Derek Lyons wrote:
Which, in my book, makes the person who thinks that's a condemnation
of the Shuttle... an idiot. Because that was the goal of the Shuttle
from Day One, to work with a space station.


No, no, no... Shuttle was designed to lower the per-pound cost of
getting things and people into LEO for NASA, commercial interests, and
the DOD.

Derek Lyons wrote:
Which, in my book, makes the person who thinks that's a condemnation
of the Shuttle... an idiot. Because that was the goal of the Shuttle
from Day One, to work with a space station.


No, no, no... Shuttle was designed to lower the per-pound cost of
getting things and people into LEO for NASA, commercial interests, and
the DOD.

Of course, the Soviet Mir gave the Reagan administration to perfect
opportunity to shovel yet more money at the aerospace industry...so that
Socialism's Shining Star wouldn't scare our children as they looked up
at the night sky and realized Commies were up their giving them the
finger and just waiting to bury them. :-)



I worked at LeRC in that era, and that was my impression as well.

Which, in my book, makes the person who thinks that's a condemnation
of the Shuttle... an idiot. Because that was the goal of the Shuttle
from Day One, to work with a space station.

Pat Flannery wrote:
Oh, I remember those days.


And speaking of those days, very rosy economic predictions for the
Shuttle, from NASA's history office itself itself:
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4221/ch6.htm

(NB: I'm not claiming the most hyped promises -- the giant protein
crystals, perfect ball bearings, breakthroughs in undersatnding
free-fall physiology etc -- would have paid off; I'm saying there's
never been a chance of finding out with the very limited equipment and
even more limited time available for them).

It's as if I'd tried to build a house on a mountaintop using a
Lamborghini to carry materials and workmen. Surprisingly, the house
ends up a lot more expensive, less spacious and well-equipped than I'd
hoped... and I conclude "well, that proves a house on a moiuntaintop
is a dumb idea."

Unfortunately, those decisions also meant that the system is a
real p.i.t.a. to fly and maintain.

Unfortunately, the system, as designed, takes *a lot* of man-hours of work
to turn it around. The TPS and SSME's were really problematic in the
beginning. The toxic OMS, RCS, and APU propellants impact the workflow due
to the need to be wearing environmental suits when working on those systems
(you can't just "gas and go" on the pad).

The original Faget two-component reusable design would have been hell to
turn around also.
In that case you would have had all the complexities of inspecting the
orbiter after every flight, plus the added burden of checking out the
big winged booster stage and its TPS after every flight also.

Pat

Somewhere, I still have a copy of "My Weekly Reader" from around 1971
or '72. The cover story was about the design competition for the
future space shuttle, and featured illustrations of 3 different
concepts; all of them huge, and all of them needlessly complex. All
these years later, and I still have the same question that I had in
the 6th grade...

"What happened to project Dyna-Soar?"

Small, reusable lifting bodies mounted on top of Titan-variant
boosters fueled by hypergolic propellants. Get in the truck, push the
START button and "Blast Off!" (well, no, not quite, but a lot closer
than anything we've got now). Leave all of the heavy lifting to the
big, dumb, disposable boosters, that's what they were designed for.

But in order to procure funding, everything was promised to everybody
and we wound up with the beautiful, exquisite mess that is the STS;
not quite the right machine for any mission. And although it sounds
harsh, from an operational standpoint perhaps the worst part is that
no one involved with the STS project seemed to have ever watched any
'50's TV Sci-Fi. If the Space Rangers lost a ship, it was certainly a
tragedy; but there were still 20 (or 50, or 100) more ships in the
fleet. By designing a shuttle large enough to carry IUS boosters into
orbit (oh, and a few passengers, too), we wound up with only a handful
of extremely expensive vehicles, the loss of one of which constituted
1/4 OF THE FLEET in addition to the loss of the crew.

When the X-38 project came along, I thought perhaps some degree of
sanity had prevailed. No such luck. That project apparently made too
much sense, so obviously it had to be cancelled (after all of the
development money was spent, of course). I think maybe you're right,
Pat, the real purpose is just to spend money. After all, they managed
to "downsize" the space station until the redesigns cost more than
building the original concept would have, right?