This pretty much since it was in fact NASA driving most of the 'design' at the time with "commercial" interests being strung along with promises of launch "to cheap to meter"
A reusable Titan and Atlas "booster" stage, (both studied pretty extensively OTL it seems, but not pursued due to the assumptions that were the basis of the OTL Shuttle system) would have covered the emerging commercial market with proper upper-stages but it just wasn't in the cards due to the inherent bias's and assumptions of the day.
Well I'd also point out that the main issue with a "reusable" booster at the time WAS those same assumptions (manned and likely flyback) that would have come back to haunt anyone who tried as the payload mass increased significantly overtime and OTL they simply added booster to the expendable booster whereas that's more difficult to do to a reusable booster.
Quite right. While you can get a true commercial launch market going long before when it did OTL, you're probably not going get it with NASA as we know it, and you're absolutely not going to get it so long as the Shuttle uses doing commercial launches to will itself into existence. You need a different space program for something like that to happen, likely with major changes going back to the Fifties or earlier, and all of the butterflies that causes in the intervening quarter-century.
Well the size is a bit unusual if you consider the fact that the original N-1 was 5 meters sorter than the Saturn V.
). For those interested, the model is currently very basic (yes, those tail planes are currently in line with the jets...), but the dimensions with wings extended are 43.8m x 31.7m x 6.36m. Attached are some orthos. I plan to do a much more detailed model in future, so details will change (or maybe some major things - after all, Buran was planned to have jets, but then flew without), but here's the current status for what it's worth.In this model the payload bay is 60'x15', exactly the same as the Covair FR-3. Indeed, the whole airframe and wings are based on FR-3, with just some modifications to the cabin (separable, with a bulge for the cockpit to give better visibility than the Gemini-style windows of FR-3) and the tail (Buran style OMS and RCS). I also moved the jets, and swapped them for Buran/Sukhoi units. This means the airframe will have plenty of room as there's much less internal fuel carried, but I didn't want to mess with the (more-or-less) validated aerodynamics of FR-3. That could be a good thing anyway, to lower the density of the airframe for re-entry.
Someone over on DeviantArt asked about the dimensions of Baikal, as there's apparently some interest in modelling it in KSP (I think Nurbel Space Race has better modding support, but unfortunately it isn't real
View attachment 740800
Like above the RCS blocks, possibly internally with extending scoops instead of deploying the engines...On popular demand
A sketch of the Shuttle-C of TL with Skylab B
And Shuttle-C with Centaur and Titan IIIE parts, what look more like Overkill concept
Come on! Re-usable Saturn stages was bad enough, but fitting out an ET as a space station is completely ridiculous!!
Basically it took NASA, or rather the Whitehouse, to decide to support commercial spaceflight at the same time as you had people willing to put real money into the idea from the private sector for it to take off. I'm not sure you could get those conditions pre-2000. There were a lot of wannabe commercial spacecraft in the timeframe of the 80s and 90s that went nowhere, Roton comes to mind.
On the other hand, there are some that did go somewhere, Kistler got awfully close to flying for instance (though not until the 2000s). The 1990s were actually quite a good opportunity, because there was a lot of private interest in cheap spaceflight due to private interest in satellite constellations and the idea of commercial launch even for government uses was gaining some traction (although the actual practical examples were still legacy aerospace vehicles). OTL, this was mostly dissipated in the X-33 and X-34 programs, but I think it's quite plausible to imagine even the Clinton administration, let alone hypothetical alternatives, taking different approaches to developing a commercial launch sector (which was what the X-33 and X-34 were meant to do) that lead to some of the private vehicles of the era becoming successful.
Come on! Re-usable Saturn stages was bad enough, but fitting out an ET as a space station is completely ridiculous!!
