Boldly Going: A History of an American Space Station

Some closer images of the orbiter, showing windows, plus dodgy texturing :)

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Wings and wheels also impose a fairly significant weight penalty, not to mention adding more components that can fail and causing their own operational complications (like needing a runway to land on). It's a bit swings and roundabouts, but VTVL at least has the advantages of a conceptually simpler system that is just trying to be a rocket rather than a rocket and an aircraft simultaneously.

They do but in this context it's a more 'known' quantity and already much more straight forward than trying to land with rocket power alone :) Having said that though it was not 'wise' of me to assume a rocket powered landing because that's not necessarily the most plausible or practical way of doing the job either but I suspect that the poster was talking SpaceX ("flyback and vertical landing" which obviously needs boost-back propellant and such) which is why I brought up the problems and why it's likely not something that would be considered in TTL's context.

It's not that NASA (OTL and TTL is suspect :) ) haven't looked into boost-back because they have and boost-back never traded that well to adding some air-breathing engines and cruising 'home' sub-sonically using wings. Even vertical landing with 'rockets' turns out to not trade so well at least on Earth since they amount of propellant you need tends to mass more than some more efficient (for that regime) engines. The "suicide burn" concept address some of the problems but really there are other ways of doing such a landing.

It's kind of a circular argument to say that vertical landing only makes sense if you "have" to land vertically and then citing VTVL vehicles. Of course it doesn't make sense to land a VTHL vehicle vertically, but the question is not that but instead whether VTVL or VTHL (or HTHL, I guess, but those have a lot of issues) are better, and I certainly don't think you can say that VTVL vehicles are obviously worse than VTHL vehicles. Yes, there are difficulties associated with rocket-powered landing, but there are also difficulties associated with wings or lifting body recoveries. I don't really see NASA as having "better" ways of "doing the job". Different ways, sure, and some ways that are not worse. But parachute recovery of the engine pods from the LRBs does not seem to be obviously "better" than building a VTVL (or, as you note, a flyback) variant thereof.

Vertical landing kind of implies, well, vertical landing so my point was/is that in context (and somewhat overhyped OTL IMO) flyback, (or in this case the more technically accurate term being 'boost-back' by holding and then expending propellant to reverse direction) only makes sense if you have certain circumstances that don't appear to be there in TTL.

I don't mean to imply that any one concept is "better" as a rule but as a background and culture TTL there's likely to be a 'conservativism' towards what's know and proven, which is pretty much what happens in "proven" program like we see here. (Not to mention the 'conservatism' of Congress and the usual politics of space launch :) )

Also, the poster didn't say it would be "easy" just that it would be "easier". That...actually probably wouldn't be true since I doubt NASA has put as much R&D into it and SpaceX probably doesn't exist, but it's at least defensible.

As In noted in a prior post it's about as likely that DC-X/XA didn't fly in TTL either as the incentive and support wasn't likely there either which makes VTVL that much more questionable in the eyes of industry and users. Vertical landing isn't actually all that 'difficult' at least in theory but a LOT of effort and work done previously was more scatter-shot and haphazard with a lot of assumptions and guess that weren't 'proven' one way or the other until they actually tried it OTL. And BECAUSE the DC-X/XA was aimed at being a prototype SSTO demonstrator that in and of itself drove a lot of requirements and design choices that likely would not be the same TTL even if it did come about.

Broadly if it can be done OTL in 2021 its not going to be that hard ITTL and only requires time. That said as ITTL NASA already has a perfectly good system its not needed but could be done in a few years if they decided to go that direction.

Actually it probably IS 'harder' given the lack of probable R&D as Workable Goblin points out. Worse it's very unlikely that NASA specifically would make many of the same decisions and choices that someone like SpaceX did. (NASA admitted they would not have considered the "suicide burn" option as that was totally counter to their operations and safety doctrine right out of the gate) OTL NASA has been significantly moved outside their 'comfort zone' by several decisions and operations that SpaceX does on their property, but on the other hand it's working so far :)

Workable Goblin has already said it but the trend in this TL since completing development on the original STS system has been to develop from existing elements of the STS system rather than clean sheet designs and with minimal new technology. Look at the LRB's themselves. No new engines, nothing exotic just slightly modified SSME's in a reusable pod.
So while I'm sure they'd look at various ways to provide a fully reusable booster the option it seems in this tl the preference is for the minimum necessary innovation. Which means preserving as much of the LRB architecture as possible and as SpaceX shows you can modify for VTVL without having to completely redesign your rocket. But wings are a much more demanding design challenge as you need to be able to withstand horizontal loads as well as vertical. So while the catamaran is cool it seems unlikely.

