Space Station Freedom

So NASA hoped to connect the OTV with the comsat market. NASA would build the OTV, launch some comsats to GEO with it, then handle the system to the private sector. The OTV would start from Freedom, boost a satellite to GEO, then move back to Freedom by braking, either on the atmosphere (or propulsively, but that would take an awful lot of propellants). Repeat, relaunch, reuse.
Satellite servicing (pioneered by Solar Max in 1984) would be a natural offspring of that.

Hmm. I can't help but feel that the Space Shuttle is never going to be able to make that plan economically viable. I wonder if Freedom+Shuttle C would be able to make OTV GEO sat servicing economical though?

fasquardon
 
Hmm. I can't help but feel that the Space Shuttle is never going to be able to make that plan economically viable. I wonder if Freedom+Shuttle C would be able to make OTV GEO sat servicing economical though?
I think you're right that with the OTL $500m/flight Shuttle that's not really viable. It might have been with a reusable first stage instead of a reusable orbiter, and of course it looked like a great idea with the initial fantasy Shuttle. I'm not sure if a Shuttle-C would be cheap enough to make it feasible--to be honest, the best way with an OTV would be to put the space shuttle parts of it aside, and fly the prop and spacecraft to Freedom for transfer to OTV on the cheapest LVs you have available--Atlas, Titan, whatever.
 
I think you're right that with the OTL $500m/flight Shuttle that's not really viable. It might have been with a reusable first stage instead of a reusable orbiter, and of course it looked like a great idea with the initial fantasy Shuttle. I'm not sure if a Shuttle-C would be cheap enough to make it feasible--to be honest, the best way with an OTV would be to put the space shuttle parts of it aside, and fly the prop and spacecraft to Freedom for transfer to OTV on the cheapest LVs you have available--Atlas, Titan, whatever.

One issue of using a station as a orbiting refuelling base is that with all these stages and satelites docking and refuelling the risk is that an collision might occur, especially if running to a busy schedule, and unlike an unmanned fuel dump, the consequences could be quite severe.
 
One issue of using a station as a orbiting refuelling base is that with all these stages and satelites docking and refuelling the risk is that an collision might occur, especially if running to a busy schedule, and unlike an unmanned fuel dump, the consequences could be quite severe.
That's traffic management, which is a solvable problem--Atlanta's airport manages about 100 takeoffs and landings an hour. It takes more people devoted to managing it, but there's no reason you can't have a docking to a station every day or two instead of every few weeks--you just need more docking ports and more people working on scheduling and managing visiting vehicle.
 

Archibald

Banned
I remembered another issue (beating that dead horse again !)
NASA basically didn't knew what to do with the space station, and the broad set of missions they struggled to define conflicted with each other.
As noted earlier in the thread, docking of interplanetary ships would wreck microgravity experiments.
28.5 degree orbit was better for interplanetary launches, but 51.6 (or polar, 90 degree) was better for remote sensing of Earth landmassess.

There were plenty of contradictions like this in the successive designs, that were never solved.
 
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