Could the Space Shuttle have succeeded?
- Thread starter kernals12
- Start date
Really depends on how he words it but honestly, the USSR could have put up a one or two-man "mini-station" with the R7 and Vostok/Voshkod which was a bit more versitile than the Atlas/Mercury the US had. (And keep in mind we'd planned "mini-space stations" to work with those for if and when we had a more powerful upper stage)
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/one-man-space-station.5237/#lg=thread-5237&slide=2
http://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2016/11/one-man-space-station-1960.html
Model Build log and pictures here: http://beyondthesprues.com/Forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=i4c1cnrva7g573s1v4e65amo83&topic=1917.0;all
We didn't even come close to the capability of the Vostok and Voshkod versions of the R7 until the Titan II GLV came along in 1965, which is also when the Saturn 1 was ready to go which actually beat the Soviet capability till Proton came along about 1967.
But the OMB did NOT continue to push them to do so, and the reason why was the bay length had now been tied to an Air Force requirment NOT just NASA's. And OMB, like everyone else wasn't in the loop about the actual structure and organizatoin of the NRO so a they simply asked the same Air Force people NASA had and got the same answer. Subject dropped, and myth of it being an Air Force "spy-sat" requirment that drove the bay length got started.
But they were never going to get that funding and it was obvious they weren't. Carter bailing them out didn't help either as they now had 'proof' that they would always get the money they "needed" when they needed it when the opposite was true.
Note we've mentioned before there were actually "two" (2) "NASA's" at the time. A group that had come from the previous agencies such as NACA, ABMA and others who were rather used to operating on limited if not asture budgets and support and what I call the "Air Force NASA" who had just come from another 'successful' high-budget/high-priority set of programs developing and fielding the United States first ICBM's. The former was used to getting programs done with little finanical or material support that itself was often inconsistant and fickle. The latter was used to getting what they wanted when they wanted and with minimumal oversight and/or argument. And when such was present they were used to having a managment system which would go to bat at the highest levels to ensure that funding and support remained. Oddly it was around the time that NASA's priority and budget were ramping up the same support and financing was actually ramping down to 'maintenanance' levels in the ICBM programs so part of the motivation to make the move to NASA was to work somewhere where the support was still high and likely to remain so for, well, at LEAST a decade.
While the older group was well aware, and often stated that such high support was not the 'normal' the younger group never believed or accepted this argument. It was not concivable that the Uniited States, once committed to a course of action would every back away or reduce its commitment even after it had achieved its stated goal. One group understood history and the other beileved that history had changed. One was right the other had coopted the people in charge. When the budget began to drop after 1966 some saw it as an inevitable return to 'normal' had begun, others saw it as only a short aberation due to the final run-up to landing on the Moon soon to be followed by an even bigger commitment to going to Mars and beyond. This despite the obvious fact that the budget drop ensured that the closed down Apollo production lines were now going to be even harder to bring back on-line and that the post-Apollo planning that had already taken place was being starved of funds and now had no means of being launched. NASA couldn't do anything with the Apollo equipment becuase there was no new Apollo equipment to be had and what was availble had for the most part already been allocated to what projects they could.
And still a big part of NASA believed that this was only 'temporary'.
Nope, that's not what the history shows at all. NASA started out and prior to 1962 had a slow and steady progression in both space and aeronautics planned out for the next couple of decades. That went out the window when Kennedy chose the Moon as THE goal and gave a timeline of less than 10 years. Aeronautics was reduced drastically as it had no applicability to getting to the Moon. Robotic probes that didn't have anything to do with furthering the Lunar mission were scaled back, pushed into the future, or outright cancled. Landing a man on the Moon and returning him safetly to the Earth was THE goal and program and NASA's number one priority. Anything else was secondary at best and would remain that way until AFTER the goal was achieved. What programs and efforts DID get anywhere during this period were either legacy already budgeted efforts, (the X-15 for example) or programs that those interesed in the research could find inovative and cheap ways to fund them further. (The Lifting Bodies were in this catagory, some Air Force funding was available but for the most part the program used 'spare' parts from aircraft and in-house volunteer work to actualy build the prototype vehicles. The success of those and some spare money, (really only a couple of million dollars) allowed the 'heavy-weight' versions to be built and tested and even then they only proceeded because it was felt they could address some of the concerns aimed at Lifting Bodies as possible Shuttle orbiters or boosters)
If your project could not be pretty well tied to either getting to the Moon on time or used for the funded post-Apollo projects your funding was taken to feed Apollo.