The "minimum" only goes so far though and that's important here since from the very start of the Shuttle development they always WANTED fully reusable boosters and preferably ones that could come back and land on dry-land rather than in the water. Once they chose to allow water landing and recovery then most of the 'incentive' for full return went away both institutionally and operationally.

And no, actually to do a 'boost-back' and vertical powered landing with the given engines then YES you DO in fact have to do a major redesign of the vehicle. Don't kid yourself, SpaceX had to do a LOT of modification and redesign work on the original Falcon 9 to get a fully recoverable booster AND they still pay for it in payload mass to orbit which is likely not acceptable to an organization like NASA.
The link I posted was from 1998 but the booster concept dates back to the early 70s Shuttle booster program and while I'll grant the likely actual design would be two separate winged boosters, the twin-hull, single booster design already had/has a long/deep heritage over something like "boost-back" and powered landing.

And as I alluded to above one thing to keep in mind is that NASA has actually done a lot of study work over time on means of landing a booster back at the launch site and while there has always been a bias towards "wings-and-wheels" in most respects they tended to find that rocket powered landing wasn't the best way to land if you did decide to do a powered landing. Oh it had it's advantages of simplicity both mechanically and somewhat operationally, but keep in mind that NASA had very different criteria and planning for HOW to land something as well as different baselines and assumptions :) And then there's the 'money' since NASA has to justify everything they do to Congress and the American people it's a LOT easier to do when your designs and assumptions are more 'conservative' than 'innovative' and in that context there's quite a lot of advantage to pointing to something with easy to recognize "wings-and-wheels" instead of trying to convince a bunch of politicians that landing like "God and Heinlein" meant us to is better :)

Now before you consider this a 'bad' thing keep in mind that NASA is a LOT less likely to see the amount of failures and re-starts that someone like SpaceX did BECAUSE they have a larger and more diverse institutional and organizational base to work from. But again, having said that it should be also made clear that it's far less likely NASA will come to the same conclusions that someone like SpaceX would

Seriously, just give @nixonshead all the Turtledove art awards.

:D

Randy
 
Exquisite renders, as usual! Curious about the wingtip vertical stabilizers/rudders--any advantage there as opposed to the OTL placement?

IIRC at higher AoA's on reentry it allows a much smaller rudder/stabilizer as you don't have to worry about body-shadowing of the rudder/stabilizer. In OTL (and TTL's :) ) Orbiter there were concerns about the wing end-tip vortices and heating with the tip-stabilizers and they also figured they had ENOUGH stuff running through the wings :)
The "tip-stabilizers" (being canted outward) also help with reentry stability reducing your RCS needs but allow a higher AoA. Now (again IIRC :) ) the disadvantages were the calculated thermal loading for the larger and heavier (denser) Orbiter and unlike the central rudder 'speed brake' if you have a problem with the speed brake on one side you generate a heck of an off axis force during your critical landing roll out.

Randy
 
i like the Shuttle II concept but...
I would put Orbiter lower between LRB
This launch configuration is scary !
The LRBs are engineered to lift from the top, matching the loading for the ET from the SRB. The primary structural element on the Shuttle-II is the main spar of the wing, which aligns with the aft end of the cargo bay (and the landing gear location) in the Teledyne-Brown SSTO design. Placing the orbiter forward means these two features are aligned, and the booster's primary structural tie-in can attach to the orbiter's primary structural element, and more of the booster's foam is aft of the orbiter.
 
The LRBs are engineered to lift from the top, matching the loading for the ET from the SRB. The primary structural element on the Shuttle-II is the main spar of the wing, which aligns with the aft end of the cargo bay (and the landing gear location) in the Teledyne-Brown SSTO design. Placing the orbiter forward means these two features are aligned, and the booster's primary structural tie-in can attach to the orbiter's primary structural element, and more of the booster's foam is aft of the orbiter.

