Ironically, some of the design features of the S-IVB that make it a pain to assemble, like the tank insulation being cut from 12"x12"x8" chunks of polyurethane foam impregnated into a 3d woven matrix of fiberglass then custom cut to shape and hand-installed into individual locations inside the tank (!) are the first things you'd change for a "chinese copy" (after all, when their complex system of external honeycomb panels failed to work reliably, NAA invented spray-on foam insulation for the S-II and flew it starting on Apollo 13) are actually pretty good for a reusable S-IVB. Costing a bit more to build isn't as bad if you reuse the stage, and having the insulation internal means you have the external surface free for any kind of thermal blankets the sidewalls need to help bring the stage back from orbit intact.
Could the Space Shuttle have succeeded?
- Thread starter kernals12
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Aerojet? Don't you mean Pratt & Whitney? From my reading of Jenkins, Aerojet was barely even a contender for the SSME contract, it was pretty much always going to come down to Rocketdyne or P&W.
Aerojet was screaming "we need a major contract or we're going down in flames!" to any politician, (and especially Nixon's staff) who could be caught and tackled to listen. Of course they had no chance at getting the main SSME work but they were hoping for some crumbs here and there so they were hammering anyone and everyone with support for both "major" players
Randy
Not sure what this one is directed to? Rockets were a given for orbital flight but there are points where things like air-breathing engines and systems can have utility. But it's also a question of how you build and operate the rockets which gets right back to our Shuttle and its issues.
The SRBs for example were recoverable and for a certain value of the word could be refurbished, but you had to ship them all the way back to Utah and then back to Florida which ruined any slight economic advantage they may have had. Thiokol was a Utah company and though they indicated they would be willing to set up a mixing/pouring facility at the Cape but the Utah politicians screamed bloody murder so shipping it was.
Quite obviously a reusable liquid booster would have been both more efficient and provided more utility.
For example see this: http://www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/blog/?p=3861
Specifically the middle one here: http://www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/blog/?p=3861
(And go out now and buy Scott’s stuff, I have to wait for payday to get this one myself)
In context this is one of the “Personnel Transport” concepts for bringing people to orbiting Solar Power Satellite assembly stations in LEO. (You can’t really make it out but the cargo bay has a module with somewhere around 300 seats in it. These would launch every other month btw)
The thing is the booster is derived from a Douglas concept for a Shuttle Liquid Booster designed by Phil Bono. This is a scaled down version using kerolox instead of hydrolox and engines based on the F1A. I’m not sure if this is the version that has the Shuttle engines running from launch or air-started but the difference is only where the booster is recovered not how.
In the former case the booster separates from the Shuttle/ET about where the OTL SRB’s did and once clear flipped and performed a retro-grade burn to loft itself back towards the Cape. Once over the Cape it would perform a ‘suicide burn’ and drop “gently” into a large man-mad freshwater lake for recovery. (Most of the VTVL freighter concepts used the water landing to avoid having landing gear which at the sizes discussed was freaking heavy! The Boeing “Big Onion” in fact had to be moved by water, as in floating, because it was too big to move on land) The latter would do so down-range to be towed back to the Cape.
Note also the shape of the booster which is designed to be naturally stable during reentry as opposed to the active control of a cylindrical booster. Also note how trying to attach anything like SRBs to boost the payload would be a pain in the rear
In fact one ‘simple’ upgrade, (albeit politically impossible though if you remember that little ‘spat’ in Congress over ‘maybe’ looking at replacing the SRB’s with LRBs?) for OTL’s shuttle stack was to replace the SRBs with LRBs. For example LRB’s based on the Atlas V design, (upgraded as needed) could increase payload mass by about ¼ whereas using H2O2/kerosene could potentially increase it by over a third.
(https://www.sworld.com.au/steven/pub/lrb.pdf
Keep in mind that you could, rather than increasing the payload mass instead replace high cost systems, (such as the tiles and carbon/carbon panels) with heavier but more economical alternatives.
Randy
marathag
Banned
even worse, doing the booster local, no need to make multiple segments, all joined together andsealed with those wonderful O-rings.
Could have been doing unified grains, and the case, little chance for leaks
They continuously revisited the idea of LRBs throughout the shuttle's life, but the main factor in cancelling it was always that it would take a lot of money to develop LRBs (especially reusable LRBs) compared to the benefit. The same is true of booster upgrades, which were also continuously mooted--the ASRM was dropped before it could fly and the five-segment booster stagnated until Constellation. Ultimately the issue is that a 25% increase in payload only makes sense if you're lifting into polar orbits or have some kind of Shuttle-C or inline Shuttle-derived vehicle, because for more equatorial orbits the extra payload probably won't actually fit in the payload bay and it will cost a lot to get that kind of performance benefit.