Actually the idea was that the Shuttle would only be a small part of the 'post-Apollo' program... Until it was the only part of that program to be authorized then IT became the new program. And the USAF never agreed to provide any funding for the Shuttle, only "political" (as in "Ya, we can use it if we have to" thinking they never would have to use it) support. The NRO had tried to convince NASA to ignore the Air Force 'requirments' but since NASA didn't know who they were they ignored the NRO instead. The Air Force ended up paying for the Shuttle faciity at Vandenburg and to train and fly some astonauts, the NRO payed for a couple of missions but generally NASA was still on the hook for paying for Shuttle flights and operations.
Randy
Not actually, Concorde made sense in the thinking of the time and wasn't questioned very much as it was assumed that supersonic travel was the next evolution of air travel. The British/French effort actually moved ahead while the US effort was slow getting started mostly due to Apollo since NASA would (obviously) have a major part in a government funded effort which was the plan. It was actually that American effort more than the Concorde, (or (Tu-144 in the USSR) that garnered questions. Especially with the requirement of Mach-3 flight, 150 to 300 passengers and such. The main problem was it rapidly became clear while Concorde was being built that supersonic flights over populated areas was going to be a big problem and that the supersonic engines were not going to fit into evloving aircraft noise regulations. Hence the current efforts towards "quite" supersonic flight and non-afterburning super-cruise engines.
Randy
Right. Kennedy opted not to go for a space station, because he was advised (correctly) that the United States could not beat the Soviets to deploying one.
And after Gagarin and the Bay of Pigs, he needed an objective where the U.S. *could* win the race, with sufficient investment.
Unfortunately, after Webb's retirement, NASA got admins from the second group. Starting with Tom Paine.
I think that has NASA gotten an administrator with a more realistic understanding of the possible after Webb's departure - and such men did exist - there was still room to pursue a more rational and fruitful HSF program post-Apollo than the one we actually got.
Well, Hermes was quite doable if they'd ever settled on what it was they wanted Hermes to do. But yes. This was known to some extent when designing the shuttle, which is one reason why the shuttle was the size it was - that big cargo bay kept the density down which lowered the heat flux per unit area.
Hmm. Was the Saturn 1C 10m wide? Because with a 10m dia. body verniers would have enough authority, but not if it had only 6m diameter. You'd need H1 engines at 6m.
The J-2 was powerful enough to play a part in an abort?
Hm. I swear I remember one of my documents going into that and giving a different answer (albeit, not an answer known at the time the shuttle was designed). No idea which one it would be. It hasn't been in any of the ones I've looked in so far.
I forget what NASA defined as a "space station" when they presented Kennedy with "ways to beat the Ruskies", but it was significantly more than the R7 or even Proton would be able to put up in one launch.
I don't know if it would have been enough for the public - I suspect actually it would have been - but it was something that I think the US actually had a pretty good chance of beating the Soviets to, given what we know about their program in hindsight.
What source are you going off here? Because this isn't how the Space Shuttle Decision presents what happened.
Really? I don't think it would have been obvious to me. I mean... The shuttle was expected to be knocking around for a generation and in fact was in use for a little more than a generation, the idea that such an important piece of hardware wouldn't get incremental upgrades is nuts. Especially when those upgrades would not be expensive.
fasquardon
Kennedy wasn't operating with hindsight, though.
And he'd be taking the risk of settling on a station, and taking two risks: 1) That the Soviets were not quite as far ahead in heavy lift or human spaceflight capability as they appeared, with regard to their ability to deploy a space station; 2) that the Soviets were not, in fact, planning to go to the Moon. A lunar landing, after all, is going to trump any space station.
It's certainly possible to butterfly away the Moon decision, but not easily once Bay of Pigs and Gagarin are in place, especially not once Webb and MacNamara had formally recommended the Moon as the best option - even with Weisner's opposition.
No, it was 6.6 m. Frankly, I don't believe you. I want to see your math. I know @e of pi talked about H-1s in a similar setup before, but that was to do with allowing powered, SpaceX-style recover, for which the F-1A is grossly oversized.
Not directly. However, if you've been following the saga of putting crew on Delta IV Heavy or Atlas V, you'll recall that one of the major challenges is that the trajectory that those upper stages have to fly due to their low thrust creates significant abort black zones during part of the trajectory. For that reason, the DEC is being manifested for Starliner launches, since the additional thrust of the extra RL10 corrects the problem. Obviously the Falcon 9 doesn't have this problem because the Merlin Vacuum has a much greater thrust than the RL10 and can therefore fly a more abort-friendly trajectory with minimal issue. This problem would be more acute with Apollo due to the jettisoning of the abort tower (versus the integral abort systems for Dragon2 and Starliner). Hence, a larger engine is very useful for crewed ascent.
Additionally, you can see that the S-IVB provided a much larger payload for the Saturn I than the S-IV did, in part because the J-2S provided over twice the thrust of the RL10 cluster and therefore allowed a considerably larger stage overall. This would be important if you wanted to launch larger or higher delta-V payloads like space station modules or interplanetary probes, which obviously NASA would.