Would there be any risk of the boosters contacting the winglets? Or would retros and aerodynamics take care of it?
 
Would there be any risk of the boosters contacting the winglets? Or would retros and aerodynamics take care of it?

Presumably the stack tips "back" so gravity helps pull them down and away while the explosive bolts are both powerful and targeted by it does seem hairy.
 
Presumably the stack tips "back" so gravity helps pull them down and away while the explosive bolts are both powerful and targeted by it does seem hairy.

It’s something I pondered during the shuttle era, but then the SRBs were always under the wings. It’s somewhat reminiscent of the Grumman shuttle proposal, that was to carry its fuel tanks into orbit.
 
Hey, they're cliche because they make sense! Even in OTL we're getting Artemis...

Doesn't mean I have to like the cliche! 😜

Wow, it's much smaller than I imagined but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Now just need to make the LRB's capable of fly back and vertical landing and you've a fully reusable, cheap space launch system.

Given the date I assume that wouldn't be hard as it around when it was done OTL.

That would require a program to develop inflight SSME restart, which is going to get very expensive, very quickly, and NASA's focus going forward is on keeping costs down for station and lunar support so that the Mars program can go forward.

You gotta think bigger, friend
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The problem with further reuse development is that NASA is already getting the engines and avionics back after every flight. The LRBs are being produced in a quantity that would make most rocket manufactures blush (an average of eight tank pairs every year for the shuttle program, with whatever is being made for the Atlas-III lines being on top of that). This turns into launch yearly production needs on the order of 1960s Atlas and Thor/Delta lines. These also share the production staff with the External Tank line, meaning that the tanks are probably less than 50 million USD for a pair, and are the only hardware expended. Even if NASA is able to get the boosters back, and coming in on land reduces the maintenance needs for the SSME-35s, the pay-back times for the cost of booster development is likely to be over a decade. Given that, NASA is 'stuck' in a 'good enough' trap.

Not that OTL NASA wouldn't love to be stuck there.

Flyback and vertical landing requires you accept a performance penalty (a bit over about 15% of possible orbital payload for SpaceX at this point) and NASA is already recovering, refurbishing and reusing the LRB's at a rate and cost that works very well for the system. If they go for fully reusable they will likely modify the LRB's into a single "flyback" booster design rather than bother with VTVL operations. Wings-and-wheels (along with parachute ocean recovery) is something NASA is well familiar with TTL and it works very well for them and is not likely to change.

Catamaran designs are tempting, but due to the geometries in question would drive two different vehicles (remember, Shuttle-C has the boosters 'under' the center tank, while Shuttle-II has them 'above'), which is not a great way to keep costs down.

Broadly if it can be done OTL in 2021 its not going to be that hard ITTL and only requires time. That said as ITTL NASA already has a perfectly good system its not needed but could be done in a few years if they decided to go that direction.

NASA's focus in the early 2020s is going to be toward Mars as a part of a tick-tock development cycle (they've just finished up the second 'tick' of LEO development, and are moving toward the 'tock' of beyond LEO).

Expending the tanks will be seen as 'good enough' for a while here. Remember, The 100 series orbiters (including OV-099) were expending two LRB tanks and the external tank on every launch. This ties into the fact that there isn't anyone doing full first stage recovery at this point in the timeline - which means no points of comparison to work from.

Seriously, just give @nixonshead all the Turtledove art awards.

While his work is fantastic, doing so would be unfair to our other artists @NorangePeels and Dylan Semrau, both of whom did fantastic work, and we hope you'll remember them come Turtledove Season next year.

As In noted in a prior post it's about as likely that DC-X/XA didn't fly in TTL either as the incentive and support wasn't likely there either which makes VTVL that much more questionable in the eyes of industry and users. Vertical landing isn't actually all that 'difficult' at least in theory but a LOT of effort and work done previously was more scatter-shot and haphazard with a lot of assumptions and guess that weren't 'proven' one way or the other until they actually tried it OTL. And BECAUSE the DC-X/XA was aimed at being a prototype SSTO demonstrator that in and of itself drove a lot of requirements and design choices that likely would not be the same TTL even if it did come about.