Actually they couldn't
Segmented solid are required for bigger SRM's when you have to use things like the railroad to transport them around the nation. (Titan used segmented solids as well)Is true
Though I wasn't kidding about starting with the Atlas V since that was one proposal put forward by Shelby and company to challenge the Utah SRB hold. Didn't work at the time, (and Shelby among others acutaly worked with several PAC's to try and get Orin Hatch out of office, that didn't work either Randy
marathag
Banned
Actually they couldn't
On Site casting&manufacture, straight shot to the Assembly building
And use this size
This is what building them in Florida (which would have been better so that reusing them would have been financially useful) or shipping them by barge or both was for.Actually they couldn't
On Site casting&manufacture, straight shot to the Assembly building
And use this size
Utah my friends, you have to love lobbying
(No you actually don't, please don't )Another part of the self-inflicted "failure" of the Shuttle actually. Due to it being a "Program of Record" the work HAD to be spread over as many Congressional districts as possible. So it was. Which is why in any 'rational' (hey don't laugh it's POSSIBLE for a government program... possible
) program you try and spread different "parts" around but keep sections in economic and mutually supporting areas.My example:
The S-1B was built in Mississippi and shipped by barge to the Cape
The S-IVB is built in California and shipped by air to the Cape
The SRBs, (you'll be using them for some missions) are built in either or both Colorado and Utah and shipped by rail to the Cape. (They are likely TItan SRBs so not recoverable which is a good thing) If you need ones that are not currently being made, (such as the 260in above) build a new facility in Florida and ship it to the cape by barge. Use what you have when you have it.
The "Mini-Shuttle" is either going to be California or Washington state and probably shipped by air.
Sub-contract to get some parts but try and avoid spreading major assemblies out. We do it more today because shipping costs are low enough, that wasn't the case in the 70s and 80s.
Randy
Another part of the self-inflicted "failure" of the Shuttle actually. Due to it being a "Program of Record" the work HAD to be spread over as many Congressional districts as possible. So it was. Which is why in any 'rational' (hey don't laugh it's POSSIBLE for a government program... possible
And that's gonna limit any cost savings you can hope to realize out of any NASA HSF architecture, no matter how well conceived, alas.
But it doesn't HAVE to work that way, it hasn't in the past and once you move away from NASA HSF in particular it's not how NASA normally runs its programs. This mode of operation for the "major" program is a legacy of Apollo and it needs to be changed.
Randy
It's how DoD major weapons systems procurements typically work.
In short, if this kind of procurement is not precisely inevitable for an aerospace program run by the United States government in the late 20th century, it's not far off it, either. It wasn't just the Space Race that was responsible.
With COTS we've seen a different model in play. But I am not so sure that an approach like that would readily have happened in the 60's and 70's.
I do wonder what would have happened if Kennedy had chosen a space station as the goal. I may try doing a TL on that some day...
Hm. That's not at all what I get from reading histories of the period.
According to The Space Shuttle Decision, the cargo bay going from full length to medium length was one of the first things NASA were willing to give up if the OMB kept pressing them to cut the program down since a medium length bay could do about 90% of the jobs they wanted the shuttle could do - that is, every job except for launching large space station cores and big space telescopes.
From the perspective of the time though, since they weren't likely to get to make another vehicle in the foreseeable future and would need to consolidate all US launches onto their shuttle to make the economies of scale have a chance in hell of working, getting the full size cargo bay would save them a whole lot of bother down the road... So less a "core requirement" and more of a "this will cost us only a little more and save us a huge amount down the line".
And if NASA had gotten the funding to continue upgrading the shuttle, they might have proven right in that thinking.
While this is true in the very narrow case of the Apollo program, Mercury and Gemini I don't think this applies to any other programs NASA has had. And heck, one of the reasons why Nixon and several key Congressmen liked the shuttle was because it got the space program away from "Buck Rogers" and moved it towards "Joe the Astronaut, doing his routine commute between space and back".
The US didn't blow money on the "wrong program", it blew its money on a series of programs that did not suit its actual needs or desires very well.
Apollo could have been the prologue to a truly astounding conquest of space, the Shuttle could have been a foundation on which to build a routine civilian economy in space. But there just wasn't the room in the budget for such a program once all the competing demands on American resources are taken into account. Congressmen actually need to win elections, As it was, both of these programs were valuable, even if they weren't best value for money.
