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The driving requirement of the Shuttle was that it should be feasible to steal a Soviet satellite sporting unknown new orbital technology, before the Soviets ha

by mapt 9y ago

The driving requirement of the Shuttle was that it should be feasible to steal a Soviet satellite sporting unknown new orbital technology, before the Soviets had the opportunity to intervene, and that it be prepared to fly fairly quickly whatever its faults to be ready for potential Soviet expansions into spaceflight as an area of competition. There were a lot of other requirements and stakeholders that were part of the planning process, and any of them who didn't understand that espionage was a critical component were left wondering why anyone would design such an expensive, impractical failure; Why every stage of the process where it seemed to be unworkable, someone said "Yeah, don't worry about that" and poured money on the problem. Aside from direct requirements, we also encouraged the Soviet Union to spend lavishly copying our design. By the time the USSR unexpectedly broke up, Energia had just (unsuccessfully) flown a test run with a giant Polyus laser weapon. Mission accomplished, right? But we didn't then want all of the Soviet scientists to spread to the winds and start building ICBMs for anyone who could pay. We needed them to stay in Russia until Russia could become a solvent, stable state. So we said "What sort of international cooperative effort could we use a whole bunch of Shuttle AND Soyuz flights for?" and designed (or adapted) a space station around that requirement. We decided to revamp Reagan's ill-fated "Space Station Freedom" program into the ISS. That's the only reason we didn't retire the Space Shuttle long before the Columbia.

sandworm101 9y ago
Nobody seriously though Shuttle could bring back a hostile spacecraft. The logistics of such a thing are ridiculous. What Shuttle could have done was to bring back friendly sats. The only friendly sats worth bringing back would be something that couldn't be allowed to re-enter. The only things that couldn't ever be allowed to re-enter would be something nuclear, either a reactor or a bomb. Shuttle was envisioned as a system for maintaining some sort of nuclear tech in orbit. That never happened, but the worry that it would was a driving force behind Buran.
- mapt 9y ago
  Such a system could orbit a number of times during maintenance operations of friendly satellites; It would not need the cross-range that the Shuttle was built for. I get a lot of "Nobody seriously thought this", but the high cross-range required of single-orbit-and-land is the long pole in the tent that stretches the rest of the requirements; It's not a reasonable tradeoff unless espionage was a use-case that could not be ruled out. Without the requirement to land a large cargo bay with an extreme cross-range, the optimal design looks nothing like the Shuttle. The Shuttle cost an order of magnitude more than that optimal design.
nradov 9y ago
That's completely wrong. There was no serious consideration of stealing Soviet satellites. Everyone knew that we'd never be able to get away with that. The driving requirement was to act as a successor to the SR-71. Launch, make a single reconnaissance pass over the Soviet Union, and then utilize the cross-range capability to land immediately so that the film could be developed. But by the time the Shuttle was actually built, spy satellites equipped with digital cameras had improved so much that it became moot.
- daemin 9y ago
  If the Russian satellite is a secret, and the Americans steal it secretly, then of course they would get away with it. It's like a thief stealing from another thief.
  - nradov 9y ago
    There were no secret satellites. Nothing can hide in orbit. Even amateur astronomers are able to track military satellites.
- mapt 9y ago
  You don't need something a tenth the size of the Shuttle to be an effective manned camera platform, even an effective manned camera platform with extreme cross-range. We had effective unmanned film camera platforms in space long before we had CCDs, long before the Shuttle was contemplated. > During the 1950s, a Soviet hoax had led to American fears of a bomber gap. In 1968, after gaining satellite photography, the United States' intelligence agencies were able to state with certainty that "No new ICBM complexes have been established in the USSR during the past year."[10] President Lyndon B. Johnson told a gathering in 1967: >> I wouldn't want to be quoted on this ... We've spent $35 or $40 billion on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge that we gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor.[10]

by mapt 9y ago

sandworm101 9y ago

Nobody seriously though Shuttle could bring back a hostile spacecraft. The logistics of such a thing are ridiculous. What Shuttle could have done was to bring back friendly sats. The only friendly sats worth bringing back would be something that couldn't be allowed to re-enter. The only things that couldn't ever be allowed to re-enter would be something nuclear, either a reactor or a bomb. Shuttle was envisioned as a system for maintaining some sort of nuclear tech in orbit. That never happened, but the worry that it would was a driving force behind Buran.

mapt 9y ago
Such a system could orbit a number of times during maintenance operations of friendly satellites; It would not need the cross-range that the Shuttle was built for. I get a lot of "Nobody seriously thought this", but the high cross-range required of single-orbit-and-land is the long pole in the tent that stretches the rest of the requirements; It's not a reasonable tradeoff unless espionage was a use-case that could not be ruled out. Without the requirement to land a large cargo bay with an extreme cross-range, the optimal design looks nothing like the Shuttle. The Shuttle cost an order of magnitude more than that optimal design.

nradov 9y ago

That's completely wrong. There was no serious consideration of stealing Soviet satellites. Everyone knew that we'd never be able to get away with that. The driving requirement was to act as a successor to the SR-71. Launch, make a single reconnaissance pass over the Soviet Union, and then utilize the cross-range capability to land immediately so that the film could be developed. But by the time the Shuttle was actually built, spy satellites equipped with digital cameras had improved so much that it became moot.

daemin 9y ago
If the Russian satellite is a secret, and the Americans steal it secretly, then of course they would get away with it. It's like a thief stealing from another thief.
- nradov 9y ago
  There were no secret satellites. Nothing can hide in orbit. Even amateur astronomers are able to track military satellites.
mapt 9y ago
You don't need something a tenth the size of the Shuttle to be an effective manned camera platform, even an effective manned camera platform with extreme cross-range. We had effective unmanned film camera platforms in space long before we had CCDs, long before the Shuttle was contemplated. > During the 1950s, a Soviet hoax had led to American fears of a bomber gap. In 1968, after gaining satellite photography, the United States' intelligence agencies were able to state with certainty that "No new ICBM complexes have been established in the USSR during the past year."[10] President Lyndon B. Johnson told a gathering in 1967: >> I wouldn't want to be quoted on this ... We've spent $35 or $40 billion on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge that we gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor.[10]