Could the Space Shuttle have succeeded?
- Thread starter kernals12
- Start date
No argument on the technical aspects.
But here is how a Soviet circumlunar flight before Apollo 8 changes the dynamics of the Space Race:
It commits the Soviet Union publicly to a lunar exploration program.
In OTL, Moscow was able to play coy about their intentions, thanks to their extreme secretiveness. They could try to achieve a "first," but if they failed to make it, they could simply halt the effort, and then pretend they had never been trying in the first place. "The Americans were just racing themselves."
This is what happened in November-December 1969, as the Soviets frantically tried to launch a Zond circumlunar flight to beat Apollo 8, right up to the last minute of their launch window. When it didn't work, they scaled back their effort with Zond. Likewise in the summer of 1969, when they tried to one up Apollo 11 with Luna 15. They were secretive about Luna 15's purpose, so that when it created a new impact crater, they could say it achieved its mission, shrug and move on.
It all worked so well that Walter Cronkite could say, in 1974, that “it turned out that the Russians were never in the race at all.” It wasn't until 1989 when we found out just how hard the Soviets had been trying.
But if they manage to send Alexei Leonov and a co-pilot around the Moon and back before the Americans get to lunar orbit, they can no longer claim they weren't trying. It will be far harder for Brezhnev to quietly scale back and terminate the lunar program. This being the case, once it becomes evident that the Soviets are trying to achieve their own lunar surface program - and presumably one-up the Americans, probably with some kind of lunar base - it then becomes harder in turn for Nixon to wind down Apollo.
Not least because, as we now know, the U.S. really did not unerstand just what the state of the Soviet space program really was. NASA management could certainly understand that a circumlunar flight was not nearly as technically impressive as an Apollo 8 profile, to be sure, but the public wouldn't grasp the difference; and now NASA and the White House would be forced to face the possibility that the Soviets were close to their own landing (even though we now know they really weren't) , and who knows else they might be up to?
This is another way of illustrating that the Soviets were always the main drivers in the Space Race.
It takes gargantuan amount of space to produce much energy from the Sun. Chemical and nuclear plants are around 2 orders of magnitude more power-dense. Solar energy is simply laughably inefficient. It just doesn't get very hot this far from the Sun. Less so from Moon orbit simply because it doesn't have to heat the atmosphere but I am not sure it can compete with a nuke plant.
Batteries have power densities that are also laughably low, comparable to solar so you need huge amounts of them to power anything. Batteries are good for convenient low power usage, not so good for high power industrial processes.
Water is certainly not a problem for space colonies, I agree. Just move over a few icy asteroids from the asteroid belt of maybe a KM in size (There are huge numbers of those) or from part of Saturns ring (Ditto). The problem for them buying from Earth is having something worth enough to sell. Anything from Earth is going to be outrageously expensive.
The problem with space farms is that they are almost impossible. They have done experiments trying to build artificial self-sustaining ecosystems and failed miserably every time. The most famous and largest experiment was Biosphere II which had all sorts of problems. We would want to know far more than we do now for there to be a prayer of having self-sustaining agriculture. Complex ecosystems are tough and all modern plants evolved in a complex ecosystem. Food would indeed be the best candidate for shipping up.
Without shipping up you have less a free economy with Earth and more a tribute based extraction. I don't know how long you could do that without massive resentment. Shipping down is cheap but shipping up to pay for it is very expensive.
If you aren't shipping stuff down, what is the point? Why should the people of Earth spend hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars if they don't get anything for it? The problem in all this is that the transportation prices are truly huge. The cost of shipping up and down has to go way, way down or it doesn't pay off.
Nobody on Earth is going to care if there is a thriving trade between the Moon and the Asteroid Belt, what they care about is Earth. Anything that doesn't hit the account ledgers in New York, London or Tokyo etc. really don't count.
And we're talking about operations in...well...space. Which has a lot of empty, well, space. Building a few square kilometers of solar panels is not a big deal if you want hundreds of megawatts of electricity. What you're missing is that chemical power is totally impractical because there are no chemicals in space, at least not available for extraction relatively easily (and if you do extract them, they're vastly more valuable as propellant or in life support), whereas nuclear power plants (and chemical power plants, but no one sane would build one) require massive radiators to dispose of the waste heat generated by their operation. That ends up making them quite comparable in power density to solar cells, despite the superficially smaller size of the reactor itself.
Which is good. Solar cells don't work well when they get hot (just the same way that they don't work well when they're too cold). But if you look at the actual available solar power density of a kilowatt per square meter, that is absolutely high enough for any conceivable purpose. There is no need to fiddle around with more complicated, harder to maintain, and less practical nuclear power plants except in a few special cases where solar power genuinely doesn't work. But those are cases like "I'm around Neptune and there's about 1 watt per square meter" or "I'm on Mars and there can be dust storms lasting months," not merely "I want to do something that requires a lot of power".
First, you're making everything much more complicated than it needs to be. A farm does not need to be a self-sustaining ecosystem; as long as a farm system produces a greater mass of food than the amount of mass that needs to be shipped up to maintain it, then you're still winning. It is entirely reasonable to incorporate mechanical components in the system; however, this doesn't preclude most actual food being grown in space. Self-sustaining ecosystems are something for the far future when you're terraforming a planet or have gargantuan colonies or similar things, not something that you need to greatly reduce resupply requirements for a space industrial base.