From Jenkins:
(I-28)
It's no surprise that ablators were dropped like hot potatoes as soon as it became realistically possible to do without them.
Lose any "one" factor and it's likely Kennedy would have chosen something, pretty much anything, else
Paine's decision to push for the IPP and tell the centers to "dream big" just has never made a lot of sense to me. He'd been around long enough to understand what was going on but seems to have drunk the koolaid that there was no way the US would 'give up-on-space' and that anythind LESS than the full IPP was going to be giving up.
In answer to your question of "Where's my jetpack/hoverboard?" you left out flying car and vacation home on the Moon but I got that
Now think about the 'average' driver you've seen on the road and ask yourself if you REALLY, REALLY want to give them another dimension to be able to screw up in? The biggest issue with SST's is that they only spend a part of the trip supersonic. Over 'residential or living' areas they either have to be sub-sonic or at very high altitude and in any case they have to slow down into the regular traffic pattern which is their very worst speed and handling zone. Hence the idea to put swing-wings on them but that got heavy quickly, (Boeing actually built a protoype of the wing pivot out of titanium and it clocked in at almost 3 tons) for less than a perfect outcome. And once you realize that, escpecially at the time, trans-continential rather than trans-oceanic was the major route where most traffic was going to be you realize that it was also the one route where supersonic flight wasn't going to work efficiently. Super-fast trains take a lot to set up and a lot to maintain which is fine where your constantly moving large urban populations around between dense centers but not so much when your moving them large distances with long stretches of rail to maintain. At least not when you're 'competition' is high subsonic aircraft.
Fear not though, Supertrain is coming! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertrain
)Randy
One problem is unless the cost of launching things comes literally orders of magnitudes cheaper there is no real reason to go out into space outside of launching satellites. There is literally nothing there that isn't much cheaper obtained on Earth. I read stories about mining the Moon but unless space launches are much cheaper the cost of the launches far outweigh the cost of expanding mines. It doesn't make economic sense to $500 million to bring back 100 tons of iron. Pure gold costs $1500 an ounce right now (https://offers.learcapital.com/a/jg...kwd=&msclkid=39cd2d6aa7e71666a91970ebb6f4b6cb) and there are 2- troy ounces in a pound and 2,000 pounds in a ton so a ton of gold is $60 million so a 100 tons of gold is $6 billion, sounds like it would pay off, but it probably wouldn't.
That is pure gold, not gold ore. So you would first have to find it then mine it, purify and ship it, which would far outweigh the cost IMO. You would have to build a large scale mining operation shipping both equipment and men up there along with tons of very expensive food. You would also have to build a smelter and probably a nuclear power plant to provide energy. After you pay for all that the gold would be shipped.
That is pure gold, not gold ore. So you would first have to find it then mine it, purify and ship it, which would far outweigh the cost IMO. You would have to build a large scale mining operation shipping both equipment and men up there along with tons of very expensive food. You would also have to build a smelter and probably a nuclear power plant to provide energy. After you pay for all that the gold would be shipped.
Lose any "one" factor and it's likely Kennedy would have chosen something, pretty much anything, else
If you mean that you needed the combo of Gagarin plus Bay of Pigs to get Kennedy to the Moon Decision, I'm not going to disagree, really.
Paine was just a bad pick all around. Perfectly capable in a subsidiary management role, but clearly had no sense at all of the political terrain the agency was moving into.
He's a perfect case in point of how you even a highly experienced and knowledgeable candidate can still fail miserably as NASA Administrator. Webb far better understood the political realities.
NASA had several ideas for space stations, none of which could be 'in-place' in less than a decade or more and all, (except few 'non-official' ones) of which would require a bigger launch vehicle than anything the US had at the time. (Saturn 1 was 'likely' to be ready by around 1962/3 but what would the Soviets have by then, especially if they knew what the US planned to do?) Also our only way to get a crew to the station was Mercury-Atlas and neither was very much of a 'good' support vehicle. While one of the un-offical suggestions was to USE the Atlas, (https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a18469/nasa-first-space-station/) this wasn't actually NASA but a Krafft Ehricke/Convair design suggestion. In truth the Atlas performance would have to be significantly improved to allow the needed payload to orbit. And there STILL wasn't any real way to get crew to it other than to commit to building and launching the hypothetical "space gliders" of the concept as the Mercury was neither capable of docking or allowing the astronaut to EVA.
(You need to pay up front for the larger Mission Control to unlock that option...
)Now that's not to say NASA didn't have 'some' ideas. I pointed out the "Mercury Space Station" based on an Agena upper-stage but it could be and was argued that the Soviet's could easily match that with known capability. A 24ft radius inflatable torus station was proposed, (https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4308/ch9.htm) along with several other 'self-deploying' station designs but none of them were 'near-term' and all needed some sort of delivery and assembly spacecraft which wasn't yet built.
