Could the Space Shuttle have succeeded?

kernals12

Banned
There was a lot of talk about how the Shuttle would allow the manufacturing of materials with the benefits of a microgravity environment. Materials included crystals, alloys, and ceramics. Perhaps out of this could come better heat shielding materials which would make future space launches less expensive.
 
Would a different design for the space shuttle, using technology available in the 1970s, have allowed the dream of low cost access to space come true?

Yes.
ChryslerSERV_1.jpg
 
As a matter of fact, NASA said they'd accept cooperation with the Soviet Union. It's the time of Detente after all.

As noted but also there was no way the Soviets were going to let the American's any deeper into their program than they had to and a 'shared' booster development would have been as forbidden on their side as it was on the American side. Part of the reason they outright refused to 'cooperate' with Kennedy on going to the Moon was they were well aware their technology "lead" was smoke and mirrors and that didn't really change till the mid-80s. Any close examination would show how far behind the American's they really were and that was not acceptable.

Skylab.

Also, Nixon wanted to cut the Apollo 16 and 17 missions, as did most of the public.

Skylab was using already funded and NOT doing at as has been noted would have been a non-starter for the US. As far as the public went the majority had never fully been behind the space program or Apollo specifically beyond some early "need to beat the Commies" rhetoric. That's the reason "interest" dropped off so fast after Apollo 11 came home and only 'spiked' (in a bad way) during Apollo 13. Had Apollo 13 gone off with no real hitch it's likely we would have seen the loss of more Apollo missions as it was. (Unlikely but without having to 'show' they could still do the mission despite 13, 14 isn't so strongly supported and 15 becomes vulnerable. On the other hand it was Apollo 13 that really got Nixon-etc nervous about having a REAL disaster on their watch)

I really do wonder what things might have looked like had Kennedy not been assassinated, assuming the rumors that he wanted to turn the Space Race into a collaborative effort were true. Or hell, even if Korolev had lived long enough to work out the flaws on the N1. A combined US-Soviet space program though...depressing to think what we could have accomplished.

As above it wouldn't/couldn't happen before the late 70s early 80s under the circumstances because the Soviet's had zero incentive to actually cooperate with the US. Likely if Kennedy had not been assassinated he himself would have worked to scale back Apollo as he'd never been happy with setting the Lunar Goal in the first place. He's about the only one who could have scaled things back too and frankly I'd see LBJ fighting that since he'd so tied himself to "space" early on. Still by the mid-60s it was clear the US was out-doing the USSR in space with little response so it's likely Kennedy could muster support to scale back and redirect the US space program in the run-up to re-election.

The Shuttle was an attempt to "return" to the more sensible and sane pre-Apollo paradigm of a space program based on a series of self-supporting steps and infrastructure that had been bypassed by the Lunar goal. Unfortunately by that point in time NASA wasn't really set up to undertake such a program and with rather rapid dissipation of the public/political enthusiasm/panic of early Space Race and its financial/resource support the basic concepts and ideas were badly skewed in direction.

In essence by this point NASA required not only a reusable space launch system but a goal for that system to serve, (large space station) a goal for THAT to serve, (manned Mars mission) and everything in between to support them. Hence the “Space Transportation System/Integrated Program Plan” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Transportation_System) and all that entailed which was in no way viable. The ‘survivor’ of this was the Shuttle BUT only under strict budget control which was detrimental to entire concept from the beginning. Especially when you factor in the ‘requirements’ imposed on the Shuttle from the start.

As a cherry-on-top to the issue stepping back from the Apollo-paradigm was simply something that NASA at the time could not do and it showed.

There was a lot of talk about how the Shuttle would allow the manufacturing of materials with the benefits of a microgravity environment. Materials included crystals, alloys, and ceramics. Perhaps out of this could come better heat shielding materials which would make future space launches less expensive.