There's no argument that had the public in the US been sufficiently interested that politicians were persuaded to find more funding for NASA Apollo would provide a useful base for a much larger program.
I don't think the general public, most members of Congress, or most members of the public who are passionate about space exploration really understand the economics of it. The penalties for doing things on a small scale are pretty harsh, and I think most people thing "spend half the money on NASA, get a result half as good" when the reality is more in the ballpark of "spend half as much on NASA, get a result 1/5th as good". So a more economically literate population of the US might also result in more NASA funding. But, a more economically literate body politic would change an awful lot of other things too.
Though maybe NASA could have gotten good use out of it's Apollo-era investments if there'd been no Vietnam war? That would only effect the 70s though, so NASA may still be downsized hard during the 90s and 00s. And it is hard to think of a PoD that ends the war there early or avoids the war without massively changing a whole bunch of other things (best I can think of is the peace talks in 1968 go much better). But I have a hard time seeing that happen without something like Watergate distracting the US long enough for the North Vietnamese actually win.
Hmmm. I wonder if it would be plausible for Nixon to have something like the Watergate scandal early in his presidency? That could have interesting effects on the space program... (Not necessarily good ones, mind you.)
The F-1A would have been awful as the only engine on a Saturn 1B-like vehicle. I know Eyes Turned Skywards has cult status on this board, but it's 11 years old and we've all learned alot about rocket science since then. The Saturn 1C is a fun paper rocket, but it wouldn't have worked. Not enough vector control. And in any case, there are safety concerns of having so much riding on that one engine, which is to top it off significantly more expensive than a cluster of H-1s. And since the H-1 was related to the engines on both the Atlas and the Delta-Thor, getting bulk production of it is much more possible. The F-1A would not ever be made in any appreciable numbers without a much larger space program.
And the J-2S is pretty nifty, but it is way oversized for getting to Earth orbit.
The Saturn V did do a good job launching Skylab, but to keep the rocket in production, you need more than launching a station module (at best) once every 5 years. At that point the recurring costs of maintaining Saturn V production outweigh the efficiencies gained by launching big loads all at once, rather than kludging together a multi-body rocket like the Delta IV Heavy or launching your big payloads in modules and assembling in orbit.
So for sure, Apollo produced lots of really cool hardware that could totally be used to do an awesome Earth-orbit-and-deep-space-probes program. It really isn't what's ideal for the job though.
I'd go so far as to say that without a space program one cannot be a great power. Congress would be funding a space program with R&D, spy satellites, weather satellites, blue sky science and LEO and GEO LVs in any TL where the USA wasn't radioactive dust.
A USA that didn't have such a program would be significantly poorer and weaker militarily, and absolutely at a disadvantage to a Soviet Union that did have a space program.
Now, if the US invested even more in space flight, I happen to think it would be one of the best investments they could make in terms of ensuring continued economic dynamism and military pre-eminence, but even with the recent advances of China, and a deeply troubled NASA, the US is still the premier space power on the planet, so in our present day there's not much pressure there to ensure the US beats the competition by even bigger margins. But in an ATL where the US fell behind a competitor, well, I think there'd be a strong response.
I think that's a little unfair. I think the issue is that NASA and the US as a whole was torn between economies on a per-unit basis, which required "buying in bulk" as it were, or economic in terms of fitting into whatever was left after more important priorities for the Congress had gotten their funding. An extra 500 million in 1970 USD each year would have allowed NASA to make a far more capable shuttle in terms of "bang for buck". Going up to around 5 billion USD per year in 1970 USD in funding would have allowed NASA to develop the Shuttle and have a robust interim space station and a strong robot probe program - we're basically talking about NASA being able to do what took OTL NASA 50 years and 10s of billions of 1970 USD (hundreds of billions in today's money) in about 16 years... In terms of science and experience gained per dollar spent, that's just a whole lot more efficient and I don't think it was unreasonable for NASA's people to say (after they'd been told they weren't going back to the moon and weren't getting any manned interplanetary missions) "OK, if we're not doing anything really big, this is the way to get the most out of us".
The disconnect, of course, is that the US was in recession and dealing with the Vietnam war at the time this conversation got started, so both Nixon and Congress had other priorities and again, I don't think they were at all unreasonable to try to strike what they saw as a responsible balance. I may have issues with where they struck the balance (too much Vietnam war, not enough space exploration, for example), but I think they were wrong in a reasonable way.