As noted Kennedy nor anyone else had that hingsight available and they NEEDED a clear win, and soon as it didn't look like the Soviets were going to slow down anytime soon. The Saturn 1 first stage booster was 'ready' by early 1962 but there was as of yet no upper stage. And you still have the problem that the only manned spacecraft you have is the Mercury capsule.
This is one (https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/newly-declassified-document-about-spy-satellites-on-the-1795124683) is from a fast-search, but I've read it in several places, and though this one 'acknowldeges' the payload bay was designed to meet NRO/Air Force needs that's not exactly true as NRO didn in fact NOT need it at the moment but could build to it since they, (unlike the Air Force) were aware that if the Shuttle went forward it would become the ONLY US launch vehicle for large payloads. (The Air Force finally 'got' this when funding for advanced Titan-IIIM's was cancled with the Shuttle given as the reason)
I think the exact quote I'm looking for came from "After Apollo" (https://www.amazon.com/After-Apollo-American-Palgrave-Technology/dp/1137438525) but to paraphrase NASA had gone to the Air Force and gotten confirmation that they would 'support' a shuttle with a large cargo bay and delta wings when they were also approached by an Under-Secretary of the Air Force who informed them that the Air Force "requirement" were in fact more "suggestions" and could be flexible if so desired. As NASA WANTED the large cargo bay and delta wings they told everyone it was a hard requirement from the Air Force for "military and intelligence needs" and everyone bought it.
You can't really argue that dropping them as DoD rather than NASA requirement shut the OMB up pretty fast...
Keep in mind that the Shuttle WAS constantly upgraded and improved in incremental steps. Glass-cockpit, upgraded engines and life support, re-vamped power system, improved SRBs all happened to increase performance. But the basic Orbiter never got improved even though that had been planned, the SRB's were never replaced with LRB's, the ET got lightened but the 'stack' never really changed. And NASA wasn't ever satisfied with it as they had and still wanted a fully reusable, top of the line Shuttle. Hence Shuttle II et-al and why they ignored of fought the idea of "using" STS parts for high capacity SDLV's like Shuttle C. It wasnt' that they didn't get to 'upgrade' the Shuttle it was that they couldn't "upgrade" (build a newer and better model and get back to building the IPP/STS model) the Shuttle the way they wanted to so they kept trying to make it 'fit' into the model they wanted.
What NASA wanted was the "shuttle" from the original IPP program with the fully reusabel booster and orbiter AND the entire IPP so they could have the flight rate needed and it being the only US launch vehicle etc.
The rather obvious fact from the start was that Nixon and Congress MEANT it when they said NASA was never again going to have the priority and budget they had at peak Apollo and they would HAVE to take a place as just another agency in the US government. The majority of NASA managment from Apollo never would and never did accept that, and the Shuttle clearly shows that. When you also look at later decision based on similar choices, (https://www.wired.com/2012/06/evolution-vs-revolution-the-1970s-battle-for-nasas-future-1978/) the thinking, bias' and blind-spots are kinda obvious and understandable if not really acceptable.
In essence the Shuttle 'failed' because certain segments of NASA could not accept the current post-Apollo situation and refused to compromise on the future to the point they were forced to compromise over and over again instead of working to get an viable starting point system to evolve from.
Couple of things to keep in mind is that they also didn't burn off at a predictable and/or steady rate especaily as the protected structure size grew. This greatly complicates the entry aerodynamics for the Orbiter so it was unlikely to be acceptable at any point for it as an overall TPS And abalator TPS forumulas WERE constantly improving so it was considered for quite a while even with that issue in the hopes they could find a way to combine sections of abilator with a 'tougher' TPS system to handle the lower heating areas. So you have to be really careful when you read up on this because they often won't be explicit that they are talking about only putting abalator materials on certain sections of the orbiter (such as the tail and wing leading edges and nose for example) rather than the whole vehicle. And Workable Goblin is correct that it was determined early on that even with a 'better' abalator than that used on the X-15 the time factor was going to be significant to remove it all and then recoat it which you have to do for every flight.
Now granting that the tiles are/were a pain that wasn't clear at the time and they really did look like an excellent system for the size the Orbiter was. Now if they could have only found a reliable and robust attachment method other than glue
Randy
Yes, and? The whole point of the shuttle was indeed to reduce the cost of launch orders of magnitude for precisely this reason. If it had worked out the way NASA thought it would (not that that was particularly realistic, but bear with me) satellites would still have been a major business rationale, but there would have been many other areas that might have become economical; private space research, space manufacturing, space tourism, and so on. You're also missing scientific research, which was after all a major mission for the Shuttles in practice, both directly with various missions (Spacelab, the Shuttle radar missions, and so on), and indirectly with the construction of the ISS and the launch of a number of scientific spacecraft.
