What's the status of the Air Force launch programs with this type of launch vehicle available? Is it similar to the pre-Challenger situation where the Air Force was trying to retire the Titans?
Right Side Up: A History of the Space Transportation System
- Thread starter Polish Eagle
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NASA preferred during 1970s the Unitary launch space station like Skylab or US space station Phase B by McDonnell-Douglas.
later with build Space Shuttle NASA switch to Modular launch station like ISS.
but here the STS can bring around 90000 lbs. into LEO what would be similar to
The Orbiting Work Shop, part of Skylab (Height: 14.66 m (48.09 ft). Diameter: 6.58 m, mass:35,380 kg (77,990 lb)).
A reasonable compromise approach--in the long run superior to either unitary launch stations which are inherently limited to their original concept, and I think to 20-ton piece modular stations as well in that individual modules are bigger and fewer are needed.
As always the question is, does anyone want to fund the actual design and construction of such a station, then pay for launching it?
A 40 ton module would not require making a bigger upper stage, the standard one can do.
Launching a 40 ton module in the same launch with an Orbiter would require a bigger upper stage, and it seems that the price tag for that would be much higher than simply launching both pieces separately.
I've nominated this excellent and rigorous timeline at this year's Turtledove Awards, and I would urge those of you who would like to see it take home the gold to second that nomination.
Chapter 6: Liftoff
The eighth launch of the Space Transportation System and the first landing of the Space Shuttle Endeavour is the historical equivalent of the driving of the golden spike which completed the first transcontinental railroad. It marks our entrance into a new era.
-President Jimmy Carter, remarks at landing of STS-8.
Chapter 6: Liftoff
"3...2....1....Liftoff! We have a liftoff!" Faster than human reflexes could comprehend, the launch computer's sequencer fired the electronic circuits to the tiny explosives in the bolts holding the rocket to arms on the pad. The pop of the tiny detonations vanished as the stack released the energy that had been building since main engine start, jerking like a colossal spring. With the bolts released, the hold down arms lept backwards into protective housings, retreating in seconds as thousands of tons of rocket rose on a tide of flame. Behind the rocket, there was a preview of hell, a baptism of fire, a blaze of light, and noise so loud it ceased being sound and was only fury. The Lifter’s crew, for a moment, could see the tower and umbilical arms in front of them lit up from below by kerosene fire--but only for a moment. The vibrations shook loose a cocoon of ice, falling from the sides of the S-IVC to bounce against the triple-layer windows of the Lifter’s cockpit before veiling the Lifter itself in a cascade of condensation and ice.The booster leaped away from the launch pad, trailing an incandescent tail of steam, carbon dioxide, and soot. As it began to gather speed, the remaining umbilical arms swept out of the way, just barely clearing the massive ship in a well-coordinated dance.
The Lifter climbed, pitching slightly to increase distance from the Umbilical Tower, before steadying and gathering way. The veteran Launch Umbilical Tower was built for the Saturn V, and loomed over the Shuttle stack, even with the S-IVC stretch. Still, within seconds, the nose of the Shuttle cleared the tower. Now, all that was visible in front of Haise and Truly in the Orbiter’s cockpit was the clear blue sky above. It took another six seconds for the rest of the stack to follow, the Lifter rising into the sky on a column of flame. Eight seconds after the hold-down arms released, the Lifter’s wingtip rudders finally cleared the tower, leaving Earth behind in a cooling cloud of steam. The staff several miles away at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Control Complex leaned fractionally back from their consoles--the mission was now out of their hands. Control had been handed off to the Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston, which seamlessly took over the job.
The stack climbed slowly, the engines and control surfaces working to turn it onto its course. The belly of the Lifter and Orbiter turned to the sky as the stack rolled, and then the horizon re-entered the very periphery of the crew’s windows as it pitched over. The turn and the continuing shaking knocked clear the last of the ice and debris. The crew in the Lifter once again had a clear view of the stack rising above them, and the sky and ocean beyond. It was practically all they could see--as the rocket climbed, the shaking of the massive engines and the air resistance mounted. The pilots had to focus intently to resolve their instrument panels. Still, they could see enough. “Houston, Constitution. We have a pitch and a roll program! Trajectory nominal,” the Lifter’s pilot John Young called over the radio. “We’re belly up, but we’re keeping a positive attitude,” he continued on the internal comm channel. Fred Haise up in the Orbiter grunted out a chuckle.
Back at the Vehicle Assembly Building, a multitude of technicians were taking a break from processing Intrepid for her next flight, gathered on the roof for the best view of the launch. Many aimed cameras to follow the rocket. Amateur photographers wielded Nikon and Canon cameras with telephoto lenses, clicking away as rolls of 35 mm film spun rapidly through the machines. Others were even more amateur, and make do with their family Polaroids. Some just gaped. It was just a short diversion for the staff, though. Even as Constitution climbed above them, her sister was being prepared below. When the show ended, the technicians would once again descend into the VAB’s cavernous interior and continue their work on the next launch of Constitution’s youngest sister.