I agree with (C), but (A) and (B) are... Um. They totally did consider what came after Apollo. They had been thinking about what would come after from the moment Apollo started. The only reason why there was an element of scramble was because their plans for a smooth transition from Apollo to post-Apollo were rendered obsolete by the end of further manufacture of Apollo hardware in Johnson's last years. And as for continuing to advance non Gemini/Apollo hardware, pretty much everything worth sacrificing at NASA was burned on the pyre of getting to the moon. As they'd been ordered to do. And what sort of government department would they be if they started ignoring the orders from Congress and the President?
Ahh, I see.
Personally, I'd have much rather NASA developed a mini-shuttle with ablative heat shielding that was easy to refurbish or a refurbishable capsule. But I don't think the tiles were quite as bad as you say. Like... The orbiter's engines were almost as much trouble.
No, it can't. It was a one-man test vehicle. An actual working vehicle that actually reaches orbit developed by the Dyna-Soar program would not look very much like a Dyna-Soar.
fasquardon
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They may have been thinking about what to do after Applo but they were not actually doing much about it and they sure were not thinking about the (very) likely chance that the budget would go back to the older level vs staying at the moon race level.
And believe that the budget would stay high was just pure foolishness.
And I don’t recall anyone saying NASA had to give up everything for Applo they just thought That Applo was the more glamorous project and ran with it, the budget to keep some slow work moving on a cheep post Applo system could have been found,
And I think that part of the reason they jumped on the combined USAF/NASA Shuttle idea was they thought it would give them the huge Applo style program on a post Applo budget because the USAF would foot part of the bill, the same reason to include provision for spy satellites. NASA would get some missions basically paid for by the intelligence agency.
It all sounded great until the other organizations pulled out leaving NASA to pay the bill.
This is like three friends in college deciding to rent a house instead of staying in the dorms. One rents the house expecting the other twoas room mates and then they drop out and....
Frankly it was a way for NASA to go large on a budget that was not up to it.
And believe that the budget would stay high was just pure foolishness.
And I don’t recall anyone saying NASA had to give up everything for Applo they just thought That Applo was the more glamorous project and ran with it, the budget to keep some slow work moving on a cheep post Applo system could have been found,
And I think that part of the reason they jumped on the combined USAF/NASA Shuttle idea was they thought it would give them the huge Applo style program on a post Applo budget because the USAF would foot part of the bill, the same reason to include provision for spy satellites. NASA would get some missions basically paid for by the intelligence agency.
It all sounded great until the other organizations pulled out leaving NASA to pay the bill.
This is like three friends in college deciding to rent a house instead of staying in the dorms. One rents the house expecting the other twoas room mates and then they drop out and....
Frankly it was a way for NASA to go large on a budget that was not up to it.
8 years ago, not 11; and for roll control you would use verniers in addition to the main engine (exactly the same way the Delta did).
The better criticism of the 1C/Multibody is that they would have been rather expensive to develop for little if any practical gain over the 1B. Which is why in a hypothetical rewrite we would probably have NASA going with continuing the 1B or switching to Titan as the main LV.
Not really, if you're launching a bigger payload as Saturn 1B/1C would have and need to meet abort constraints. The J-2S has about the same thrust as the Merlin 1D Vacuum, for example. The Delta IV Heavy and Atlas V Heavy upper stages are a bit undersized for their payloads, which makes sense because they're intended to cover everything from the single-stick with no boosters to the Heavies.
I think this is exceedingly optimistic given the actual technical difficulties that were experienced in developing Shuttle and Station, not to mention how meandering NASA could be when it came to figuring out what it wanted and how that interacted with what the political system wanted (again, look at Station).
Webb had been deliberately shutting down discussion of the post-Apollo era to focus on getting to the Moon. Maybe not a bad idea, but all of the thinking about post-Apollo was at a very low level rather than being integrated
Pick one: easy to refurbish or ablative heat shielding. They tried modifying X-15-A2 to have an ablative outer coating to allow it to reach higher speeds, and discovered that it was a maintenance nightmare. This was a significant factor in dismissing proposals to use ablators on Shuttle.
The Dyna-Soar was designed to reach orbit...?
Thefact that NASA has repeatedly evinced willingness to use a single engine launcher for crewed vehicles (Mercury Redstone, Ares I) suggests this wouldn't be a showstopper for NASA, especially when the engine being used (F-1) has such a successful heritage.