You're entirely correct, which is why most proposals for space mining focus on using the materials in space, where the economic case is less negative. Instead of competing with cheap Earth-based mining, now you're competing with cheap Earth-based mining + expensive launch from Earth. Alternatively, you can manufacture stuff in space that is not possible to replicate on the ground, though this is less popular nowadays than in the 1980s. It's still not enough to close the case except maybe for producing propellant and life-support materials, but you can get a lot closer to economic viability that way.
Thing is, "going to the Moon" is an absolute, major distinction from "putting up a space station" the public readily understands. It is a hearts and minds things. Whereas "our Yankee space station is vastly superior to Ivan's space station" is a much less weighty narrative, and the Russians could most definitely launch some kind of "space station" even restricted to R-7. Of course to be much of anything it would have to be modular with teeny tiny modules. But the same was true of the "off the shelf" plans drawn up immediately for US stations launched on Atlas and the like. Either we'd have to lash up an upgraded new rocket stage combo to achieve heftier throw weight which would take development time, thus buying the Soviets time to similarly keep up, or devise something within the limited launch capacity of something on the shelf--and either way, designing the mini-station itself on whichever scale is itself time consuming. The big firms had their draft plans already, but finalizing the details cannot be too rushed. So a "station race" was a bad bet; the Soviets, soft-focusing the actual limits of what they put up and able to simply disavow rushed failed efforts, taking their usual "let's try this launch with fingers crossed and hope it works" ultimate version of "all up testing" could easily win, or anyway keep apparent pace.
There was a similar risk even in Lunar missions, that the Soviets could "win" by getting a crewed Lunar flyby past the Moon before the USA was quite ready to go for the whole JFK package of land a man and return them to Earth. It would be vaguely obvious to the public that doing the latter is a greater feat than the former, but they would have little idea of the magnitude of the difference, certainly not in such wonky terms as "delta-V" we would be comfortable using as a yardstick of accomplishment. Thus the worry that the Soviets might possibly manage a half-assed "Zond" style flyby causing NASA to recommend the Apollo 8 mission, which was nowhere on their systematic checklist of preparation building up to the proper crew landing and return goal being met. The public would just look at the distance to the Moon and the date, and credit the Soviets with "beating" us to Lunar space, never mind the huge difference between orbiting the Moon versus flyby. The Zond missions actually launched seemed clearly to be preparations for exactly such a crewed mission.
While it is perfectly clear that ablators are a poor option for a vehicle meant to aerodynamically glide due to unpredictable ablation, this seems like entirely a red herring issue for a proposal for a vehicle that reenters in traditional ballistic fashion then parachutes with or without retropropulsive terminal braking a la Soyuz or TKS to a soft landing, and but with the capsule designed to be reusable. The straightforward thing to do is mount the disposable ablative on a light, removable substrate which can be bolted onto the capsule permanent structure, and simply unlatch the snap-on heat shield from the body. This can be done with lighter side panels too, or the upper body can be designed with shingle type lighter shielding along the lines of Mercury and Gemini.
The point being that no one wanted to transition from say Apollo to Apollo CM upgrades designed to be used many times, except for such obvious refurbishments as replacing the heat shield and parachutes; they wanted to regard the whole ballistic capsule era as a side track and "get back" to proper spaceplanes. Given that one has no intention of ever reusing a given capsule it is simpler and a bit lighter overall to just plate the damn ablative right onto the main body, but clearly there would be some synergies offsetting the slightly greater complication of bolt-on replaceable shields--such as the offset of the backing layer from the body serving itself as a heat shield layer, allowing the backing structure to be designed to get hotter since the gap and limited direct heat transfer of the mountings to the main body allows this. Now it is possible to focus on plating the disposable backing structure efficiently and just bolt it onto the capsule refurbished for another mission, or to manufacture a great many shields and stockpile them.
This "argument" seems to be making the rounds of the inter-web again recently
Responses range from "If we don't go into space we might as well nuke ourselves and get it over with" to "Humanity needs to expand or we're not human anymore" to "Humans shouldn't pollute the universe as well as Earth" to "Robots are simpler, cheaper and we'll be uploading ourselves soon anyway: etc.The thing with exploiting resource in space is the simple fact you exploit them IN space, not on Earth. Needs aluminum on the Moon, go out and get it 'cause shipping it up from Earth is a none starter. Being a member of "The Millennial Project" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project) the 'why' has never been the problem but you DO want to find a way to make it all 'pay' for itself.