Lets be clear the Shuttle tiles weren't really as fragile as people think. The MAIN problem was they couldn't find a way to keep them attached to the Orbiter and it was the Carbon-Carbon that turned out to be a heck of alot more damage prone than anyone thought. (The US Army knew this but as it had been tested as part of an advanced tank armor guess who wasn't in the loop to "know" that little tid-bit) And space manufacturing and the Shuttle were predicated on both regular flights, (at least montly if not bi-monthly to a Space Station mind you not using the Shuttle as a space station which is what happened OTL till they built the ISS) AND large commercial interest which the Shuttle actually stifled being neither cost effective nor flying regularly.

Randy
 

And of course probably having about as much luck as Chrysler had in convincing the "wings-and-wheels" crowd of the feasability of the idea even though I note a large number of the "post-Saturn" launch studies kept coming around to vertical recovery as being the best option. Of course note the MURP (Manned Upper-stage Reusable Payload the 'piloted' stage on top the SERV) was to glide to a landing after reentry but that cargo bay itself...

And it still had the issue with being a SSTO which was wrecked should there be any weight gain during design and development. (Like that every happens right? :) )

Randy
 
To make the Space Shuttle ,better' (not actually the proposed jack of all trades) it may be possible, to have created the STS an optionally manned vehicle, payload capacity of maybe 40 tons unmanned with autonomous landing, a ,stump' nose and payload bay up to the near front. For manned missions, a crew container with life support and B-70 derived escape capsules installed. Such a system miggt have had a higher rotation for pure payload ,commercial' (pun intended, the tried to cramp ,commercial flights' into manned missions until Challenger). Stil, the Problem with tile overhaul, the unnescessary large wings, the dangerous piggyback configuration and the criminal neglect of ATK for the solids would be still there. Maybe after desaster on an unmanned mission (solids on high flight rate still likely because ATK) a reurn to flight might be faster.

To really improve Shuttle, one would have to go the way of ,e of pi', reusable first stage with much less heat protection needed for much lower speed at stage separation, throw away second stage (production optimised S-IV), production optimised Apollo derived crewed component, maybe later reusable winged crew component (still like the Apollo design with the ability of mission specific orbital module for sattelite overhaul, logistic module for space station supply, crew/science module for long duration LEO etc.)
 
Good topic.

One of the shuttle's selling points was that it was going to use off-the-shelf technology to keep costs down. The main system was run by threde 216K computers. There were rumors in the first decade of this century that NASA had people out on eBay buying up old computers like Commodore 64s to get replacements/spares for the shuttles' systems. I think whatever form the reusable spacecraft takes, it needs to have that mindset broken; use off-the-shelf now, but design with improvement in mind.

In my opinion, the design chosen locked NASA into low-Earth orbit flights. A different vehicle, with the flexibility to do both low and higher Earth orbits would have been more useful, hence used more resulting in more efficiency.

My thoughts,
 
To make the Space Shuttle ,better' (not actually the proposed jack of all trades) it may be possible, to have created the STS an optionally manned vehicle, payload capacity of maybe 40 tons unmanned with autonomous landing, a ,stump' nose and payload bay up to the near front. For manned missions, a crew container with life support and B-70 derived escape capsules installed. Such a system might have had a higher rotation for pure payload ,commercial' (pun intended, the tried to cramp ,commercial flights' into manned missions until Challenger). Still, the Problem with tile overhaul, the unnecessary large wings, the dangerous piggyback configuration and the criminal neglect of ATK for the solids would be still there. Maybe after disaster on an unmanned mission (solids on high flight rate still likely because ATK) a return to flight might be faster.

To really improve Shuttle, one would have to go the way of ,e of pi', reusable first stage with much less heat protection needed for much lower speed at stage separation, throw away second stage (production optimized S-IV), production optimized Apollo derived crewed component, maybe later reusable winged crew component (still like the Apollo design with the ability of mission specific orbital module for satellite overhaul, logistic module for space station supply, crew/science module for long duration LEO etc.)