DC-X and XA both did some flying, but further development wasn't funded as NASA had a focus on getting the station operational, and all of the landing focus was on the Minerva program. I believe we even mentioned that DC-X experience was why McDonnell-Douglas got the lunar lander contract.

How does the Shuttle II Abort Mode work with crew? Parachute descent? It doesn’t appear particularly aerodynamic being payload bay-sized.

The nose of the crew cabin is rounded, and there are fold-out flaps aft of the docking port to give the vehicle a nose-forward configuration. Furthermore, the entire cabin has a candy-coating of ablator to let the crew survive any entry. Terminal landing is going to be with parachutes. Think of the K-1 OV with the blunt nose and aft flare (we don't have a fixed flare, but the geometry is similar), and you're most of the way there. If you're riding the crew cabin home independently, then enough has already gone wrong that either NASA, or the crew, or the vehicle, has already decided that the vehicle has been sacrificed to shave the crew aboard. The most dangerous period is probably an on-pad abort which could see the crew cabin thrown from the stack with no time for the parachutes to deploy. The all-liquid nature of the stack combined with the difficulty in getting explosive hydrogen-oxygen mixtures at sea level make this a reasonable risk, but one the cabin is likely designed to take without being crushed.

Another inspriration we took was from the HAVOC aeroshell:

Proposed_NASA_HAVOC_Missions_to_Venus2.jpg


Minus, Alas for AH, the part where it turns into an airship 😞
 
Minus, Alas for AH, the part where it turns into an airship 😞
That the Venus blimp proposal? Looks a little familiar and I'm not aware of NASA looking at using crewed airships for any other orbital insertion.
Speaking of, that looks to be one hell of a rollercoaster ride before the balloon fully inflates!
 
Catamaran designs are tempting, but due to the geometries in question would drive two different vehicles (remember, Shuttle-C has the boosters 'under' the center tank, while Shuttle-II has them 'above'), which is not a great way to keep costs down.

Finally found a link to the earlier "catamaran" design the Martin Marietta "Spacemaster" concept. And yes I doubt they would have gone for an 'all-in' design like a Catamaran but that was likely something they would consider before they considered boost-back and vertical landing. (Most likely they would have looked more at individual flyback boosters as a baseline)

DC-X and XA both did some flying, but further development wasn't funded as NASA had a focus on getting the station operational, and all of the landing focus was on the Minerva program. I believe we even mentioned that DC-X experience was why McDonnell-Douglas got the lunar lander contract.

I thought I recalled that but a quick skim apparently missed it :) And it's understandable why it would not be pursued TTL given the circumstances.

The nose of the crew cabin is rounded, and there are fold-out flaps aft of the docking port to give the vehicle a nose-forward configuration. Furthermore, the entire cabin has a candy-coating of ablator to let the crew survive any entry. Terminal landing is going to be with parachutes. Think of the K-1 OV with the blunt nose and aft flare (we don't have a fixed flare, but the geometry is similar), and you're most of the way there. If you're riding the crew cabin home independently, then enough has already gone wrong that either NASA, or the crew, or the vehicle, has already decided that the vehicle has been sacrificed to shave the crew aboard. The most dangerous period is probably an on-pad abort which could see the crew cabin thrown from the stack with no time for the parachutes to deploy. The all-liquid nature of the stack combined with the difficulty in getting explosive hydrogen-oxygen mixtures at sea level make this a reasonable risk, but one the cabin is likely designed to take without being crushed.

Another inspiration we took was from the HAVOC aeroshell:

Proposed_NASA_HAVOC_Missions_to_Venus2.jpg


Minus, Alas for AH, the part where it turns into an airship 😞

Well that last part is disappointing I must say :)

Randy
 
That the Venus blimp proposal? Looks a little familiar and I'm not aware of NASA looking at using crewed airships for any other orbital insertion.
Speaking of, that looks to be one hell of a rollercoaster ride before the balloon fully inflates!