Second, it just isn't the case that they "failed miserably every time". Biosphere II was, of course, a failure, but it was also vastly overcomplicated, especially for merely supporting a few humans as opposed to replicating Earth's entire ecosystem. Russian experiments in the same field were much more successful and generally showed that you could reach reasonable closure rates fairly sustainably. Again, Biosphere II was massively overcomplicated and poorly designed.
Third, there are continual experiments with growing food outside of ecosystems, both in the context of space exploration (indeed, the ISS right now has experiments that are growing plants in orbit) and in the context of merely Earthly developments. In all cases this has proven to not be so very much of a problem; if all you want is lettuce, you don't really need an entire ecosystem for it. The main barrier to deploying it is, as I said, that it's rather expensive to actually develop appropriate modules for supporting food growth, and it only really makes sense for long-duration, large-crew operations, beyond the ISS level, which don't exist yet. But if you were actually building a long-term habitat for industrial operations, with scores or hundreds of people rotating through for years or decades, then it would absolutely make sense to grow most of the food there instead of shipping it up from Earth, and the money would be found.
You're really thinking about this the wrong way. Again, it's really easy to find stuff that Earth can sell to space: basically everything. I mean, just look around your house: literally everything there is not currently made in space. Setting up manufacturing lines to make it in space would be expensive and doesn't make much sense unless there's a large demand for it. So a lot of it will, at least for early industrial operations, be bought from Earth. The hard part is finding stuff that space can sell which Earth will pay for so that space operations can actually be sustained instead of being purely money-losing research operations. This is the critical problem with all plans for space industrialization and development. In any case, in the foreseeable future space industry is more likely to be akin to remote mining operations on Earth, like deep-sea oil rigs. These are not environments that breed "massive resentment" despite a highly imbalanced trade deficit, because everyone is only there temporarily and is operating as a kind of tribute extractor anyway.
What Earth is getting is the services provided by the satellites and other in-space operations, at a lower cost (hopefully) than would be the case if they had to launch everything from Earth. Remember, the biggest companies in the world today, like Google, are as much or more about selling intangible services than they are about selling physical products. In this case, that would be things like communications services, observation services, scientific data, potentially electrical power using solar power satellites, and so on. Similarly, they could support operations by space agencies or others to distant points, for example selling propellant to NASA for less than it would cost to launch it. Presuming NASA is working on a mission to somewhere--say, Mars--then this could be an attractive option (unless Shelby wants them to use Alabama rocket fuel or something).
Again, all of this is quite speculative and marginal at the moment, and the only reasonably justifiable "industrial" activity in the near future is going to be producing propellant and life support chemicals in space, thereby bypassing the need to launch them separately from Earth. Examples would be extracting oxygen from the lunar regolith, or producing methane from the Martian atmosphere, or mining and purifying water on the Moon or Mars. All of this would take place in the context of missions to these regions, so it would be rather low-key.
It's not true that if there is a "thriving trade between the Moon and the Asteroid Belt" it would all be invisible on Earth. Who do you think will own the ships traveling between those areas? Who do you think will own the mines? The factories? Who is hiring the workers, who is buying the products, and who is benefiting from the services those products are providing? All of the physical activity might be in space, but the actual money is all on Earth. This is quite similar to how shipping companies can profit from booming trade between locations that their own country is nowhere near, or how financiers can make money off of stock markets outside of their own countries, or how companies these days can make money off of operations all around the world even if they don't necessarily have a physical footprint in some countries.
For a historical analogy, consider how European companies took over and monopolized trade in Southeast Asia during the Age of Exploration and the Age of Colonialism. Only a small part of the products produced in the region actually traveled back to Europe, the most valuable portions: spices, chinaware, and so on. But the companies still profited immensely from their control over local trade by skimming part of the revenue from that off the top and sending it back to Amsterdam and London and so on. Something similar would be true here; not much of the stuff made in space would actually end up on Earth, but people on Earth would control it (at least for decades if not centuries) and so profit from it.
Riain
Banned
A couple of things I've heard of in the past.
The budget was for 5 production Shuttles, but NASA agreed to 4 and use the freed up money for a space station.
There were proposals for a long-duration Shuttle which had a space station module complete with an extendable solar panel in the cargo bay, able to stay in space for 30 days. This was knocked on the head because it was thought that it would compete with an actual, free-floating space station.
How would these two ideas impact on the success of the Shuttle? Would having a 5th orbiter reduce the time pressure on turnaround? Would being able to stay aloft for a month be a good or bad thing overall? What if these 2 things were a result of launching Skyklab B in 1976?
The budget was for 5 production Shuttles, but NASA agreed to 4 and use the freed up money for a space station.
There were proposals for a long-duration Shuttle which had a space station module complete with an extendable solar panel in the cargo bay, able to stay in space for 30 days. This was knocked on the head because it was thought that it would compete with an actual, free-floating space station.
How would these two ideas impact on the success of the Shuttle? Would having a 5th orbiter reduce the time pressure on turnaround? Would being able to stay aloft for a month be a good or bad thing overall? What if these 2 things were a result of launching Skyklab B in 1976?
