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Battle for the space shuttle (4)
first round !
August 13, 1971
Alexander Flax had been hired by the President Science Advisory Committee (the PSAC) as the chairman of a subcommittee tasked with a rationale evaluation of a the space shuttle – on technical grounds.
President Nixon was rather skeptic about the space shuttle; he wanted advisors like Flax to tell him a) whether the thing could fly, and b) if it could earn money like an airliner as NASA claimed.
Flax had long experience with large technocratic endeavours. Within USAF he had had to endure and try to repair many of Robert McNamara follies.
A decade before he had led a last ditch, uphill, and despaired battle to save that Dynasoar spaceplane, to no avail. Then he had moved to new horizons, leading that very secretive agency called the National Reconnaissance Office no one knew anything about, not even it existed.
Now he was back into the civilian world - to a senior position within the Institute for Defence Analyses, a Pentagon think tank. Beside Flax technical advisory committee, Caspar Weinberger Bureau of Budget was similarly assessing the shuttle, on economic grounds.
The first meeting of the Flax Space Shuttle Committee was a three-day affair, far from the heat and humidity of Washington, atWoods Hole, Massachusetts.
Within Flax committee was Eugene Fubini, who pushed for a concept from the Martin Marietta corporation, Denver. Martin’s Shuttle consisted of an up-scaled Titan III with a glider on top of it. The glider looked like an enlarged DynaSoar, the mythical USAF spaceplane that Flax had failed to save a decade before.
Over the past year Caspar Weinberger’s Bureau of Budget had put a lot of pressure over NASA, committing them into extensive economic studies of their beloved Space Shuttle. The space agency had had its budget cut to a point were it could only afford a space station or a space shuttle, and not both. The choice they had made had been to build the shuttle first, to make trips to orbit cheap; after what building the space station there would cost little.
As far as Flax was concerned it was a risky business. The shuttle would have nowhere to fly in the early years; it evidently had to found another role than carrying modules of a non-existing space station.
NASA answer had been the shuttle would earn its life launching satellites. Yet it would have to launch plenty of them to pay for its large development costs of billions of dollars. That made any present and future satellite precious, be it military, commercial or scientific. Yet airmen and scientists were notably reluctant committing to the shuttle, while the commercial market barely existed.
This long day and the next were spent in presentations by NASA, airframe Contractors, Shuttle Panel, Aerospace Corp., Mathematica, Lockheed, and the Air Force.
Flax noted that contractors mostly concentrated on fully reusable shuttles; however it was more and more obvious that the shuttle would be partially reusable. While listening a myriad of engineers, Flax could see how the program had turned into a mess. Since 1969 NASA had focused on fully reusable two stage shuttles. Contractors had been given Phase A, then Phase B studies to conclude late June 1971. Then nothing had happened. Phase C should have seen a contractor selection to build the shuttle, except NASA had not been given the money to do so. So further studies had been ordered, of partially expendable shuttles that dropped tanks on their way to orbit.
It was a chicken-and-egg problem.
Fully reusable shuttles promised to cost less to operate, but more to build. Partially expendable shuttles just reverted the problem: cheaper to build, more expensive to fly.
Flax understood there were essentially three kind of shuttle in competition, none being fully reusable and which differed by their boosters.
Or the shuttle would use the big Apollo Saturn first stage, recoverable or not;
or it would ride to space atop a so-called pressure-fed booster;
or the orbiter would fire its own engines together with a pair of smaller boosters.
The "Saturn Shuttle" was attractive because it reused the lower half of the lunar rocket build at the cost of billions. It was clearly the space agency favourite. Whatever the booster, every orbiter now featured an external tank and complied to the Air Force requirements, which were very stringent.
NASA had hired the military aviators because the shuttle desesperately needed every satellite to make sense economically. In return the military had imposed their own requirements, transforming the shuttle. The military wanted a huge payload into a large bay because they would soon fly monster satellites into orbit to spy the Soviet Union like never before.
The Air Force had its own launch base in Vandenberg, California: what they wanted was to land there after a single orbit. Because Earth rotated, the shuttle had to catch Vandenberg back - meaning it had to skim laterally during reentry, by 2000 km. This so-called crossrange dictated a certain shuttle shape that was far from optimal...
NASA had thrown millions into lifting body research, while their chief designer had its own cherished design, a straight wing orbiter akin to an airliner. But the Air Force requirements had made all this moot. Only delta wings could deport the thing laterally during reentry to catch Vandenberg back after a single orbit; and the big payload bay, all fifteen feet wide by sixty feet long, could not be folded into anything else than the delta winged shape.