Eh, actually one of the MAIN requirements for the Shuttle was that it be manned and in fact that it NEED a crew for operation. In fact while the Shuttle "could" operate in an automatic mode much like the Soviet Buran, doing so required someone to manually install a cable between the flight computers and the flight systems that was not normally carried on the Shuttle. A close second was to recover the engines which were pretty expensive items in and of themselves. Really there were a LOT of know and 'assumed' requirements that went into the design of the Shuttle and once you figured in budget issues and the compromises that had to be made to meet them...

You're right that needing to be a "jack-of-all-trades" and sizing to carry larger payloads drove up the cost. As per "Right Side Up" building the booster first with expendable and semi-expendable upper stages would have had a better "return" on the initial investment. Still it needs to be kept in mind that NASA was focused on the 'future' and that drove a lot of what came to be the Shuttle we know whether those reasons are explicitly stated or not.

The "minimum" size of the cargo bay drove the size of the Shuttle which itself was derived from a future need ot carry large space station modules to orbit in the Shuttle. The wings were required for an Air Force 'need' but really NASA had already decided on the delta wings as any other wing configuration was seen as having too high a development risk. The large crew and on-orbit stay time were to get more astronauts into space and serve as a "mini-space station until a real one could be built. The "Stage-And-A-Half" configuration was driven by economics (as were most things) as the bigger an aerospace vehicle the more it costs in terms of development and production. The drop tank was the obvious way to reduce vehicle size. And since hyrdolox engines are not really efficient booster engines it was clear some sort of high thrust booster was going to be needed to get the Shuttle off the ground so the SRB's were actually an obvious choice. The Air Force had been operating large segmented boosters for years and this was thought to be pretty straight forward. They were made 'reusable' because it was hoped in the future when the SRBs were replaced by more powerful and efficient LRBs that the recovery systems would already be in place. Oh and lest we forget it is imperative, no demanded that the Shuttle be THE ONLY LAUNCH VEHICLE THE USA HAS so that any and all launches go to it. It was literally the only way to make the economics case close.
And so on.

Keep in mind that a fully reusable Space Shuttle with a huge flyback reusable booster as well as a large reusable orbiter had been the baseline concept since the beginning. This was meant to make monthly or more flights to a large space station it would help construct and maintain and would be used to deliver parts for building things like Moon and Mars ships. And keep in mind just how BIG all this was going to have to be to replace the Saturn V and Apollo capsule! Of course that's the OTHER problem is that it's going to be big, (hence by the above mentioned formula, and there IS actually a formula someplace I've seen it) and therefore more expensive than something smaller designed to JUST support a space station or perform LEO short-term tasks. The concept for making a 'cargo' and 'crew' launcher as different vehicles was suggested early on and frankly the STS design lent itself well to such a division of labor but again, in NASA's eyes if the flight wasn't manned there wasn't much point because the entire reason is to justify manned space flight. What we later knew as the Shuttle C was initially proposed by Rockwell before the Shuttle flew but set aside in order to not divert from getting the Shuttle flying first.

The Flyback F1 of RSU is a large vehicle which means it doesn't scale down well which translates into pretty large "minimum" payloads as addressed in that TL. Even if a Shuttle-C had been designed with the aim of reducing the needs of the manned element you have to consider that certain parameters have to be close to the same to retain enough commonality to remain one system. What you end up with is more a Shuttle-C with a Dreamchaser on top the cargo pod. Nice but what do you do with all that cargo space? (I KNOW we have answers but please remember this is not so obvious at the time :) ) Worse once you replace the SRB's and ET with a "real" reusable booster your dinky "orbiter" is going to need an expendable rocket stage to get into orbit and the whole point was to be fully reusable at the end... And can you imagine pitching THAT to Congress and the President?

Here you have this huge vehicle, these boosters fall off and land in the ocean, we recovery them. (Hopefully but given they need to be shipped back and forth to Utah don't ever expect them to be economical) The huge tank burns up, but we recover the rocket engines in a pod, (we hope) and the huge cargo volume burns up* when we're done and only this small manned section comes back to land on a runway...
(*Oh I forgot to mention a "primary" reason for the size of the orbiter as given was the idea it could retrieve satellites and bring them back down to Earth for servicing and then put them back into orbit. This required a space tug that was never built and was questionable it could actually carry, which would likely have been discarded after use since there was no space station to store it at. See how all these things tend to need each other?)