Riain
Banned
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 thatNow 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
I'm just generally bummed out that the world of atoms stalled in the 70s and the substitute is a porn machine and map in your pocket. The Space Shuttle is part of this; the 'problems' are political/financial rather than technical and could be solved simply by human decisions to build more, accept the cost, develop a programme etc.
To be honest I've heard similar worded stuff since the early 70s when the Space Colonization movement was takiing off, along with others even less complementary towards humans which was actually the point. The statement reflects less a "we need to fix things here on Earth first" (which I can understand but not agree with) than a "human's are scum and need to be stopped from corrupting the universe with their vile presence. Usually. Like the supposed "joke" of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, the actual belief in this rhetoric is questionable at best but still a worrying issue.
[quoet]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.[/quote]
Did I ever mention I'm an L5-er from way back?
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society, https://space.nss.org/brief-history-of-the-l5-society/) If anyone didn't know the L5 Society as the wiki-page states was organized in the mid-70s as a grass-roots support movement for advocating Solar Power Satellites and Space Colonies/indutrialization. Unlike the similar "National Space Insititute" with which it later merged the focus was on more than just political support and advocay. The Hensens were very much "nuts-and-bolts" people who, along with many others would take highly scientific reports and studies and break them down into what they would mean for workers and colonists in space and were very much into small scale demonstration and experimentation to quantify the "Hows" of Space Colonization. Not the high tech, electronic and digital stuff but the little things you were going to have to do to make a colony or base an actual home. A similar group is the Moon Society (https://www.moonsociety.org/mmm) which publish the "Moon Miner's Manifesto" which includes well researched articles ranging from Lunar Habitat design to eventual colonization of the Oort Cloud and beyond.More to the point they sponsored and participated in experimental work for using solar power for industrial purposes for Lunar, Martian and Asteroidal purposes. They then passed those results on to NASA who was so impressed they then offered grants to several universties to fund studies to expand the work. Today you can buy or build a small scale solar smelting rig pretty easily and on the Moon or in space it would be vastly more efficient. But as Workable Goblin points out you don't have to do it on the surface since smelting and seperation process' can take advantage of orbital micro-gravity.
But don't forget the concept of Space Solar Power Satellites, (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2004ESASP.567..165L, https://space.nss.org/media/2008-Energizing-The-Future-Of-Space-Exploration.pdf) beamed power is a thing and supplying surface industrial sites with power isn't going to be an issue. Further as Solar Electric Propulsuion (SEP) is a highly efficient, albeit low thrust, for in-space propulsion you can use the vehicle solar arrays to gather and transmit power while waiting for cargo or a launch window. (Not here NTRS is peeving me off again, both these were openly available for download last year and now they are just abstracts, https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20000074095, https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20000074093)
As WG says it's not as complicated as it might seem. Actual 'cheap' space launch methods are known, many tested on a small scale and we know they'd work both in practice and to reduce the cost of access the main issue is the initial start up costs and/or current inertia due to the lack of need for significantly reduced launch costs. Most of the best concepts predicate an existing in-space infrastructure and population to support and require that kind of access it's like a chicken-or-egg scenerio. Yes you need to find a way to make 'space' pay but just having people and industry up there automatically opens up a large number of 'paying' prospects.
First of all a nuclear rocket engine can't blow up, they can melt, they can shed bits if the matrix isn't designed/build right but they can't blow up like a chemical rocket unless they are designed to do so. (see Kiwi TNT: Safety Tests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Rover#Safety_tests) They can crack open when hitting the ground but if the containment system is designed right, (which isn't hard to do) then you won't get a big release of radiation or scattering of materials.
While you COULD launch a nuclear rocket from the Earth's surface, (injecting LOX into the exhaust which is known as LANTR, (http://www.alternatewars.com/BBOW/Space_Engines/AIAA-2004-3863_TRITON.pdf, which also incorperates a bryton power tap off system to generate electrical power) with say SRB assist since even LANTR's thrust is pretty pathetic, WG's mostly right you wouldn't really want to. You waste to much mass getting off the ground and you also then need to deal with 'back-scatter' radiation because of the atmosphere. A good primer on the problems, issues, solutions and possible configurations can be found here:
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.php#ntr0
In essence you can't sheild the WHOLE reactor since that would mass to much to be able to move. So you put in what is known as a 'shadow' shield between the reactor and the crew. The crew then is in the 'shadow' of the sheild while deadly radiation spews out from the reactor in every other direction. Inside an atmosphere some of this can then hit the atmosphere and be reflected or scattered around the shield to the crew. The less atmosphere the better so you normally wouldn't want to start a reactor until you were at very high atltitude of the vacuum of space. Of course there are ways to 'cheat' such as ASPEN, (AeroSpacePlane with Nuclear Engines, https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/lib-www/la-pubs/00384860.pdf) or the Nuclear Thermal Turbo Rocket (https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2015/07/nuclear-thermal-turbo-rocket-with.html) but those have their own problems.