So the question of launch costs ends up being included in the overall price of 'living' in space and the lower the better but you take what you can get and run with it till you come up with something better. What would people DO in space? Wrong question, what you SHOULD say is "since we're up here anyway what can we do that you need?"
It costs a lot to push something UP the gravity well but little to bring it back down again.In context you already have a VERY large, VERY powerful "nuclear" reactor in space so energy if you really want it isnt' that much of an issue. But you DO have to bring a lot of stuff from Earth to get anything done in space. Arguably less with ISRU but you still need equipment and infrastructure to get even that done so it's never going to be free and easy as some people think.
As I pointed out up-thread we already have a decent TSTO orbital system with Falcon 9R and Dragon 1/2 which could be better with full reusabilty. (It works out to around $2,700 dollars per kg to LEO for a Falcon 9R) Currently you could (in theory) put a person into LEO for around half a million dollars just for the person and whatever he's wearing. (Call it $550,000 for a person in a space suit) So what can they do? Well with today's space suit technology they can with enough support and preperation work in increasing discomfort and decreasing efficiency work on EVA for about 9 hours, but you'd get better value for 6 hours or less. (EVA is tough, especially using a pressure suit) 8 to 10 hour 'days' inside a pressurized environment is likely more achivable. Run and service orbital remotes that service satellites? Actually service satellites? (One thing Workable Goblin forgot to note was part of the 'sizing' of the Shuttle was not only could it deliver satellites TO orbit but it could bring them back to Earth for repair/servicing and then take them BACK into orbit. Now it couldn't do any of this without the assumed "Space Tug" that it would carry up each trip to go and get these satellites to bring back for servicing and/or repair but that's part of the whole "system" that never got built)
The point of course is any of this 'economically' worth the cost? If everything is based on and from Earth of course not but that was supposed to be the whole "point" of the actual "Space Transporation System" which would include an Earth-to-Orbit Shuttle, orbital Space Tug, Orbital Transfer Tug, Reusable Lunar Lander, etc. We never got past that first, small part and that itself was highly compromised by all parties involved.
Randy
Two-fer!
As I've often pointed out in AH's even getting Sheppard up on a sub-orbital mission before Gagarin would have greatly reduced the pressure on Kennedy. The main problem was Sputnik had BADLY 'scared' the public and politicians and Eisenhower's attitude while correct and understandable in context, (he was FAR more interested in both the defense implications of space reconnaissance AND determined not to let the military make space another "front" in the Cold War) was exactly the WRONG one to have when you have panicked civilians and politicians to deal with. Heck Vanguard not having failed in such a spectacular and public manner would have even helped. As it was…
While doing a flyby of the Moon would have caused a spike in public interest which could be fanned into a fear of a Soviet come-back in truth it would have been far too little far too late. Even the Soviet sample return mission was rushed and botched and it was all because the USSR didn’t believe the US would actually and fully commit to reaching the Moon in less than 10 years. Oddly enough it was the same denial that the US had had prior to Sputnik.
Which is what is confusing really because I’m sure Webb understood what would happen if Paine took over. I know it was less common then than now to have a “Deputy” passed over for the top spot but doing so would have sent a clear message to the rest of the management team of what was to come.
Well to be honest the “spacecraft will only economical when they are operated like aircraft” paradigm is still around today even though you’d think we actually understood how this all works a lot better now. So the idea that something with wings and wheels would always be more economical than something without made sense. Similarly the concept of ‘powered’ landing actually DID make some sense and was looked at but not very deeply or for very long. (And obviously used jet engines rather than rockets for even ‘more’ economy
) Because in the end while wings and wheels weighed more it was a better ‘passive’ landing system and would always be more capable in areas like controlled landing and returned payload.In theory recovering, refurbishing and reusing a capsule designed to economize and ease that process makes a huge amount of sense and I’d have liked to see more done with it but as I pointed out above one of the main rationalizations for how much utility the Shuttle would have was the idea it could not only launch but recover and relaunch satellites. No capsule could do that, and you quickly run into sizing and parachute issues if you try and go bigger.
It never did happen anyway but along the way current satellite operations and design have rendered that idea moot anyway. And much like some aspects of air transport operations which became “standard” even though more efficient and practical methods COULD be used but would cost too much to implement, that paradigm may not be able to be changed down the line even if the capability DOES come into existence.
And while that works for strictly ballistic capsules it would be tougher to apply to shapes like a biconic reentry vehicle or a lifting body both of which can carry more payload than a straight-up ballistic capsule. Further unless you also put effort into making the entire launch vehicle as reusable as possible then any savings from reusing the capsule are going to be minimal at best.