Me? My idea has always been along the lines of learning how to recover and refurbish the Saturn-1B first stage from the ocean down range to get experience with operations and costs then transitioning the S-IVB stage into a recoverable upper stage version along with a payload only version before evolving into a high reuse boost-back first stage, (still water recovered just closer to the coast, boost back to vertical landing is nice but till you get to fully 'gas-n-go' operations it's not that big a factor) coupled with either a cargo or mixed payload orbiter. Always keep the option to strap on some SRBs for thrust augmentation and you can cover pretty much anything you might need.

But in a world, (as it was) that sees "aircraft" not only in operations but in looks as the ultimate "reusable vehicle" selling that idea is an almost vertical uphill battle from the start.

Randy
 
1) The Soviet lead was not “smoke and mirrors” as someone unthread stated. It was real. As illustrated by the fact that since 1961, the USSR/Russia has never been out of the manned space launch business, while the US has had over a decade plus cumulative. It was since their programme had a laundry list of stuff they wanted to do. In the US, between Shepard and Armstrong, everything was done with a moon landing in mind. James Webb was very successful in getting things which were not at least partially germane to that aim, shitcanned.
An approach which paid dividends in getting to the moon, but stymied the post Apollo landscape, except for SkyLab and Apollo-Soyuz, which used spare hardware anyway

2) The Shuttle was a jobs programme at it heart. A sop to an industry facing cuts and layoff. That was the original sin.
 
A frankly better senario would have been to restart Apollo CSM production. Use Saturn 1B as a launcher. Skylab had provisions for two or three long duration mission, or half a dozen short ones. A backup also existed.
That could have been used till the early 1980’s when a better and more realistic shuttle comes on line.

This does butterfly away female astronauts until the mid 80’s.
 
They did cancel some of their other projects. Almost all of their other projects, actually. Most of what they did was hangovers that had been substantially funded before the space shuttle decision was made (Skylab, to a lesser extent Viking), forced by orbital mechanics to happen in the '70s or not at all (Voyager), international (Apollo-Soyuz, Helios), or not actually that expensive in the first place (ATS, Landsat, Pioneer, Mariner 10).

Actually, it's even worse than that:

Viking in an earlier formulation was killed by Congress in 1967, in the big post-Apollo 1 fire slaughter of Apollo Applications.

And the original Grand Tour (with four probes) was cancelled by Congress in 1971, when its budget came in over a billion dollars. JPL was smart enough to come back with a chopped down version that only cost $360 million - and thus the Voyagers were born.

(But I know you know all of this.)

But yes, the budget retrenchment was real. Even what survived had to take its hits, not least the Space Shuttle itself.

I mean, I guess you could drop Viking and Voyager and scrounge up a few hundred million dollars in this year and that, but why?

I think William Proxmire had an answer to that!
 
Good topic.

One of the shuttle's selling points was that it was going to use off-the-shelf technology to keep costs down. The main system was run by threde 216K computers. There were rumors in the first decade of this century that NASA had people out on eBay buying up old computers like Commodore 64s to get replacements/spares for the shuttles' systems. I think whatever form the reusable spacecraft takes, it needs to have that mindset broken; use off-the-shelf now, but design with improvement in mind.

In my opinion, the design chosen locked NASA into low-Earth orbit flights. A different vehicle, with the flexibility to do both low and higher Earth orbits would have been more useful, hence used more resulting in more efficiency.

My thoughts,

Er, actually the use of "off-the-shelf" technology was NEVER a point of the Shuttle in fact it was always going to be 'cutting edge' technology. With the ability to do SOME upgrades as time wore on. (Major changes to the airframe, mold line and such were beyond the scope of 'upgrades') Those rumors were just that. The computers were built using existing parts where they could be but they were upgraded as time went on. The Orbiters all had fully modern "glass cockpits" by the time they retired.