6Mx6M (20ft by 20ft) solar reflector feeding a concentrator system on Earth (https://www.energymatters.com.au/renewable-news/em4264/) which runs a furnace capable of tempertures of over 1600C (2912F/1873K) so it would do better on the Moon and regolith melts (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19920005262.pdf) at 1380C (2515F/1653K). And as Workable Goblin notes your in space so mega-structrues are pretty easy to work with. We aleady know we can deploy mechanical systems (http://kiss.caltech.edu/workshops/apertures/presentations/santiagoprowald.pdf) up to 15m (50ft) in diameter, and inflatable structures of similar size (https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missions/i/iae), or vastly bigger (Echo Satellite, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Echo, 30.48M/100ft) which can be used to collect, concentrate or convert to electrictiy solar energy. And mind you that's ONLY direct (thermal) use. Electrical conversion output is getting up towards 40%+ so you can get equivelent power to a nuclear reactor for far less mass with solar. (Mind you I happen to prefer nuclear for most surface based purposes but the reactor, sheilding, and distribution system can be pretty mass intensive)
Batteries are used for many applications in space but no one suggests using them for powering industrial process. You could use fuel cells with solar thermal decomposed water, (Hydrogen-Oxygen) stored for "over-night" use, or you can use beamed (microwave or laser) power from satellites in orbit or arrays in constant sunlight. You CAN use nukes but they aren't a given or even a requirment.
Maybe, depends on how much time has gone by and how much orbital and space infrastructure you're supporting. As time goes on prices for payload to orbit will continue to drop and if and when more efficient methods are developed the price should drop even more.
For a starter we should note that while Biosphere II "failed" miserably most of the others including Biosphere I were great success, not failures. You might want to look into the various experiments a bit deeper than just one. Also you're confused on the meaning of "space farm" it seems which is a method and means of growing plants to help recycle and improve the atmosphere on a spacecraf or space station which conversly to what you may think have all been wildly successful in operation. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_farming, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plants_in_space) Hydroponics, aqua-ponics, aero-ponics among others have all been tested successfully in space and they work fine. Further experiments with systems similar to what Workable Goblin suggested, which are NOT "biosphere" or fully self-sustiaining closed environment systems because you can't actually have one of those in space, but systems which use combined organic (usually plants) and mechanial systems to reduce the delivered life support burden from Earth. These are called Closed Loop Life Support Systems (CLLSS) or Bioregenerative Life Support Systems and while they clearly are not 100% efficient they can greatly reduce the consumables transport burden. These systems break down the organic waste geneated by the crew by various means and use it as feedstock for plants and animals that in turn feed the atmopshere and people in the cycle. Work is moving forward rapidly with recent inclusion of both algea and aquatic components to the ISS life support exerpiments.
Actually most of the stuff people in space would need from Earth is pretty compact and low-mass. Thing like micro-electronics, chips and serioulsy high tech stuff they can't make no their own. And while it's technically 'cheaper' to gather and process resources on Earth from Earth keep in mind that getting it out of space is near 'dirt-cheap' in a lot of cases so dropping the material back down the gravity well could be cost competative. (In fact it we're being technically accurate there are a number of industries that would pay a premimum for space colonists NOT to ship product to Earth. Diamonds, Platinum, gold or silver? One asteroid could tank the entire Earth market after all
)An actual point is that IF cost to orbit is still high with people and infrastructure in space then there is a lucrative market on-orbit for things like satellite repair, replenishment, and even construction and deployment services. Your 20 million dollar communications satellite just died due to a 15 cent chip going bad? Ship up a new one an pay the people up there a couple of million to replace it and get it working again. Running out of RCS on it? Have a crew rendezvous with and top off the tanks. (Check under the hood while your there
) Need to upgrade your satellite services? Spend $150 million to send up a new one, (plus the cost of the satellite) or send up the parts and pay 10 million to have the satellite upgraded? It would make more sense that people in space are 'service' rather than resource workers. It would be more likely they would concentrate on reducing the requirements to be shipped up from Earth than supplying EarthIt really does depend on the circumstances involved because in general the "people of Earth" are not likely to pay a single cent for any of this though their political representatives might. In which case "payback" was never a factor in the first place. But I agree space has to be made to 'pay it's way' on the most general terms. I've always felt it is most likely going to be a non-government, non-commercial entity that puts people into space on a permament basis. Such has the ability to ignore ROI or vagries of public or political opinion and simply does the job. But sooner or later you need to look to building an economy and trade to allow expansion of infrastructure and population. And in that case you may actually ship nothing physical down to Earth but provide on-orbit and in-space services with more economy and efficency than doing it from Earth.
And those companies also made money by being interconnected to the European (Earth) markets by extension from Europe (Earth) for example supplying the Moon with water and metals from the asteroids which is used to build and launch satellites used by Earth into GEO/LEO.
While Johnrankins is correct that most of Earth won't see or care about the details, (like most don't today with all the benifits that space already provides) they will notice the effects and products from such trade and will take notice should the economics and availability provide a possible chance to participate.
I'll agree that price needs to come down even more but it is currently at a historic low already while the acutal ability to access space, (and connected flight rate) are still far to low to effect those prices. We really need to see an incresae in flight rates rather than larger payloads, (one of my compliants about Starship
) since what we need at this point is "destinations" (places) as well as infrstructure (jobs) in Earth orbit to ramp demand up even more.Circilng back this was also one of the unfullfilled "promises" of the Shuttle which was to be used from the start to build infrstructure in LEO which it would visit and service. Since that wasn't authorized at the time of the design it now had to also be a "mini-space-station" as well as a shuttle with all that entailed. Of course NASA made it quite clear, (at every opportunity) to declare to Congress, (who we should note had already made it clear the Mars was off the table) that this was just the 'first step' in going to Mars... (Nothing like telling someone who's already watching your budget for anything being spent on going to Mars that EVERYTHING you spend is being spent on going to Mars, am I right?