Across the Banana River, at Space Launch Complex 40, their counterparts with the United States Air Force were also breaking their labor to follow Constitution and Endeavour with eyes and cameras. There, a Titan IIIC stood cradled within its servicing tower, soon to be mated with one of the Department of Defense’s communications satellites. The Air Force technicians, and their counterparts from Martin-Marietta, cheered the Lifter and Orbiter on as they clear the tower, but there was a touch of unease in their minds--it was an open secret that the Lifter was to replace all American rockets bigger than the Scout. Just how many more Titans would they launch before their pad was mothballed?
The flight of STS-8 was, but for some minor teething problems with the Orbiter, totally nominal. At T+120 seconds, the Lifter’s engines shut down and the S-IVC pulled away, its own J-2S-2 starting up at T+122 seconds, the disposable interstage falling away between them. As the upper stage carried the Orbiter the rest of the way to Low Earth Orbit, the Lifter continued its rapidly-slowing coast to 109 km--past the Karman line--before hydrogen peroxide thrusters turned it around and pointed its engines down-range. The center F-1B lit again, slowing the craft down and orienting it for a return to its launch site, burning off the remaining supplies of propellant on-board. The crew got to enjoy minutes more of micro-gravity, though they were strapped into their seats and so couldn’t move around the cabin. As the Lifter fell back into the atmosphere, the crew pointed the nose up, presenting the almost-flat aluminum underbelly to the incoming air flow, the better to maximize drag. Just 15 km above the Earth’s surface, the air inlets for the turbojets opened. A combination of ram pressure and decomposing peroxide from the vehicle’s tanks spun up the turbines, first a pair, then more in sequence. Seven of the eight started with no trouble, and a second start attempt brought the last to life as the Constitution made her turn back to land. On her own power, the Lifter descended as she covered the 600 kilometers she had crossed in less than fifteen minutes. Without drama, the big winged booster touched down at the Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center, returning to the ground less than 20 minutes after she had left.
The Orbiter continued up, as the S-IVC burned for over 10 minutes until its propellant tanks were depleted. The S-IVC stopped just short of a fully circular orbit--the Orbiter would have to finish that job itself, as the upper stage’s perigee remained just inside Earth’s atmosphere. Separating from the S-IVC, the Orbiter’s AJ-10 engine provided the last little kick to circularize the orbit at three hundred kilometers. For the next 24 hours, Haise and Truly put Endeavour through her paces. They checked the communications systems (using TDRS for manned orbital missions for the first time) and verified that the life-support system functioned in microgravity. They opened the payload bay doors and depressurized the airlock, though no EVA was planned for this particular flight. The crew extended the Orbiter’s Canadian-built robot arm, including using a camera on the end to photograph the thermal insulation tiles on the Orbiter’s dorsal surface. The images confirmed that the densification procedures implemented at Rockwell years earlier had successfully mitigated the feared tile-loss issues--only a few tiles were missing or showed damage, none in critical locations.
Reentry was a bit hairier--though the Shuttle returned to Kennedy Space Center in good shape, the vehicle’s actual performance at hypersonic velocities differed from that predicted on the ground. Though the computer at times overcompensated for aerodynamic stresses, it was not far enough outside expected tolerances to require Haise to take manual control. The descent remained fully automated until the last minutes of flight, at which point Haise and Truly took over and brought the craft to a successful landing at the Shuttle Landing Facility, just meters away from where the Lifter had touched down the previous day. By this point, however, the Lifter had already been rolled over to the Booster Processing Facility.
Haise and Truly got a hero’s welcome at Kennedy Space Center, greeted first by Young and Crippen, and then, in celebration of the end of the Space Transportation System Test Program, by President Jimmy Carter, who gave a brief speech at the Landing Facility congratulating the astronauts on a successful flight and formally inaugurating the Space Lifter portion of the Space Transportation System as America’s premier operational launch vehicle. Notably, Carter tied the successful tests of the STS with his own administration’s goals of freeing the US from its dependence on foreign fossil fuels, recalling the tenth principle he’d outlined in his 1977 speech on his proposed energy policy, which said “we must start now to develop the new, unconventional sources of energy we will rely on in the next century.” The Carter Administration, since 1978, had flirted with orbital solar power satellites as a clean, fully-renewable, and high-power source of electricity, and with the successful landing of STS-8, Carter felt confident enough to suggest that the Space Transportation System opened the way to such a system. “In the future, vehicles like this and its successors may go on to revolutionize how we power our planet, and other benefits of spaceflight we can only dream of today. But it begins with this flight here today, and I congratulate the crew and the team which have brought them here." Though the flight of STS-8 took place toward the end of Carter’s administration, historians credit it with swinging the state of Alabama to him in the 1980 US Presidential Election, as voters in Huntsville and its environs supported the man who had brought the space program to a new triumph. This would be the last time that Alabama went Democrat, however.