And that’s where the “Shuttle” came from, the desire to bring back all the expensive stuff and only discard the bare minimum it anything at all.. But that could have been done differently as well
In the end it is the sum of the bias’, assumptions, and more human than technical factors that end up determining what you end up with.Randy
"Humans shouldn't pollute the universe as well as Earth" is particularly dumb. Do these people realize how big space really is? We couldn't pollute even Lunar distance orbits if we tried. There is far, far much volume there to matter.This "argument" seems to be making the rounds of the inter-web again recently
The thing with exploiting resource in space is the simple fact you exploit them IN space, not on Earth. Needs aluminum on the Moon, go out and get it 'cause shipping it up from Earth is a none starter. Being a member of "The Millennial Project" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project) the 'why' has never been the problem but you DO want to find a way to make it all 'pay' for itself.
So the question of launch costs ends up being included in the overall price of 'living' in space and the lower the better but you take what you can get and run with it till you come up with something better. What would people DO in space? Wrong question, what you SHOULD say is "since we're up here anyway what can we do that you need?"
In context you already have a VERY large, VERY powerful "nuclear" reactor in space so energy if you really want it isnt' that much of an issue. But you DO have to bring a lot of stuff from Earth to get anything done in space. Arguably less with ISRU but you still need equipment and infrastructure to get even that done so it's never going to be free and easy as some people think.
As I pointed out up-thread we already have a decent TSTO orbital system with Falcon 9R and Dragon 1/2 which could be better with full reusabilty. (It works out to around $2,700 dollars per kg to LEO for a Falcon 9R) Currently you could (in theory) put a person into LEO for around half a million dollars just for the person and whatever he's wearing. (Call it $550,000 for a person in a space suit) So what can they do? Well with today's space suit technology they can with enough support and preperation work in increasing discomfort and decreasing efficiency work on EVA for about 9 hours, but you'd get better value for 6 hours or less. (EVA is tough, especially using a pressure suit) 8 to 10 hour 'days' inside a pressurized environment is likely more achivable. Run and service orbital remotes that service satellites? Actually service satellites? (One thing Workable Goblin forgot to note was part of the 'sizing' of the Shuttle was not only could it deliver satellites TO orbit but it could bring them back to Earth for repair/servicing and then take them BACK into orbit. Now it couldn't do any of this without the assumed "Space Tug" that it would carry up each trip to go and get these satellites to bring back for servicing and/or repair but that's part of the whole "system" that never got built)
The point of course is any of this 'economically' worth the cost? If everything is based on and from Earth of course not but that was supposed to be the whole "point" of the actual "Space Transporation System" which would include an Earth-to-Orbit Shuttle, orbital Space Tug, Orbital Transfer Tug, Reusable Lunar Lander, etc. We never got past that first, small part and that itself was highly compromised by all parties involved.
Randy
The very powerful nuclear reactor in space provides little energy by the time it hits Earth's orbit. It is more potent on the Moon due to it not having an atmosphere but it is not enough. The energy is still too diffuse. You have reasonable temperatures for industrialization(barely) for at most half the time a month, reaching an average of only 224 degrees during its daytime. Then it plunges back down again 14 days later. For industrialization, you want it hot, really hot. At least the temperature to boil water and the Sun is barely able to do so on the Moon's surface. You also want that power as close to 24/7 as possible, not off half a month and then on half a month. You really do need that nuclear reactor.
They can't just send things down for a functioning economy, they have to have things sent up to pay for it otherwise why would they bother and just declare independence which causes you to lose the hundreds of billions you put into it in the first place. My guess is that it would be food. Basically it would be very expensive MREs. The food goes up and metals or whatever comes down. It would take many tons of metal for a few pounds of food however due to its extreme transport cost. Again you need orders of magnitude cheaper transport which I doubt would be as easy as you imagine. It would take tens if not hundreds of billions just to iron out the bugs before it could happen.
My best guess is that we would eventually have to build gigantic nuclear-powered rockets to do it. The reactor would have to be shielded with lead but due to its extreme size and enormous energy that wouldn't be a problem. The lead would weight a lot but since nuclear fuel is literally millions of times more efficient than chemical that isn't the problem. The problem is that you would have to build failsafes on failsafes on failsafes to make sure the rocket doesn't break up. A chemical rocket blowing up shortly after launch is pretty bad as it kills the crew and a multi-billion dollar piece of equipment but a nuclear-powered rocket that blows up on launch or shortly afterward could spread radiation a good deal of distance. The Uranium itself would be no big deal but the Transuranics would be. Their short half-life would make them deadly.
