Two Stage Shuttle, Phase B

Probably can carry more weight, but will also be far more expensive, and will still not fix the issue of over-complexity.
 

Archibald

Banned
No way. As of 1971 NASA had lost control of the shuttle program; Nixon final decision over the shuttle (or not) would be based on input from Weinberger Bureau of Budget - not from NASA Fletcher.
Once the obstacle Weinberger surmounted, a bigger obstacle is Congress, with the Proxmire / Mondale / Karth troika.
 
As Archibald said, there's essentially no possible PoD for this. The decision wasn't NASA's, it was Nixon and Congress's, and there's not really a way to change it enough for it to happen. More than that, I'm not sure it wouldn't have had worse teething issues than OTL's Shuttle.
 

Archibald

Banned
My own little theory is that there was, quite simply, no good shuttle to be picked up by NASA.
It was all a matter of internal / external tank Vs booster.
Internal tankage was too hard, yet external tankage bastardized the shuttle. Then the booster: the Saturn S-IC was tempting, but how do you recover it ?
IMHO the best they could hope for was more or less the orbiter / external tank as we know it, with a ballistic recoverable pressure-fed falling into the ocean. Unlike the S-IC, a pressure-fed booster can withstand a brutal fall into the ocean.
Another issue is wether the SSME light on the pad or in flight. Massive butterflies there (Ares 1 !)
 
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