Like a sonic boom propagating through the atmosphere, the effects of the Space Transportation System were not limited to the United States but were felt across the world. With the fourth consecutive failure of Korolev’s N-1 rocket in 1972, the Soviet Union had finally put its lunar program to rest and shifted gears, placing the late Korolev’s rival, Valentin Glushko, in command of the program. With an efficiency that would have warmed the hearts of Stalin and Beria, Glushko purged the N1-L3 program from official Soviet history, scrapping the incomplete launch vehicles and ordering the NK-33 engines his competitor Kuznetsov had developed destroyed. Only a secret countermanding order from the other designer himself saw them redirected to a remote storage facility instead. Instead, Glushko envisioned a new, modular launch system built on a common series of kerosene-oxygen tanks and engines that could put payloads as small as 30 tonnes and as large as 250 tonnes. The new system would be fully expendable, and its end goal would be a Soviet conquest of the lunar beachhead abandoned by the Americans.
As ambitious as Glushko’s vision of a Red Moon was, it found little traction among those elements of the regime most responsible for allocating funding. Both the Ministry of General Machine Building and Ministry of Defense objected to the program’s high cost (one hundred billion rubles) and lack of apparent utility. The sizing of the core stage for 250 tonnes made its smaller variants inefficient for lofting 30-tonne payloads, and the cancellation of the Saturn V in the United States (together with Glushko’s own cancellation of the N-1) raised doubts about the usefulness of heavy-lift vehicles in general.
The announcement of the Space Transportation System began to change minds among the USSR’s decision-making class. Though the Lifter’s low cost-per-flight was deemed feasible by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, such cost savings were not quite as meaningful in the Soviet command economy as they were in the American market economy. The high flight rate the Americans forecasted, however, was far more interesting to Soviet analysts. The weekly flight rates proposed for the Space Lifter and the monthly Orbiter missions indicated that the United States planned to increase the mass it sent to Low Earth Orbit by an order of magnitude, and to return some 100 tonnes to Earth from space every year. The only identifiable reason for such a massive increase in capability would be a massive military undertaking--a new space-based weapons system, or an advanced anti-missile defense system. The Orbiter’s unique ability to maneuver in the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds also raised troubling questions about the military applications of such a vehicle--specifically, the ability of a hypersonic orbital airplane to dive down onto the USSR from the south, drop a thermonuclear payload, and then return to its launch site, having managed a sneak attack that escaped the notice of the Soviet early warning satellite system.
Whatever the Americans were up to, it was clear that the maintenance of the balance of power between the superpowers required a Soviet answer. The Lifter had, in the Soviets’ eyes, metamorphosed into the launcher for a vast fleet of space-based weapons, and the Orbiter into a hypersonic dive-bomber of doom come to eradicate the entire Soviet people. It was with this in mind that in February 1976 the USSR Council of Ministers and the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a joint decree “On the Development of a Reusable Space System and Future Space Complexes”, directing the creation of a Soviet version of STS.
The Politburo’s demand for an answer to the STS did not deter Glushko from pursuing his lunar plans. Though nominally satisfying the Party’s demands, Glushko’s design bureau optimized their new rocket family as boosters for a future super-heavy-lift vehicle. Though the maximum payload of the new family, dubbed “Groza,” or “Thunderstorm,” was only 50 tonnes to LEO (still greater than the maximum capability of the STS), the system enabled a lunar program using an Earth Orbit Rendezvous architecture, and, as stated, could support far greater payloads if only a bigger core stage were available.
Each Groza rocket was based on a first-stage vehicle called Raskat (“Thunderbolt”, literally “Peal of Thunder”), a 3.9-meter-diameter, 40-meter-length booster with a new, phenomenally powerful engine--the RD-170, an oxidizer-rich staged-combustion-cycle motor. Each Raskat was equipped with swing-wings and landing gear, which would deploy after booster separation and allow the vehicle to make an autonomous landing at an airstrip. The second-stage vehicle, a new, 4.15-meter stage that shared its diameter with the upper stage but which used altitude-optimized RD-170 engines, would light after booster separation, and propel an upper stage (either a new, large upper stage for heavyweight payloads or an existing Blok-D for small ones) the rest of the way through the atmosphere.
Though Glushko’s attention was focused on the booster and its eventual lunar payloads, the Soviet military’s interest was primarily in the glider that would fly atop Groza, a payload dubbed Uragan (“hurricane”). Uragan was administered by the Ministry of Aviation Industry, whose engineers drew on work done in the late 1960s on an orbital space plane called the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-105, AKA “Spiral.” The “Spiral” concept was scaled up to match the capabilities of the American Orbiter, under the direction of the original “Spiral” chief designer, Gleb Lozino-Lozinsky.
Though based on internal Soviet design work and even subscale prototypes flown well before the American Shuttle announcement, international views were that the Soviets were merely copying the Americans. Though not true in a technical sense, it was true in a strategic one: Uragan was scaled to resemble the American's orbiter in most capabilities, as the orbiter was the portion of STS with which the Soviet's analysis of economics found the most issue. Clearly the Americans had other plans for using it, and the Soviet Union wouldn't be left behind if they had to copy the Americans to the rivet.