)Randy
I don't think that's accurate. The "5th" Shuttle orbiter was produced IIRC for major spares which were stored. (Yep see Endeavour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Endeavour) So we could pretty easily build a replacement for Challenger but not one for Columbia. "Enterprise" was supposed to be converted to a 'real' orbiter but the funding to do so wasn't authorized I think.
Suspect that was this conflict:
http://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2015/08/evolution-vs-revolution-1970s-battle.html
And yes an incrimental approach was rejected for trying for a full-up space station authorization which failed continually till the mid-90s despite President Reagan supporting it. (He didn't really and refused to confront Congress over the idea)
At first not really since the flight rate was so low, more towards peak usage they had turn-aroung down pretty well so you may have been able to add some flights (between 25 and 40 say) but could you squeeze them into the schedule is another question.
Well having an orbiter stay on orbit for 30 days would be a tough task even with the Power Tower since it was life support limited at well. If it's early enough, (see below) then they'd have had to adapt a few museum exhibit Apollo CM's to work as life boats as the Shuttle would still likely only stay a week or so and mostly be used for crew and new module flights. It also impacts the launch and processing schedule since the orbiter will not be avialable to schedule into the line until it finally comes back. (Not world ending but a pain for the maintenance folks
)The problem with that idea is that you can't DO anything with Skylab B until the Shuttle is flying. They only had one full Saturn-1B left over from Apollo/Skylab and only one partially completed Apollo CM unless they pulled one from a museum which they didn't want to do without a VERY good reason. So that's one flight to get Skylab B up and running and then...
Skylab B sits in orbit till sometime after 1982 (1981 flights were qualification and R&D only) so close to 6 years of unattended operation before a crew arrives. And keep in mind they would have had to modify Skylab B to accomodate the Shuttle before it could be launched. (Two of the four "windmill" solar panels have to be kept retracted while the Shuttle is there and I don't think they had the ability to retract on demand so they'd likely need to be removed before flight) And then there is the question of where you fit it into the initial flight schedules:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Space_Shuttle_missions#Flight_statistics
Now here a fifth orbiter might allow scheduling mission on a regular basis to Skylab B and then allowing the others to continue with the OTL schedule. It would depend on when the 5th Orbiter was available. Having Skylab B "might" have helped the Shuttle image and the 5th orbiter might have helped the flight schedule but keep in mind that unlike OTL's Endeavour this one would not have all the upgrades ours did with "lessons learned" from the previous Shuttles. (It also would have a different name I'd think
)You're not wrong at all
But as has been famously said about the TSR-2 any government project has a political dimension as well as its physical ones and getting that right is a task in and of itself. NASA has some of the blame because they really didn't want a "shuttle" as the main program but as a side-note to the bigger picture. But it was already going to be a huge part of any project simply because of the size and capabilities that NASA wanted which itself was tied to an over-estimated sense of worth in the governmental scheme of things. "Technically" once the government was flying its Shuttles we should have seen commercial Shuttles flying payloads to orbit for profit but as the hard-logic behind the Shuttle design and operation were that is MUST carry any and all US launches or be unaffordable that obviously wasn't going to be done. I mean there was work done on designing a 300 person 'passegner module' to fit into the cargo bay at one point! And then even at the end there was a credible effort to "buy" a couple of orbiters to use for commercial purposes when the Shuttle was retired. But as was pointed out during the latter effort, even if one COULD purchase a Shuttle and then manage to fund some flights would there be enough demand or market to actually make it sustainable in any sense? Given the cost and complexity of the Shuttle support system this was questionable at best and the fact that it would have tied up equipment and facilities NASA needed to move on towards the SLS would have been a major conflict.The OTL Shuttle was a compromised design, built to a compromised plan, for a compromised goal aimed at a vague but overly grandious and likely unatainable outcome. We needed, (and still do) a rational and logical approach with a clear goal and attainable vision. We need to make up our minds if we're exploring space, dabbling in it or just goofing off and proceed from there. Currenlty the only thing we're commited to is the rhetoric of space...
Randy
Basically, that was because JSC won the intra-agency foodfight with MSFC.
Alas.
But there's no reason to think that, had HQ given MSFC the mandate, that it couldn't have been sold on the Hill. God knows, they couldn't sell any iteration they tried of a JSC mega-station until the early 90's, when they'd hacked it down enough - and brought in the Russians as partners - to make it cheap enough.
It's a shame.
I think the easier answer here is to just delete the Telescope mount entirely. Perhaps put another docking port in its place. I think that's what e of pi and Workable Goblin did in their timeline.
Don't underestimate the number of clueless idiots out there. There are hordes of them.
He did have a point that the amount of space required is not as big a problem in space because there is so much space. Something I admit I forgot to consider.Did I ever mention I'm an L5-er from way back?
More to the point they sponsored and participated in experimental work for using solar power for industrial purposes for Lunar, Martian and Asteroidal purposes. They then passed those results on to NASA who was so impressed they then offered grants to several universties to fund studies to expand the work. Today you can buy or build a small scale solar smelting rig pretty easily and on the Moon or in space it would be vastly more efficient. But as Workable Goblin points out you don't have to do it on the surface since smelting and seperation process' can take advantage of orbital micro-gravity.