The Shuttle was never expected to go anywhere BUT Low Earth Orbit, more specifically it was supposed to build and then service a LEO space station which finally happened. It could also support a BLEO program as was pointed out in the various "Outpost" studies of the late 80s:
http://www.astronautix.com/o/outpostonthemoon.html
http://www.astronautix.com/l/lunarevolutionbase1989.html
http://www.astronautix.com/l/lunaroutpost.html

It was not till the early 90s that plans reverted to using a new "Saturn derived" LV and basically repeating Apollo all over again became the main idea.

The Shuttle was expected to lower the price of payload TO LEO which would then allow more specialized vehicles such as the proposed space tug (http://www.astronautix.com/s/spacetug.html, http://www.astronautix.com/s/spacetugs.html) Orbital/Lunar Transfer Vehicles, (http://astronautix.com/o/otv.html, http://astronautix.com/s/septug.html, http://astronautix.com/o/omv.html) and Lunar Landers which would do the bulk of the 'in-space' and Lunar work. This is based on the idea that there will be a permanent presence of humans and a lot more activity in orbit which in turn will require more Shuttles and more flights which again lowers the cost of access.

A more recent example is the Falcon 9 which can deliver payload to LEO for less than past and most current LVs. It can also delivery payload to GEO but is less efficient at it and therefore actually increases costs and limits payload due to that fact. (You also cant reuse the upper-stage but I'll get to that in a second) This is basically because as an upper stage propellant kerolox isn't really that great, it can get the job done but there are better propellants out there to use. Hydrolox is of course the best but bulky and difficult to work with, methalox comes next and you could even use cryogenic propane and LOX which gives about as much isp as methalox but is even smaller in volume. The problem is this breaks SpaceX's "one propellant" mantra but if you really look at the details OTHER than hydrolox which is expensive to work with and bulky to carry the added performance and capability far outweigh the supposed drawbacks of using more than one propellant type.

Then there is electric drives such as ion, Hall and such and these could move a payload from LEO to GEO for pennies on per pound. However these are not powerful enough, (thrust wise) to go from first stage cut off to orbit in a reasonable time frame so you'd need to either rendezvous with a sub-orbital package or use the current upper stage to push the payload into orbit and rendezvous there. This isn't a bad thing though as even the current upper stage can push about 4 times the payload it can deliver to LEO. Cuts some margins in that and you've plenty to make the upper stage recoverable as well as the lower stage and 'taa-da!' a fully reusable "shuttle" vehicle (Dragon I and II were designed to be reused but NASA doesn't want to pay to do so*)to LEO at low cost and higher than average utility. Couple it with a reusable space tug to move the stuff from LEO outwards and you literally just opened up space.

(And note that Musk is dumping the Falcon series for Starship/BFR which has far more payload than anyone can use and unknown development and operating costs to boot. But hey it CAN go to Mars which is all Musk in actually interested in so there is that...)

*= Which is why such ideas as Red Dragon as a probe to Mars and Green Dragon as a probe to Venus have been bandied about. I wish the second would get a more professional treatment as per RD but I suppose that would take me or someone getting the idea out there more than forum posts :) )

Randy
 
1) The Soviet lead was not “smoke and mirrors” as someone unthread stated. It was real. As illustrated by the fact that since 1961, the USSR/Russia has never been out of the manned space launch business, while the US has had over a decade plus cumulative. It was since their programme had a laundry list of stuff they wanted to do. In the US, between Shepard and Armstrong, everything was done with a moon landing in mind. James Webb was very successful in getting things which were not at least partially germane to that aim, shitcanned.

An approach which paid dividends in getting to the moon, but stymied the post Apollo landscape, except for SkyLab and Apollo-Soyuz, which used spare hardware anyway

The actual quote you're looking for is:
As noted but also there was no way the Soviets were going to let the American's any deeper into their program than they had to and a 'shared' booster development would have been as forbidden on their side as it was on the American side. Part of the reason they outright refused to 'cooperate' with Kennedy on going to the Moon was they were well aware their technology "lead" was smoke and mirrors and that didn't really change till the mid-80s. Any close examination would show how far behind the American's they really were and that was not acceptable.