In preparation for orbital tests of the full-sized Uragan, Lozinsky’s team manufactured a series of sub-scale orbital and suborbital test articles, collectively referred to as “BOR,” from the acronym for “Unpiloted Orbital Rocketplane”--an acronym that, conveniently, also suggested another violent weather phenomenon, the snowstorm (In Russian, “Buran”). From 1978 to 1980, orbital and suborbital test flights of several BOR gliders validated the aerodynamics and thermal protection systems of the larger Uragan. Following close behind were low-velocity approach and landing tests of a piloted Uragan test article, a vehicle without rockets or thermal protection systems, dubbed Ptitchka (the diminutive form of “Bird,” i.e. “Birdie”). Piloted by Igor Volk and Rimantas Stankyavichus, Ptitchka was launched from the dorsal surface of a Myasishchev 3M bomber and brought to a successful landing at Zhukovsky Air Base over and over, validating the aerodynamic design of Uragan.
Even as Fred Haise and Richard Truly took Endeavour through her paces on STS-8, the Soviet orbiter program appeared well on the way to matching the Americans’ orbital capabilities by the mid-1980s. Unfortunately, it was not the glider but the booster that plagued the Soviet design effort. The RD-170, utilizing the comparatively untested oxidizer-rich staged-combustion cycle, ran at higher pressures and temperatures than previous engines, and, due to its exotic combustion chemistry, required new metallurgical techniques. Validating each of the techniques was a long and arduous process that cost Glushko dozens of engines and at least one test stand, and delayed successful tests of the Groza booster system until the mid-1980s.
The Soviet Union was not the only foreign power to take note of the new American program. Across the Atlantic, European policymakers debated the impacts of new launch system on the American near-monopoly on commercial satellite launch, while the failure of the Europa rocket program very nearly ended the united European space program before it began, driving new wedges between the biggest of the European aerospace players.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the United Kingdom eventually came to terms with the loss of its empire and its second-tier status. Though Britain developed her own atomic weapons and the missiles and bombers with which to deploy them, she increasingly lost the will and the financial capability to maintain the aeronautical sector that had, at its height, burned Nazi Germany to the ground. The United States helped speed this decline along by offering subsidized launches of British satellites on American rockets, and by offering American-made missiles for Britain’s nuclear deterrent. In the cold arithmetic of economics, the British rocket program that had produced Blue Streak and Black Prince was found wanting. The Blue Streak was finally cancelled as a missile program in 1960, though it had a brief second lease on life.
France’s rocket development program followed a diametrically opposite trajectory. France reacted to her humiliation in the Second World War by attempting to reassert herself as the great power she had once been. Under the leadership of President Charles de Gaulle, she invested in nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons, and, bearing fruit at last in the early 1970s, a missile fleet that gave her a nuclear deterrent wholly independent of the American triad. French scientists and engineers tackled the problem of orbital launch with equal vigor and for much the same reasons--the French Republic was not a second-rate power to beg for scraps from the United States. Finding sympathetic allies in those sectors of the British government that did not want Blue Streak to have been a total waste, and who remained optimistic about the economic prospects of European-launched communications satellites, the French committed to a 1-tonne-to-orbit rocket for the 1960s. Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany, and Australia would join this effort as the 1960s continued, forming the European Launcher Development Organization (ELDO), whose stated goals included the development of an independent European satellite launching capability.
ELDO’s job was easier said than done. The Europa rocket design called for stages from Britain, France, and West Germany to be combined into a single launch vehicle in a project to which not all the partners were equally committed. Britain’s interest in space, increasingly, narrowed to communications and navigation satellites, to support the complex chain of shipping services that fed raw materials into the United Kingdom from distant lands (particularly the Middle East). West Germany, for its part, was most interested in all manner of space science--heliophysics, astronomy, planetary science, and materials science in microgravity. The Federal Republic of Germany took a prominent role in ELDO’s counterpart, the European Space Research Organization (ESRO), and developed, in partnership with NASA, the Helios spacecraft, which would study the sun at an unprecedentedly close range. As the 1970s dawned, ESRO would lay the foundations, with NASA, for the later Spacelab program.
Europe’s scientific triumphs in space were still years off, however, when ELDO’s Europa rocket failed on every attempt to successfully orbit a satellite. Though the British-made Blue Streak first stage did its job well on the first-stage-only flights and on the later tests with the complete vehicle, the upper stages, manufactured in France and West Germany, failed, over and over. The nations involved took these failures in different ways. Britain’s Labour government had already reduced their commitment to the project; the repeated failure of Europa led to their total withdrawal. Though Britain would launch her own satellite on the Black Arrow rocket precisely once, Her Majesty’s government would have no part in space launch after 1971.
France and Germany had to soldier on without Perfidious Albion. The failure of Europa and the loss of its first stage forced a total redesign of ELDO’s launch vehicle. ELDO’s engineers formed two general camps. One of these camps, taking their cue from the trend toward reusable rockets in the United States, advocated a system much like a miniature Space Transportation System--a one-man piloted first stage with an expendable second stage. As France had already committed to developing a hydrogen-burning rocket and the new vehicle would have no heritage to which it had to cling, it could be optimized early on to burn the high-performance hydrogen-oxygen combination, managing a better mass fraction than the STS was to have. They dubbed their proposal “Europa L3R,” or “Europa Lanceur 3, Réutilisable.” The second camp was more conservative. Pointing out that reusability’s economic case had not yet been proven, and noting the limited resources of the European aerospace sector compared to the gigantic American war machine (and, not so loudly, that ELDO had yet to demonstrate the ability to go up, let alone down), this second camp favored a derivative of France’s Diamant hypergolic rockets. Diamant, as a satellite launcher, had been fairly successful, and as West Germany too seemed to gradually lose interest in ELDO, its all-French heritage was a welcome safety measure for the program. A new rocket, originally named “Europa L3S,” (Europa Lanceur 3, Substitution--for its replacement of the first stage) was designed around a new, higher-performance hypergolic engine called Viking, and a hydrogen-burning engine derived from France’s HM4.