Its main consideration as far as that is concerned is the amount of material needed and possibly maintenance. This indeed drastically reduces costs, particularly since you are using all 3 dimensions. So it might work in space, just not on Earth.That I knew and some of them like an LFTR or a pebble bed reactor can't even meltdown. I am not sure a pebble bad would be practical but LFTR probably would be. It was originally designed to power a "nuclear-powered jet" after all.
This is what I was more thinking about if you are right about containment that is one less thing to worry about. I wasn't sure if you could do that with a rocket. On Earth that is less of a problem.
How big are these "furnaces"? It doesn't say. The laws of thermodynamics suggest not very. You are lucky if it 2ft by 2ft, there Earth doesn't get very hot after all. You can't get more energy out of a system than you put into it and the amount of energy that hits a square meter of ground is not much. It is enough to heat air to a piddling 120 degrees F or around 49 C on the hottest days of the year on the hottest parts of the planet. That is all there is to work with and you won't get all of it.
He was talking about the two week long night on the Moon. That means batteries would have to be used for everything during those two weeks.
That is exactly the stuff they probably would make on their own. If your building space stations, space ships, and Moon bases high tech stuff is exactly what you need. Why build that on earth when microchips are made up of silica which is common enough on the Moon?
That is true, particularly if it is mined from asteroids. No gravity well there and you can drop it anywhere. No need to go through a hub, just direct flight.
It would have to be a very big asteroid or have very rich ore for that to happen though. Gold ore on an asteroid is no more likely to be rich as any random gold ore on Earth.(In fact it we're being technically accurate there are a number of industries that would pay a premimum for space colonists NOT to ship product to Earth. Diamonds, Platinum, gold or silver? One asteroid could tank the entire Earth market after all
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Well, just removing two of the solar panels is probably easier, and you have to modify Skylab B to fix the MMOD/solar shield deploy problem that they ran into with Skylab A in any case, so you might as well just do that at the same time. If you're doing this early enough that the '79 Shuttle in-service date still seems viable, there's an argument that the ATM would be useful for observing solar maximum, in conjunction with Solar Max and ground observatories.
Fair point. But perhaps it would be just as well (admittedly, requiring some extra funding) to reconfigure the ATM solar arrays in such a way that they don't obstruct docking.
Because building microchips is extremely complex and requires a highly sophisticated industrial pipeline that demands a lot more than just raw silica. Even just the chip fabs themselves--which are only the last stage in the manufacturing process--cost billions of dollars each nowadays. At that price, it's more economical to just buy the chips and launch them into space on a rocket than to build a chip fab in space unless you're using a lot of chips, i.e. you already have a substantial industrial base there (which also saves on having to build all of the support industries the chip fab needs, since they already exist).
The stuff you want to do in space is the stuff that's massive, because that way you can save the cost of a lot of launches, and simple, because simple means easy to set up without needing a lot of prerequisite industry. This leads to propellants, life support fluids, radiation shielding, structural elements, and similar things that require only relatively simple chemical or mechanical processing to be useful. High-tech goods, by contrast, are almost the exact opposite of what you want to do in space; they're lightweight, so launch costs are much less significant, and they're complicated and require complex industrial processes to produce, so it would cost a gargantuan amount of money to set up a production line in space. Maybe eventually people will be fabbing computer chips in space, but only after there's a highly mature economy there.
Not exactly. See, on Earth heavy metals like gold sank into the core early on during the planet's formation, because (to use a geological term) they're siderophilic, that is they readily dissolve into molten iron. Most gold on the surface was actually brought later on in the planet's formation, due to bombardment of asteroids after the mantle and core had solidified and thus prevented the gold from simply sinking away. But none of this happened in asteroids; most of them weren't massive enough for the gravity-driven separation that created the core to happen. And some of those that were massive enough later got broken apart by asteroid-asteroid collisions, exposing or ejecting pieces of their core (this is thought to be the origin of 16 Psyche, for example).
Therefore, any random metallic asteroid is likely to be effectively gold ore (in addition to iron ore, nickel ore, etc.), and even non-metallic asteroids often have compositions that would qualify them as (low-grade) gold ore on Earth. And it doesn't take a very large asteroid for this to amount to a lot of gold; a metallic asteroid 2 kilometers across with 5 ppm of gold (similar to some meteorites found on Earth) would have roughly 200 000 tonnes of gold inside, which is about the same amount that currently exists in human hands. And that is definitely not a "very big" asteroid by any reasonable standard, given that the belt has hundreds of thousands of that size or larger (although most of them are not metallic and so would not have this much gold). And, of course, you don't need to have a mine that can output as much gold as every mine in history combined to have a large negative price impact, so a much smaller asteroid would be quite enough to cause major disruptions.