Unmanned they looked at a Titan flyer concept that did something similar. As for the mission profile we in the military tend to call it:
"A sphincter spraining mission plan" :)

Randy
 
I wonder what use was eventually made of that 'boneyard' of Conestoga descent stages. The increased access to space and the presence of habitable space and hardware just sitting there on the surface, close by to a fully operational battle station outpost in case anything went wrong, should be attracting bids by commercial or scientific interests, bids that a NASA hungry for improving its cashflow enough to move on to Mars might start listening to.
 
Author's Notes: Vehicle Names

Authors’ Notes​

A Discussion on names:​


When writing Boldly Going, we were confronted with the need to give names to the wide variety of vehicles that we had introduced, including the Shuttle-C OPAMs, Kepler capsules, Lunar Landers, European ATV derived modules, and finally the Shuttle-IIs.

Working backwards, the Shuttle-II names remained in flux for quite a while, with the names being finalized only sometime in late December of 2020, resulting in the inadvertent reuse of the names from the movie Armageddon (The intent being a joke that you end up with the orbiter Freedom docking to the Space Station Enterprise.) While we only named three of the 300 series orbiters, using Freedom and Independence as the first two operational units and Spirit as the test article leads to the idea that they are broadly referred to as the Spirit-Class Orbiters. Our thought is that the names selected for the first run of 4-5 operational vehicles would be names that fit with the scheme “Spirit of _”, and will probably seem like the historical names of Mars landers and helicopters. Indeed, part of the reason for the late December switch was that Ingenuity had been grabbed from the list of Mars 2020/Perseverance alternatives earlier in the year, and then we had to switch it to something else when it was selected in turn by JPL for the real helicopter. Additional orbiters beyond these may revert to more conventional names based on ships of exploration, but once again, that’s beyond the scope of the timeline. A potential bridge, though not one we’re canonizing, would be an OV-30X “Spirit of” Discovery as it both fits the name scheme and would serve to honor TTL’s only lost orbiter.

One of the unmentioned bits that was worked out is that because the Spirit Class Orbiters would not have the exact same mounting hardware as the original orbiters, the older NASA Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA) - N905NA and N911NA would not have the correct mounting points for the new vehicles. NASA uses this to justify the purchase of two new, 747-8F derived transports, which would be designated N976NA and N977NA. In keeping with the numbering and the “Spirit-class” naming scheme, these aircraft would be known as The Spirit of ‘76 and The Spirit of ‘77 respectively. The first is obviously named after the American Revolution, and the second after the Enterprise Approach and Landing tests. The numbers are a happy coincidence, mostly selected to fit with the NASA aircraft registration scheme. Most FAA registered NASA aircraft use a three digit number with the NA suffix, with the first number designating the Center the aircraft are based out of, with 9 being the number for Johnson (4 is Wallops; 5 is Langley; 6 Lewis/Glenn; 7 is Ames; 8 is Dryden/Armstrong). After some digging, I (TimothyC) determined that N976NA and N977NA were both going to be available in the 2005-2020 time period. This will also allow NASA to retire the older 747-100(SR), and pipe the new aircraft for in-flight refueling from tankers during their construction, improving the national and international reach of Shuttle-II transport. These new SCAs are expected to have a long and productive life.

Moving on to the ATV derivatives, as was noted by @Polish Eagle, the Galileo Tug / Crew-Tended Free-Flyer / Station was named entirely as a play on the name of the shuttle-craft from Star Trek. We’re glad to see that someone spotted it. Curie was picked for the module on MIR-II because of that station’s greater focus on microgravity physics thanks to the ability of experiments to be placed closer to the station’s center of mass - rather than the labs on Space Station Enterprise which tend to be located on the station’s edges, far from the best environment for microgravity research. The ATV resupply vehicles themselves are left unnamed, as there would have been close to thirty of the vehicles (one per year to Enterprise and one every other year to MIR-II) over the course of the timeline.

One name that was not available was Leonardo, which was a late change to the name of the laboratory inside the Enterprise payload bay, which in early drafts was called the “Enterprise European Laboratory Module” or EELM. That got to be a mouthful, and confusing when the Columbus module would be launched later. The resulting wordplay of using LEOnardo with Low Earth Orbit was too much for us to pass up.