Ultimately, Europa L3S triumphed over the L3R because of its lower development cost. As much as France strove to continue playing the part of a Great Power in a bipolar world, its resources were simply not nearly as large as those available to the United States and Soviet Union. The economic case for L3R made more sense, in the long run, than that for Europa, but having a run at all was only possible for Europa L3S.
Europa L3S, eventually to be renamed “Ariane,” promised the ability to loft commercial payloads to geostationary orbit. But by the time the program was announced, in 1973, this was a capability of interest only to France. Britain’s space ambitions had converged on a maritime communications and navigation constellation, while West Germany was in negotiations with the US to build the Spacelab man-tended space station. The original goal of the Europa program, to break the American monopoly on communications satellites, had been all but forgotten.
Eventually, a deal was hammered out between Britain, France, and West Germany, where each would support the others in achieving their goals. Britain would have her communications/navigation constellation, West Germany would have Spacelab and a growing fleet of scientific space probes, and France would have Ariane. Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium would see continued economic support for their burgeoning space sectors, and ELDO and ESRO were to merge into a new organization--a European Space Agency--by 1975.
Ariane was scheduled to be completed in 1979--the same year for which the Space Transportation System’s debut was planned. Ariane was a conservative gamble--a pessimistic one--in that it assumed that reusability would be far more expensive than the Americans predicted, that the satellite market would not grow fast enough to demand the two dozen flights per year that the Americans forecasted, and that a small launcher produced in limited numbers would be able, economically, to hold its own against the American vehicle. While the French had no illusions about capturing all the world’s commercial satellites, they believed Ariane’s cost would be competitive with that of the much more complicated STS. Given these assumptions, the ability to ensure a European launcher for European institutional launches was viewed as worthwhile, even if it was slightly more expensive than STS.
EDIT: Points to TimothyC for spotting a minor continuity error about the airbreathing engine count early in this post.
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It's Back! And great as ever of course. Good to have some idea of what the soviets are doing, although they again seem (emphasis on seem) to be copying the US effort. Europe is probably following a dead end with this Ariane rocket though. You seem to have taken a page out of the Brainbin style of TL, and decided not to write a utopia 
Seriously ?
The Most Optimistic Study gave cost for SPS Program with one Prototype in 1988, around 50 to 100 billion US Dollar in 1978.
No way that Capitol Hill support that
or like Soviet Military love to say "development of a craft with analogous tactical-technical characteristic of Americans once"
only that Glushko goes for a Zenit Heavy that Fly back to launch site and a MiG-105 "on Steroids" is put on top
So it's Ariane if goes like OTL and produce the Launcher cheap they can to draw level with
but if STS Program goes on full speed, ESA will regret not went for E3R instead
no worry about that, because the CNES and German Aerospace made in early 1980s dozens of Study for Reusable Launcher
some of those will get attention by ESA
I'll admit that SPS was somewhat unrealistic for the time, but damnit, we clean-energy supporters can dream, can't we?
Nevertheless, they flirted with it. After all, it's not like Carter would actually have to worry about actually getting Congressional approval or whether or not the program would succeed, even if he got reelected.
Good afternoon, everyone! As we all saw last week, for the first time in real life a reusable first stage lifted a payload from LC-39A in Florida. Much congratulations to SpaceX for that. On the other hand, as we all know, it's a bit more than 36 years too. The inestimable @nixonshead pictures the scene:
Anyway, Part II has cleared the tower, and the next post wil lcome Tuesday as scheduled. Feel free to ask any further questions!
Ironically, one of these studies ITOL (looking at the heavy launch vehicles which would be required for SPS work) features one of the later real examinations of a flyback S-IC like Lifter. This one, though, features twin RS-ICs being used as strap-on boosters to a core/upper stage, like massively oversized Raskats, to deliver over 300 tons to orbit.
Anyway, Part II has cleared the tower, and the next post wil lcome Tuesday as scheduled. Feel free to ask any further questions!
Indeed, that is a very wise quote, and much the approach here. It's worth noting however, that the period in the early-to-mid 70s when Ariane and Groza are being designed is one where whether or not the STS will succeed in its goals is unknown, and some of the promises seem impossible. As IOTL, Europe just needs a launch vehicle at all, while the Soviets have their own conventional LVs and a larger budget, so can afford to bet on following the Americans' lead while Europe takes the more conservative bet. IOTL, that paid off well for Ariane and less well for the Soviets. Here....we'll have to see. I would note that it's unlikely Shuttle will have any sort of revenge on Ariane, though--that would be more Lifter's job.It's Back! And great as ever of course. Good to have some idea of what the soviets are doing, although they again seem (emphasis on seem) to be copying the US effort. Europe is probably following a dead end with this Ariane rocket though. You seem to have taken a page out of the Brainbin style of TL, and decided not to write a utopia
The NASA studies of SBSP in the Carter administration have roots in OTL. The major difference is that Carter more directly acknowledges the studies, though it amounts to a couple mentions in speeches like the State of the Union and the STS-8 landing.
