an M/T External Tank into orbit in a single launch as the basis of a commercial space station and you have just cut out about two-thirds of the operational and budgetary as well as institutional (NASA resistance) issues such concepts face that make investors nervous. If you're clever in fact, (and lets face it even if no one initially is there will be someone to point out the 'obvious'
) NASA-et-al may even kick in some money and support if you pitch it right.So all is not "lost" in the realm of commercial space we just have to adjust to consider where such focus might be in this context
Randy
It strikes me that the greatest contribution to this timeline's future space future isn't Enterprise, or the Shuttle II series, but the Shuttle-C with liquid boosters. That massive capacity for lift while maximizing the reusability of the 'working' parts of the stack is likely to reduce cost-per-kilogram in a way the original Shuttle it was based on could never do. I'm not sure how it would compare with single-launch rockets like Saturn 1B, but I suspect the cost benefits only rise over time.