This is something I've mused on, and am debating exploring in a timeline that's kicking around on back-burner behind Kistling a Different Tune. In a sense, the Soviets got lucky that their program ran into issues when it did. If, for instance, they had succeeded in a flyby just ahead of Apollo 8, but then been unable to land until 1971 or later, they would have confirmed they were in the race and enhanced the American "victory" in finally landing, but only claimed a very tenuous and immaterial "first". They would almost have been forced to go on to land, but by the time they could sort out N1's issues and those of the LK, they might have been flying 1-day single-person lunar stays to compare against H and J class Apollo flights. They really only could have kept up if they pushed the N1 system to its limits, or if the Americans had left off the gas even more than OTL--and as you say, without the appearance that "the Russians were in the race after all" but still lacking a clear idea of Soviet capabilities, it'd be harder for the Americans to be sure they could ease off.
Fsci123
Banned
OTL there was a strong belief that the soviets were ahead in space technology... even up until its collapse. Basically along the lines of “the soviets are more focused on the practical aspects of space flight rather than wasteful displays like the moonshot”
Yet there was veey little effort to challenge “soviet dominance” in space and the only program that was proposed was space station freedom... which barely survives in the form of the iss.
EDIT: basic point is that short of colonizing space(which was logistically impossible for the soviets to do) the us would not have poured money into its space program. Like the shuttle, any projects that would've been answers to soviet ones would likely fall short of being “successful.”
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Very
Well this would have been significantly cheaper as an option and Congress would have felt they had more control,(which was an issue with the big station designs) which may or may not have been a good or bad thing. (Different Congress though the general goals were the same at that point in time it smaller and more incremental might have gotten more traction)
Probably, which would make it somewhat similar to the "Olympus" or interim concept stations:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TB3WhwLWg...B16U4/s1600/ISS+solar+array+configs1+copy.jpg
As you'd still need the power so they'd have to redesign and build new solar 'wings' for the Skylab B.
Randy
It's an interesting point. What would the public reception of Apollo 11 be like in a world where the Soviets had beaten them to lunar space several months before? How would the U.S. government have presented it?
I'd have to think about that one. It would be a different dynamic in some way. Winning the Superbowl in the two minute warning has more frisson than winning it in a blowout. (I mean to say, the perception that we'd won in the final seconds, since we didn't know how many teething problems the N1 was having.)
But I think you are right that if a Leonov lap around the Moon at the end of '68 makes Nixon's life somewhat uncomfortable, it would make Brezhnev's life even more sticky, once the hangover from the Red Square celebrations had dissipated.
One thing that occurs to me is that maybe the Soviets could try to count on general illiteracy in space technology. Sure, a quickie LK landing and two hour EVA don't compare with an Apollo J class mission, but maybe it's enough for casual observers to see photos and video of a cosmonaut standing on the Moon, in the same way that a Zond flyby doesn't look all that much different to the man on the street than a ten orbit Apollo 8 mission. The Soviet moon rocks will look more or less the same as American moon rocks.
Either way, Nixon and his intel people would be left guessing about just what the state of the Soviet program really was, or what their plans really were - assuming the Soviets hadn't publicly committed to anything precise. Obviously, if Brezhnev or Kosygin gives a big speech promising a Soviet lunar base by the 60th anniversary of the Revolution (1977), then Nixon probably has to commit to at least some sort of Apollo extension, and perhaps even one of the Apollo Applications programs. (This sounds pretty ambitious given the state of the Soviet lunar program in 1969, I fully grant, but then the Soviets might get very flexible about what counts as a "lunar base.")
Or in the alternative, they might take a closer look at their plans for a crewed Venus flyby instead...
Well, to put it in perspective the same amount of time passed between Gagarin's flight and this hypothetical announcement as would have passed between the announcement and the lunar base. Certainly on the face of it that sounds like enough time to debug the N1 and LK and everything else and get something set up, if the Soviets are committed to it (which is, of course, the fly in the ointment, as always).
And here I have to wonder if there wouldn't be more than a bit of panic by the Soviets if they DID pull something off. Sure they 'one-upped' the American's again but by this point its quite clear that panicking the Americans NEVER works out well and having not taken them seriously on the race to the Moon was a serious mistake. Worse as we've noted they are now saying "we're going too" with little wiggle room.
Throwing rubles at the N1 is going to work, eventually. But as E of Pi notes gaining ground on the American's even if they fully push the N1 is both unlikely and really, really risky because so far the American's have kept quite about what they know about the Soviet program. Throwing down the gauntlet tosses that out the window so the American's will exploit and advertise every failure they can from now on.
On the American side this will allow NASA to get a bit back into the drivers seat from Congress since Congress can't take the chance that the Soviets will actually beat us to the Moon after all this. However I'd hesitate to believe that it will allow more money or planning for post-Apollo missions. It's been pretty clear since Gemini that the Soviets weren't moving as fast as it had been thought, and while the public might get nervous those in power certainly would not take NASA's word for how close the race was and would also understand the difference between Zond and Apollo 8. I highly suspect that while NASA would push such a case for all it's worth I am pretty sure it would backfire. They would likely get funding to push the landing but that would come with Congress digging its heels in for anything post-Apollo even more. And if the Soviet's DON'T follow it up then NASA is hanging even more out int the breeze.