The names for the Kepler capsules were, like the ATV derivatives, selected from the names of various European figures. The selection of the class name was made fairly early on, as it was a name that was neither French, nor British, nor Italian, making it acceptable (if not preferred) to those nations that were paying for the design, had conceived of the design, and had sold the design to the rest of ESA. Once we confirmed that we would be naming the capsules after people, the name for the first lunar-capable capsule almost had to be the Jules Verne, although there was some minor debate as to that being the first lunar-capable capsule, or the first capsule to go to the moon. In the end, it was slotted in as the first lunar capable vessel. The names that we ended up defining with certainty were Johannes Kepler, Charles Messier, Edoardo Amaldi, Jules Verne, & Francesco Grimaldi. The first three were three of the four Kepler-E lifeboats that are cycled through year-long tours on Space Station Enterprise, and the later two are two of the Lunar-capable capsules. Further names were never selected, but the name Issac Newton was likely used for one of the lunar-capable units.

The lander program naming selection of Minerva has been gone over before, and we went over the selection of the name Conestoga in the text in Part 20.

OPAM naming ended up being a bit fabulous in its subtlety. e of pi expressed a desire to name the first two American reusable heavy lift vehicles after two titans of American myth even before we started working on Boldly Going. Thus, when the naming opportunity presented itself, the names Paul Bunyan and John Henry were immediately used. As the timeline progressed, we needed to have additional names. In the process of discussing it, we discovered we had accidentally implied a naming scheme (at least on the meta level), and thus first had George Washington and Richard Byrd penciled in to complete the set. Later on, TimothyC suggested that to avoid confusion with other nationally significant named craft (read: USS George Washington CVN-73) we instead name OV-203 and 204 the George Meuller and Richard Nixon respectively - for their contributions to the shuttle program. The first was met with acceptance. The second was met with the suggestion being ignored - repeatedly. The idea is that the names of the OPAMs start out as unofficial, but since the public reacts better to craft with names than those with just serial numbers, they become official as the OPAMs fly more. The Richard Byrd is the craft that performs most of the Defense Department missions, and I am sure that the Intelligence Community loves the twenty-five foot wide payload fairing that Shuttle-C offers (five meter fairings allow for deployable antennas that are hundreds of meters wide and Shuttle-C is over half again as wide).

OV-105 Endeavour received the same name it did historically, because even with an American space station in service, we did not see a reason why the name would change. We would encourage people to read From Ship to Shuttle: NASA Orbiter Naming Program, September 1988 - May 1989 for a better understanding of how the name was selected.
 
I don’t think NASA would reuse names of destroyed ships. Being 2020ish TTL Resilience is both a spirit and a great freakin name during COVID or a similar ATL pandemic, so I’d say Spirit of Freedom, Spirit of Independence, Spirit of Resilience, and rather than Discovery, Spirit of Devotion for the Last Full Measure of Devotion in reference to Lincoln, in that the crew of Discovery ITTL gave it in the cause of manned spaceflight. For a fifth and six I suggest the Spirit of Excelsior (Ever Upward) and Spirit of the Frontier. Maybe TTL’s Ares can adopt OTL’s Artemis arch for Mars at a similar time.
 
I don’t think NASA would reuse names of destroyed ships. Being 2020ish TTL Resilience is both a spirit and a great freakin name during COVID or a similar ATL pandemic, so I’d say Spirit of Freedom, Spirit of Independence, Spirit of Resilience, and rather than Discovery, Spirit of Devotion for the Last Full Measure of Devotion in reference to Lincoln, in that the crew of Discovery ITTL gave it in the cause of manned spaceflight. For a fifth and six I suggest the Spirit of Excelsior (Ever Upward) and Spirit of the Frontier. Maybe TTL’s Ares can adopt OTL’s Artemis arch for Mars at a similar time.

I believe that we *will*, one day, see spacecraft named Columbia and Challenger, though I'm less sure whether NASA will be the one operating them. But that's not least because both names have long and successful pedigrees previous to the Shuttle. The same is true of Discovery.

All that said, in *this* situation, I think they would probably search for other names.

I might propose also Cook's ship Resolution, which I believe NASA considered at least briefly for a Shuttle name.
 
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