Ironically, one of these studies ITOL (looking at the heavy launch vehicles which would be required for SPS work) features one of the later real examinations of a flyback S-IC like Lifter. This one, though, features twin RS-ICs being used as strap-on boosters to a core/upper stage, like massively oversized Raskats, to deliver over 300 tons to orbit.
As ever Nixonhead gives us a beautiful rendition.
Just a question. In case I've missed it, when they launch do they have control surfaces on both lifter and shuttle to mitigate the lift from the wings? Otherwise It'd tend to pull into the tower on launch. I was expecting either a slight angle away from the tower or for it to be positioned a little further away. (Or for it to just face the other way, like the OTL shuttle did... sort of. Theirs is sideways, clear front and back.)
Just a question. In case I've missed it, when they launch do they have control surfaces on both lifter and shuttle to mitigate the lift from the wings? Otherwise It'd tend to pull into the tower on launch. I was expecting either a slight angle away from the tower or for it to be positioned a little further away. (Or for it to just face the other way, like the OTL shuttle did... sort of. Theirs is sideways, clear front and back.)
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Good catch! I didn't notice at first; I figured that as OTL the ventral side of both Lifter and Orbiter would be facing the tower, not the dorsal side!
Upon thinking about it, there is a clear advantage to having the "top" of both craft, viewed as gliding landers, facing the service tower. It means a number of hatches and ports to get into or service the craft are conveniently facing the tower, simplifying crew entrance for both assuming hatches are on the dorsal side, which is best protected from reentry plasma/hot air flow. OTL the Orbiter, side-mounted on the tank, was at a great distance from the tower, and the Orbiter perforce had ports in the heavy TPS ventral side--for landing gear, for propellant intake and I suppose more for more arcane purposes too. The tank then had to have ports on the other side for propellant loading/outgassing, and I guess a long crew entry outrigger not unlike the shorter one used on Apollo launches.
From other points of view it looks crazy of course, in case of launch accident the Orbiter has--well, the same options it would facing the other way pretty much, the LES spare engines mentioned in earlier posts would have to skew the thrust a bit to angle the Orbiter away from the tower, now that puts the control cabin windows on top of the arc while the other way it would zoom off a bit upside down and have to rotate. So for the Orbiter crew it is six of one, half a dozen of the other. But in that contingency, the Lifter control cabin is pinned between the Lifter nose and the tower, it would have to eject straight up and ahead of the Lifter, which seems very tricky to me and also a hazard for the Orbiter crew. If the Lifter were not manned it would be OK, but since it is, I would like to see this configuration explained too.
It occurred to me also before reading your comment that there is actually no need for the two vehicles to be oriented the same way. During launch the motion is vertical, along the craft axis, then during separation the Lifter is in free fall, except insofar as residual air drag and backwash from the second stage impacts it, and with an apogee of 107 km it has a long time, minutes, to change orientation. So it is OK if the ascent arc has the Lifter "upside down" as seen from the ground, and this positions the control cabin to have a free range for ejection that can easily be far forward/up along the craft axis, while the Orbiter must of course escape mostly forward with only a small angle to assure moving away from the tower during an early abort. Given that the Orbiter has liquid fueled escape engines they can easily be gimbaled so that during the early seconds it is prepared to be ejected with a big component away from the tower, and later on straight ahead, or even angled the other way so the Orbiter blasts away above the projected trajectory of a nominal craft path while the Lifter cabin, which has no such variable angle options, has a larger transverse component of escape on the down side. On a nominal mission then, during the two minutes of Lifter launch burn, the Lifter crew will, while "feeling" that down is at their backs along the Lifter axis, see Earth loom from a wall behind their heads to tip up with the horizon ahead of them rolling forward-if the back of the Lifter is at 9 o'clock, (the "clock" here being set around the pitch axis rather than the yaw axis of conventional warplane terminology) the forward horizon would have been at 12 o'clock, but creeps forward toward 3 o'clock, still above their heads in terms of cabin and flyback orientation. This gives them excellent subjective navigational cues to supplement instrument flying--not that I think Lifter pilots are really flying the craft during a nominal boost! The automated launch program is doing that and they are monitoring--they take over only if something is going wrong I'd think. Meanwhile the Orbiter pilots, who are twice removed from control during a nominal ascent, are basically spam in the can until separation, don't need this cue--by the time separation occurs the craft has nosed over so from their point of view they are still substantially nose up, but probably can see the forward horizon below their unobstructed nose, down at 10 or 11 o'clock, so they have some visual cue. Perhaps during or after separation they do a roll maneuver to bring the Earth "above" their cabin for superior seat of the pants navigation.