Lets be honest no matter what NASA was getting pruned back post-Apollo, Congress made that clear and win-lose-or-draw NASA was not going to Mars or getting their vision of new Apollo-like program piled on Apollo-like program for the next 100 years. If for no other reason (and there were many others) America couldn't afford to keep spending money like they did for Apollo. Worse it was quite clear that the American public wasn't going to support such spending for much longer. (Again there would be a blip of support for a short while but even if the Soviets manage to land first the American public wasn't into the Space Race to the same extent anymore and they wouldn't be willing to allow things to go further without significant changes and that meant NASA taking its place among the other agencies of the government)
And unless you butterfly away Apollo 13, (making it worse will only make things worse) that will scare the heck out of Nixon and Congress anyway. And as we know NASA was well aware they were very lucky to have things turn out as well as it did. They knew they couldn't keep it up and worse we've already had production shut down on all the important Apollo hardware, they couldn't keep it up even if they wanted to and the whole point was to go out on a high note rather than a sour one. (And no, a Soviet flyby is NOT going to make Congress turn the taps back on. Enough to ensure Apollo 11 hits the mark but that's it) Apollo is done and NASA will need to move on. If NASA doesn't play their hand right Skylab could be it for a very long time. Actually in a situation like this you might actually see more support for something like modified Big Gemini with 3 or 4 crew launching on a Titan III and NASA forced to like it.
Now getting back to the Soviet side they would have painted themselves into a corner but with enough shucking and jiving they could possible pull out an "it was a simple reconnaissance flight of no consequence to our actual orbital plans, we just wanted some pictures of the Moon before the Americans mess it up" or some such. Then there's pouring money into the N1 and hoping for a miracle but I think that's not likely because as pointed out the N1 at it's best still isn't going to match or better Apollo. They could try and throw together a multi-launch landing based on Soyuz, R7, Proton and maybe the N1 (http://www.russianspaceweb.com/spacecraft_manned_lunar.html) but beating the American's isn't likely no matter what they do. So maybe they could go with a 'better second' plan?
It would take some big brass ones and a lot of chutzpah as well but to be frank I never understood why the Soviets didn't at least try to follow up on the American moon landings. Ok as an adult it makes more sense since it's not throwing money away on being 'second' in a race you are supposedly not in but that's OTL, here we assume they snatched the flyby option and are now committed to 'something' dealing with the Moon. So sometime around the early 70s after they have put up and used Salyut one for a bit the Soviets orbit another Salyut/Almaz station but then also orbit a large liquid stage that docks with it. Followed by a Soyuz or two and then a couple of the LK lander's and soon the entire complex leaves Earth orbit for the Moon. Sure maybe this only put two people on the Moon, unlike Apollo those two people went to two different landing sites on the Moon in the same mission. Worse if the entire assembly comes back to Earth orbit because that says "We can do this as often as we want and America can't so who did the Moon better?"
On the American side it's still unlikely that NASA would get any major funding boost out of this because despite what people think "been there, done that" has been around for quite a while... Still... NASA's plan for a space station and space shuttle (note the lack of capitalization there
) may begin to take on a bit more of a justification. As long as NASA can hold itself back from going hog-wild with the opening (It could happen) Well the question is we're already deep into the shuttle design but here's a chance to create some positive changes. Questionable I know since with out some serious LGB's (Laser Guided Butterflies) you're still dealing with many of the same people and personalities that OTL pushed the design to what we got. But the thing is the Soviets have shown they still are in the 'race' albeit a bit slower and more methodical and it can be argued that once the US has a space station and shuttle to service it the can always use the system to go back to the Moon. (If we're lucky no one at NASA mentions Mars but again that would likely take a miracle ) Specifically this could address some of the paranoia about the "end of manned spaceflight" during development and also pointing out the need for at least occasional heavy lift. Keep in mind that at this point recreating the Saturn-V and Apollo, while being the thematic goal isn't the 'actual' goal here so there's some wiggle room. Especially if you can get Congress to agree to fund (and NASA to stick to the deal) things the right way. Assuming Salyut flies in 1971 and the Soviets commit the Salyut 2, (also assume DOS-2 was the original mission and still failed so actually DOS-3, which we'll make a success for this assumption) in 1973 to the mission. (The mission is on the way or just leaving to the Moon when Skylab launches for maximum effect) So while the American's are struggling to 'save' their space station the Soviets are landing and returning from the Moon. As the Shuttle program was announce in January of 1972 we're going to get something like OTL's shuttle though it might be argued that some major design changes can still be made? (Probably not but I can hope they reduce the cargo bay and mass issues with a little luck) NA-Rockwell had already pointed out before construction began that the "Space Transportation System" as it was officially known COULD in fact be the basis for an actual "system" rather than just launching the Orbiter. But NASA pretty much shelved this OTL because doing so would be direct competition to manned flights. TTL maybe not so much because with a Shuttle-C (which it wasn't called yet) you can put a Skylab sized payload into orbit or something close to the "self-deploying-space-station" concepts. Even a reusable lunar transfer vehicle if the Soviets (and we still have Reagan likely in the background here so an Orbital Operations Center just got a leg up) make Congress nervous enough. I could hope for funding to test an actual sub-scale orbiter so they could see how much of a 'drag' (sorry for the pun
) the engines are and get them off-loaded to a recoverable pod that would blend the Shuttle and Shuttle-C more seamlessly but I'm going to guess not.In the end we'd likely have a Shuttle, a heavy lift Shuttle-C and probably all five orbiters with options to scale the STS somewhat up or down depending on need which all in all could make the Shuttle more of a success... Maybe?
Randy