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No, actually you don't. First, it's possible to concentrate sunlight to produce much higher temperatures than naturally occur, something which is in fact done on Earth. Now, on Earth this is only used for research purposes because it's much easier and cheaper to use chemical fuels for heating, but in space doing so would be vastly more complicated because you have to manufacture the chemical fuels and oxidizers in the first place instead of being able to dig them up and burn them in the free air that makes up something like 60% of the required mass. Second, you can generate electricity from sunlight and use that for heating, as in for instance an electric furnace. Again, on Earth we have chemical fuels which we can use to produce heat more cheaply for many applications (but not all), but in space that's much less of an option. Solar energy can absolutely produce extremely high temperatures, quite adequate for any industrial process you care to name.
Now, as for your argument about nights...that's true. On the moon. And only the moon. If you put your industry in free space or on an asteroid or basically anywhere that's not a planet or moon--which, in fact, most supporters of space industry believe would be the most sensible option--then this problem almost completely vanishes. In high orbit areas (which is where you would want to put the industry, to keep debris produced by it away from valuable low orbit or geostationary zones), nighttime does not exist and solar power offers quite high power densities, comparable to or even greater than nuclear power without advanced (non-existent) radiators. And even on the moon there are ways around this issue; you can put solar panels in space and beam power down, for example, as has been proposed not just for lunar bases but also for Earth itself, or use large banks of batteries or fuel cells to produce electricity at night. In the outer solar system nuclear reactors become very useful because sunlight is too diffuse to produce much power and solar cells themselves stop working very well (in principle you can get around both issues with various methods, but it's not clear that this is better than just using a nuclear power plant). But there's little reason to use nuclear power in space itself as long as you're closer than about Jupiter.
This is barely coherent, but the independence of space colonies is definitely not something that would happen anytime soon. First of all, space settlements would inherently be highly dependent on Earth for a long and possibly indefinite period; they would require constant supplies of goods that would be difficult or impossible to produce in space. Second, the population of such colonies would likely have substantial links to their founding country, just the same as every other colony. It would probably take decades or centuries for them to develop their own identity to the point where they would even want independence, much less attempt to get it.
More importantly, "sending things down" (or rather finding some business that can pay) is the crucial issue for ideas about space colonization. The problem is not figuring out what they can buy from Earth, which is an endless list of stuff; it's finding something that they can sell to Earth to make it worthwhile for someone to spend the money to build a colony and develop space industry in the first place. Again, as I said earlier the most practical business for a space colony appears to be selling the ability to not launch stuff into space, precisely because that's very expensive. And again, as I said earlier at the moment the only things that it seems that it might be worthwhile to actually produce in space are propellants and life support raw materials like water, since those don't require a large amount of processing and reduce the amount of mass you need to launch significantly. But even those don't quite seem practical just yet.
Actually it probably wouldn't be food because if you have a permanent presence in space it starts making sense to build a full bioregenerative life support system, i.e. build farms in space to feed the people in space. It works out that at a certain point of mission duration and crew size which is probably smaller than what you would need to actually support full-on space industry it is actually lighter and more efficient to grow food in space instead of transporting it from Earth.
Realistically, what space industry would probably consume would mostly be "high-tech" goods, stuff that is really complicated and expensive to produce so it wouldn't make sense for a while to make it in space. Computer chips, for instance, or many drugs. Earth could also provide living organisms of various sorts to space habitats, since it's unlikely that they would support a great deal of biodiversity for some time.
Again, you probably wouldn't be shipping much down (and most of that would be byproducts or stuff that literally cannot be produced on Earth). What you would be doing would be eliminating the need to ship stuff up; instead of shipping up whole complete satellites, you only need to launch computer chips and a few other things and the spacemen in space build a satellite from that and the resources they've mined from the Moon or an asteroid or something. Sure, they might send down gold or platinum left over from mineral refining, or manufactured goods using the space environment, but that wouldn't be the core of the business.
It is in fact a huge problem. The way you get high thrusts--like you need to take off--is to flood the reactor with a lot of coolant that gets converted into a hot gas that's directed out the back of a nozzle. Which is basically the same way that a chemical rocket works, you're just switching from using the inherent energy of the combustion process to nuclear fuel. This does let you produce a hotter gas, up to a point dictated by not vaporizing the reactor or the nozzle (yes, there are gas-core reactor designs, but they're all crazy), but it works out that while this does raise your ISP (by about a factor of two) it actually reduces your thrust, because that's dependent on the amount of mass you're throwing out, and throwing away oxygen means there's more mass in the exhaust than if you're carrying around a heavy nuclear reactor to produce thrust.
The result is that real nuclear rockets--without shielding--end up having lousy thrust/weight ratios unless you start doing some really heroic (and problematic) engineering. Add enough lead shielding to make the rockets themselves no more dangerous than a nuclear power plant, and they become a complicated way of converting water into hydrogen gas and nothing more, certainly not anything you could or would use to go anywhere. Nuclear rockets have a certain degree of utility in in-space applications (but even there they have serious issues), but they're totally useless for taking off from a planet, never mind the failure issues you point out.