Of course if both modules were oriented with ventral side to the cabin this roll would not be necessary and the Orbiter crew would see what the Lifter crew see, but then access from the tower to the high Orbiter, which has a smaller diameter than the lower Lifter stage and either more cuts than strictly necessary would be needed to access the Orbiter cabin, fluid intakes and so forth through the heavy TPS belly, or else reach-around gantries that must also clear the shape of the wings, would be harder, whereas early escape options for the Orbiter are pretty much indifferent to orientation.
If the stack were twisted as I suggest, so the Lifter is ventral to the tower but the Orbiter is dorsal, intuitively your question about the aerodynamics of the early boost phase might seem addressed--the higher Orbiter would "want" to drift toward the tower but the lower Lifter would be lifting away from it. Upon thought that is actually terrible, since the combined moments would work together to pitch the stack right into the tower!
Consider several things though:
1) airspeed during the tower-clearing phase is really low; as the tail of the Lifter clears the top, it is only going some tens of meters/sec, well below runway takeoff speeds for all but the lightest low-power airplanes; air drag and aerodynamic lift and pitching moments are very low. Per square meter anyway; the large wing areas can make these substantial even then. But the moments should not be too difficult to control, by vectoring Lifter thrust if not by aerodynamic control alone.
2) it is indeed customary to design airplanes so that when their fuselages are oriented for minimal drag straight into the slipstream, the wings are canted with some positive angle of attack for lift; to get minimal drag one would have to pitch the plane a bit nose-down. But there is no absolute requirement to do that; the wings could be "depressed" a bit relative to conventional design so that zero pitch on the fuselage is also the neutral pitch of the wing. If this were done with the Orbiter and Lifter design, then the larger wing area of the Lifter at the back cancels and overwhelms the pitch effect of the forward but smaller Orbiter lift area. Both wings develop lift in the same direction, with the larger Lifter wing tending to automatically stabilize the net craft axis to point along the slipstream. If the wings are indeed unusually pitched for zero lift when the craft is pitched straight into the slipstream, then upon reentry both must fly with their fuselages pitched more "nose up" than is normal for most airplane designs, which would also tend to raise net drag a bit. But I don't see why this should be a problem, as long as the drag increase in lifting flight is minor.
3) as you note, of course both vehicles have control surfaces, customarily called "elevons" on tailless delta wing configurations, to point out that a single surface plays both the role of elevators on conventional tails, which are hinged to work together to raise or lower the tail, and ailerons that control roll and thus banking. Flaps as used on conventional tailed aircraft have no place on a simple delta wing; the high lift flaps provide comes from the ability of a delta to go to much higher angles of attack without stalling and pitching the nose up high is how deltas acquire high lift for landing (along with their very high area). With the craft separated as is always the case when either component lands, they are I suppose simple deltas (perhaps with extra surfaces for hypersonic control such as a central flap as on OTL Orbiter) but when launched, of course we have a tandem arrangement with the Orbiter wing serving as a sort of oversized canard. Even if both Orbiter and Lifter are configured with conventionally pitched wings that develop lift when the fuselage axis is horizontal, it is of course possible to pitch both sets of elevons to neutralize that lift--at the cost of a bit of drag of course. But as mentioned, during the tower-clearing phase the airspeed is low and Q, the pressure from it, is even lower, certainly relative to Q-Max, about one atmospheric scale height up more or less. To lower wing lift to zero on a conventionally up-pitched wing one would raise the elevons up a bit, raising drag (and stress on the elevons, but they have to be designed to take much worse stresses). Drag is small at low airspeeds though. Once they clear the tower, the elevons could go back to neutral and the consequence would be a transverse lift relative to body axes. With both craft dorsal to the tower as shown in Nixonshead's picture, this means lift up on the trajectory once the ship starts to tilt. With both ventral, which is intuitively what I guessed and Patupi did too, it would mean countering some of the thrust lift which is unfortunate, but also helping the transverse component accelerating toward orbit. With it twisted so the Orbiter is dorsal (for easiest access on the tower) and the Lifter is ventral, it means a net lift force as with ventral orientation for both, since the Lifter wing dominates, and a strong pitching moment back toward vertical since the opposing lifts add instead of cancel for that purpose. This must be opposed either by pitching the Lifter engines strongly, against that module's own lift and thus achieving net lift as with the dorsal launch configuration, or continuing to zero out the lift of both winged units thus raising air drag. Since air drag probably costs a lot less than losing thrust with engine gimbaling--though a small amount of the latter costs very little indeed--I expect it would be a mix of both, mainly relying on aerodynamic nullification to ease the burden of the engine gimbaling, but a bit of the latter--which would be needed anyway to achieve desired pitching if the craft had no wings at all.
