A Rocket to Nowhere (2005)
I think I tell this story every time there's an article about the STS on here. When I was a precocious space cadet, I followed the development of the Shuttle as closely as a kid could before the Internet. I remember the initial promised launch cost of $50/lb into LEO. Young theothermkn weighed himself and worked out how much that would cost, and even tried to guess how much a capsule would weigh, and how much of a group capsule's weight that he would be responsible to pay for. Tough, but doable.
And then the price went to $100/lb. Okay, tougher, but still within reach. And then $500/lb. Ugh. And then $1,000/lb. Oh, well. Maybe a later version will be cheaper. Economies of scale! And then the newscasters stopped talking about the cost at all, except to note how far we were from the initial cost.
The Space Shuttle set spaceflight back 40 years. Years later, I got an aerospace engineering degree, and promptly left the field when I graduated because I didn't want to work inside soul-crushing aerospace institutions without even the hope of doing anything good.
We may never recover, given that all our eggs are in the SpaceX basket.
> The Shuttle even helped Reagan inadvertently bankrupt the Soviet Union, as the Soviets decided they needed a rival orbiter, and cloned the vehicle at terrific expense
Yeah that line of reasoning is pretty popular. "Soviet Union collapsed because of Reagan's masterful tricks. Look how great we are, we beat them"
Reagan didn't have any measurable effect on the collapse. But I guess it makes us feel better saying "We won the fight". Even though in reality the opponent's cancer finally got to him and he collapsed in the ring.
Russian shuttle Buran was in some way more advanced than ours: it could land itself automatically. It used an interesting programming and guidance system. There is even a vestige of it alive today:
Author here, thank you for lifiting this up from the mists of time.
Is there a readable summary anywhere of the last few years of progress towards Constellation (or whatever it's called now)? I find the situation confusing and have trouble figuring out what's still slated to happen, what got changed, and what missions are still on the drawing board.
So I once saw a talk by one of the Steve K. Robinson, a mission specialist on the STS-114 where a gap filler came loose from one of the tiles and was protruding near the front of the shuttle. Accord to him, this was a very scary situation. The reason being that the gap filler could trip the flow near the front of the shuttle from laminar to turbulent.
This would be very very bad. So if you haven't taken fluid dynamics, turbulent flow transfers heat a lot better than laminar flow and once flow becomes turbulent it tends to stay that way. So what this meant is that pesky gap filler could have made almost all of the flow trailing it turbulent, creating a region of increased heat transfer across much of the shuttle, which could have destroyed the shuttle.
And unfortunately poor Steve knew about all of this because he did some work on hypersonic flow in grad school. So NASA engineers went all apollo 13 and macgyvered some procedures on how to turn the hack saw aboard the station into filler slicer-offer. Steve Robinson himself decided to perform the mission, this was the first and probably only time a spacewalk was performed under the shuttle's heat shield. This was a very risky mission where a small mistake could do more damage than the gap filler could do. Luckily in the end, the gap filler was loose and easily removed by pulling.
All that caused by a tiny piece of ceramic sticking out about a centimeter! Now the interesting thing is that a couple missions later, NASA engineers decided to put a turbulent trip on the shuttle on purpose, because we don't understand hypersonic boundary layer transition all that well[1]. It was near the end of the shuttle, so the region of increased heat transfer couldn't do much damage, but still performing such an experiment on the shuttle, almost right after the Columbia disaster, was pretty nuts. Necessary though, because experiments on hypersonic flow are difficult to perform in wind tunnels.
One of the reasons capsules are so compelling is that there is less distance for this laminar to turbulent transition to occur.
[0]http://www.nasa.gov/returntoflight/crew/EVA_gapfiller.html [1]http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/2011001...
"with each Shuttle mission now bespangled in a dazzling assortment of scientific experiments, like so many talismans against budget reduction."
Now that's a beautiful line.
If you'd like a lot more detail on the process described here by which the Shuttle program went from what it could have been to what it ended up being, I've found NASA's own history, "The Space Shuttle Decision", to be quite thorough and comprehensive. You can find it here: http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4221/contents.htm
It makes you wonder what a shuttle program unencumbered by political compromise would look like.
A space station on an orbit where it could be used as a way station for manned exploration further afield.
The ISS itself, is the same kind of boondoggle as the Shuttle.
Imagine a US space program that put unmanned probes front and center. We could've had video feeds crawling over every moon of Jupiter and Saturn, and inside the Martian caves. We might've settled the Mars and Europa life question. And two Shuttle crews would not have died.
Humans don't belong in space. Robots do.
Lovely piece on the Soviet shuttle "Buran" http://www.astronautix.com/b/buran.html
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Can anyone offer an explanation of why the shuttle used a horizontal launch stack (booster alongside the orbiter) instead of a vertical launch stack (booster beneath the orbiter) like every other launch vehicle I know of? TFA hints that it was related to the requirement for polar orbit capability, but offers no details.