It's a fair point about development costs, especially when NASA is already hat in hand for money to develop the Block III CSM and the AARDV, to say nothing of what Spacelab will cost. All of that won't cost as much as Shuttle ended up costing, but that wouldn't be Congress's or OMB's measuring stick. One can see Congress saying: "You've already got launch vehicles that can do the job; why should we pay for more?" I mean, unless you can get get John Sparkman to chair the Senate Appropriations Committee.
No kidding.
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Between computers for a bit but something to keep in mind about "Mini-Shuttles" and heat shielding:
1) We didn't discover till after the Shuttle (and the ESA ran headlong into this issue with Hermes) is that depending on the design, L/D and entry dynamics sometimes "smaller" is very much worse than bigger (Dynasoar would have shown us this during high speed flight tests as it acually had a few 'odd' corners in the design that more modern computing and modeling show probably would have had issues)
2) Abalators, by their nature, don't burn off consistantly all over and with an vehicle that needs more than basic aerodynamic control during flight this can be a bit of a problem. (The X-15 abalator had burn through issues and while fairly 'easy' to apply was a nightmare to get off. It also came off with a residue which gummed up the aerosurfaces and blocked out the window of the cockpit. That last was known though so they simply put a cover on the other one that the pilot used to 'see' during landing)
3) Now interstingly enough the Air Force actually knew of a "few" good metallic TPS designs that while they would not work on the full size Shuttle were workable for a smaller vehicle. (Lockheed or GD can't remember had in fact tested a section of a proposed TPS they had built through multiple 'reentry' cycles in the late 60s. The issue? It was made with a complex and expensive process and was complelty made of titanium. Keep in mind the US at the time was buying Russian titanium through third-party cut-outs to make the SR-71s because we didn't have enough through 'normal' channels )
Saturn 1C: I thought we figured out how to solve the problem(s) by using a couple (or was it four?) of H1's as "roll-control"/final thrust motors. You shut the F1 down near the end of the burn and used the H1 to get to orbit.
Don't get me wrong I like the F1 but it's a beast of an engine and expensive to boot. The 8 H1's seem to have always come out as more economical and frankly they were probably more adaptable in the long run.
Dynasoar: Yes it was EVENTUALLY supposed to reach orbit but the program had to achieve several steps first and as I noted above there's modern questions if it would have 'survived' the high speed flight tests without a significant redesign. The Shuttle may have been NASA's "mistake" but Dynasoar was an Air Force one. The Air Force was STILL insisting when the program was canceled that LM modify the Titan II/III so that the Dynasoar pilot could 'manually' control the flight to orbit...
Randy
1) We didn't discover till after the Shuttle (and the ESA ran headlong into this issue with Hermes) is that depending on the design, L/D and entry dynamics sometimes "smaller" is very much worse than bigger (Dynasoar would have shown us this during high speed flight tests as it acually had a few 'odd' corners in the design that more modern computing and modeling show probably would have had issues)
2) Abalators, by their nature, don't burn off consistantly all over and with an vehicle that needs more than basic aerodynamic control during flight this can be a bit of a problem. (The X-15 abalator had burn through issues and while fairly 'easy' to apply was a nightmare to get off. It also came off with a residue which gummed up the aerosurfaces and blocked out the window of the cockpit. That last was known though so they simply put a cover on the other one that the pilot used to 'see' during landing)
3) Now interstingly enough the Air Force actually knew of a "few" good metallic TPS designs that while they would not work on the full size Shuttle were workable for a smaller vehicle. (Lockheed or GD can't remember had in fact tested a section of a proposed TPS they had built through multiple 'reentry' cycles in the late 60s. The issue? It was made with a complex and expensive process and was complelty made of titanium. Keep in mind the US at the time was buying Russian titanium through third-party cut-outs to make the SR-71s because we didn't have enough through 'normal' channels
)Saturn 1C: I thought we figured out how to solve the problem(s) by using a couple (or was it four?) of H1's as "roll-control"/final thrust motors. You shut the F1 down near the end of the burn and used the H1 to get to orbit.
Don't get me wrong I like the F1 but it's a beast of an engine and expensive to boot. The 8 H1's seem to have always come out as more economical and frankly they were probably more adaptable in the long run.
Dynasoar: Yes it was EVENTUALLY supposed to reach orbit but the program had to achieve several steps first and as I noted above there's modern questions if it would have 'survived' the high speed flight tests without a significant redesign. The Shuttle may have been NASA's "mistake" but Dynasoar was an Air Force one. The Air Force was STILL insisting when the program was canceled that LM modify the Titan II/III so that the Dynasoar pilot could 'manually' control the flight to orbit...
Randy