The upshot of this post is that I can't see how the orientation of the Lifter as shown in Nixonhead's picture can be right; it means that during the first 10 seconds or more of burn, until the Lifter cabin clears the tower anyway, the Lifter crew has no escape at all, except in a case before the hold-downs are released that pair can slide down a wire as with that mode of escape from Apollo and IIRC the Orbiter OTL. Ejection seats would be just as useless as ejecting the capsule; either would shred the crew like cheese against the tower. Well, I suppose sideways ejection might be an option, but it means adding in a very specialized escape system. Perhaps if I go back and reread about the Lifter's escape capsule system I will be reminded that the two Lifter pilots must eject from the capsule and separately parachute to the surface since the capsule is not designed to soft-land anyway. If so I suppose maybe sideways ejection might be feasible--but I don't see how that will clear either astronaut from a total detonation of Lifter and second stage propellants, whereas within the capsule they would be shielded, and could eject from it after the shock wave has passed. The only way for Lifter pilots to survive an early launch failure would be if the crew capsule were oriented on the far side from the tower. For the Lifter I don't think that poses severe problems of servicing or even entry. IIRC from earlier pictures, the Lifter has a side hatch like an airplane's, but it might also have a ventral hatch--even though the nose area gets severe heating, at 1500 m/sec a suitable hatch is surely feasible, and come to think of it very suitable for egress after a nominal landing too. More problematic might be the transfer tunnel to the cabin, that might need to cut through the oxygen tank, or at least the fuel tank. But anyway a side hatch is workable with a reach-around external boarding gantry similar to that used on Apollo and I suppose STS, which definitely did not have a ventral hatch.
The Orbiter on the other hand can face any way the designers like, and thus the convenience of a dorsal orientation to the tower can be safely taken advantage of.
This suggests to me the twisted arrangement, with the Lifter and Orbiter cabins on opposite sides of the vertical stack, is most sensible. I confess I never thought about it until today, but now that I have I have to ask the authors if this has been considered and rejected for reasons, or if they too were blinded by conventional thinking that says all modules have the same orientation because that's the way a sanely make airplane would be, even though it is impossible for the combined stack to take off or land in a horizontal orientation as a whole anyway.
Of course if there is an explanation why it is OK for the Lifter crew to be sandwiched between their potentially exploding stage and the tower, I think we'd all like to know it!
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Way back in ETS, I got enthusiastic about the practice of horizontal assembly, believing not only that it would allow a much less expensive assembly building but that it would enable much more rapid and safe transport of the assembled stack to the launch tower, after which elevation to a vertical attitude is very straightforward given a suitable gantry. At the time I did not realize that in Soviet practice, even such giant rockets as N-1 and Energia were handled in just that way, but they were. I was mainly troubled by the long time it took for a Saturn rocket (Saturn V, or the eventual Multibodies of the TL, or Shuttle of OTL) to be hauled from the VAB to the launch pads by the crawlers, which were restricted in speed not only by the sheer mass of the loads but by their vertical orientation meaning it was a risky load to move, being liable to topple, meaning it was terribly vulnerable to strong winds. In practice weather forecasting is apparently good enough to plan the dates on which the stacks were moved. One cannot safely launch in windy weather anyway of course. But I thought that a horizontal load could be moved much faster, and of course is not in danger of being toppled even if winds were to blow up unexpectedly.
Against this, the authors, IIRC e of pi on this point, rejected the suggestion in large part because the problem of designing a rocket, in its separate stages and then even worse as an integrated whole, to take two different directions of major stress (and indeed the shifting mix of both as it is pitched up from horizontal to vertical) is enough of a headache, and would nullify the value of checks done in the assembly hangar as well, and it was simpler and better to just design the rocket to always be vertical as it effectively would be under thrust anyway, and move it that way. This argument held firm throughout the development of NASA launch systems in ETS, where all reusable first stage proposals were vertical-landing as with SpaceX's OTL Falcon developments.
But in this ATL, the decision has been made to do what e of pi did not want to do in ETS, and make the first stage a horizontal fly-back and lander. It at any rate must be designed to hold up in both orientations, though admittedly not in the intermediate states! (Except I suppose intermediate stressing will surely occur in flight and must be anticipated as well). The Orbiter too must tolerate both orientations, as the OTL Orbiter did. Only the second stage is meant to operate solely under vertical stress, and surely it would not be too difficult to make it tolerant of being shifted from horizontal to vertical. I might therefore look forward to later generation Lifter designs that can be assembled and moved horizontally.
Except of course, for this sudden suggestion that actually the Lifter and Orbiter should be twisted 180 degrees relative to each other. That would mean that during horizontal assembly and movement, one or the other must be upside down! Or alternatively, having argued that the Lifter absolutely must be belly to the tower, the Orbiter would have to be so mounted as well and thus access to it before launch would be compromised one way or another.
Thus the argument for vertical assembly and transport is reinforced, beyond merely noting that the legacy VAB requires this anyway.
I was considering the slow launch, but in the description it actually says it was very quick to get past the tower. That was what originally made be wonder if there would be some build up of a little lateral aerodynamic forces towards the tower. With it positioned as close as it appears I considered it might be at least worrying, if on a conventional launch unlikely to get dangerous. But you know how safety conscious NASA is. I was just curious if they had a system in play for it, no matter how minor such variances were.
...and rereading the launch description I've just realized at the end of the burn past the tower they say exactly that, that they initiate a slight angle away from the tower to compensate. Comes from reading the description and seeing the pic several days apart... and having a bad memory.
...and rereading the launch description I've just realized at the end of the burn past the tower they say exactly that, that they initiate a slight angle away from the tower to compensate. Comes from reading the description and seeing the pic several days apart... and having a bad memory.