Which it was as the Soviet TECHNOLOGY was far more primitive than the US and by the 1962 the US was gearing up to show this. They Soviet's stepped back for 18 months (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_1) just like the American's would for their space accidents and they did so because they felt they were pushing to hard and did not want to squander their current "lead" in space. That happened anyway because the American Gemini program was blazing ahead of them already and the technology and capability were only getting better. The Soviets did not in fact have a "laundry list" of things to do in space as the military was running the program and they had specific goals they were actually forced to second to the manned space program once it was realized the political windfall of gaining space "firsts" over the US. But it couldn't last as their budget and support were never on par with the US Lunar program. While I agree that the laser-focus on the Lunar goal was overall a bad thing it certainly created the needed infrastructure on Earth to support a Lunar and expanded space program. The former it did but the latter has always lacked political and financial support. The Soviet and later Russian program never HAD that support to lose so were actually forced to do more with less which IMO was a lesson that NASA has yet to learn but in part SOME of NASA were very aware that support was fickle and general interest was never going to be high or supportive of expensive and grandiose plans. That faction lost out in planning and operations very quickly to those who "knew" another Apollo was just around the corner, any day now.

Point of fact though the entire Mercury program had nothing to do with the Lunar Goal and was shut down as soon as possible due to that fact. The Mercury spacecraft, due to the payload capability of then current US launch vehicles, was vastly inferior to the Vostok and Voshkod and had never been anything more than a "can man live and work in space enough to survive launch, flight, reentry and landing?" program and it showed in the lack of capability and expandability of the Mercury itself. The three-man Apollo spacecraft which was put out for bid in 1961 was supposed to be the 'workhorse' (American Soyuz if you will) program and spacecraft with incremental steps from Low Earth Orbit, to the Moon and beyond. That got hijacked by setting the Lunar goal in less than a decade. Anything that did not lead directly to meeting that goal had to dropped and I agree that was no help to future efforts.

2) The Shuttle was a jobs programme at it heart. A sop to an industry facing cuts and layoff. That was the original sin.

No it wasn't that originally but that's what Nixon made it and frankly under the circumstances NASA was lucky to get that much support. Even Nixon believed that NASA could make it a way to reduce the cost to access space but between OMB and Congress the money was always shy and support fickle to say the least. Ford and Carter actually did more to revive the American aerospace industry with renewed defense spending. Now if you want to argue that SLS is a jobs program I won't really disagree because it was never actually billed as anything else. The Shuttle however was an honest if somewhat over-hyped and dishonestly explained attempt to go back and start doing space access in a more sensible and supportable manner. Apollo as we know it is very much to blame for how that turned out both in scope and organization.

We should never have 'needed' a do-everything and include every center and possible sponsor space Ferrari acting as a truck in the first place as other options would have done better with the same or slightly less funds and support but once it became the "program of record" then the post-Apollo "failure is not an option" mentality kicked in and NASA could not consider any alternatives or deviation. (It became another "goal" rather than a tool just like going to the Moon with much the same results. The ISS was treated the same way)

Randy
 
I don't think even Bill thought Viking and Voyager were bad ideas once NASA had trimmed them down from Voyager/Grand Tour, respectively...

I thought I recall Proxmire objecting to Viking all the way to the bitter end. But I'd have to do some digging to confirm that, look at his roll call votes, etc.
 
A frankly better senario would have been to restart Apollo CSM production. Use Saturn 1B as a launcher. Skylab had provisions for two or three long duration mission, or half a dozen short ones. A backup also existed.
That could have been used till the early 1980’s when a better and more realistic shuttle comes on line.

Best POD would have been to delay the shuttle program for a decade and keep Apollo a little longer. By then the shuttle could be designed with better tech and without the design requirement to launch/service huge spy satellites in orbit.
 

kernals12

Banned
If the Space Shuttle had worked as well as they said it would, imagine how much further NASA's budget would go and how many more probes they could launch.
 
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