8 ms·
Space Transportation System
- iscrewyou 8y agoSomething about that image in Wikipedia makes it very easy to understand. Why are vintage graphics so good? Is it the nostalgia or the limited amount of color usage? Or is it the use of arrows and and telling the user exactly what they need to know from the image? I can’t quite put my finger on it.
- garmaine 8y agoIt was actually drawn by hand, a process that took a lot longer than digital work and required an artist to contemplate every part of it during its creation. That’s a lot of time to make tweaks and adjust things to communicate better.
- Gravityloss 8y agoAlso these were made by professional specialists. Even just regular consulting companies had people doing graphs for their reports and presentations. Excel and Powerpoint came and analysts started doing them themselves with drastic loss in quality and legibility.
- codeulike 8y agoIf they released it now there would be a glossy video animation and a press kit, and then fifty different websites would add clickbait titles like 'You won't believe what NASA's new Robot Tug can do with its arms' and then make you wade through paragraphs of blurb before letting you get to the bit that actually explains whats going on. And you'd also have to click no to a pop-up subscribe window and turn off the sound of an unrelated autoplay video, by which time you would have forgotten why you even came to look at that page. Thats why a simple diagram is better.
- duxup 8y agoAnd somehow I still wouldn't understand it...
- Raphmedia 8y agoVideos were very instructive back then too. At some point, we started to prioritize form over function. E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI [Around The Corner - How Differential Steering Works (1937)]
- JKCalhoun 8y agoDon't mean to start a flame thread, but I hate CG "space renderings". The concept art from the 70's was amazing. When NASA and the industry in general went to CG the illustrations really fell off a cliff. To be sure, the rendering is top-notch today, less so when they first made the switch, but I dislike even the modern realistic CG renderings. I want palette-knife clouds on the Earth in the background, hues of cerulean blue and rust orange on the aluminum surfaces of the space craft.... You know, art!
- greedo 8y agoInteresting sidenote; Ralph McQuarrie drew for NASA, and then created the iconic images for Star Wars (along with many other artists).
- willyt 8y agoThe final artwork was a bigger time commitment so you would stop and think about the message for much longer before you committed to the final rendering. I think now we go straight to modelling and graphics programs which speed up the process and are much more flexible about allowing you to go back and edit. This gives people a feeling they can change the final output much more easily and so there is not so much pressure to get the information design concept right for how you convey the information before you start creating the final image.
- dokem 8y agoI've been watching a lot of those black and white technical videos produced by the US Army/Air Force/Navy/MIT/etc from the 50s-70s. The videos and diagrams are incredibly descriptive and information dense yet easy to digest. The narrator is authoritative and straight to the point. I really haven't find much modern content of the same caliber. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyDbq5HRs0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyDbq5HRs0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFp6pH9XCtY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFp6pH9XCtY
- hef19898 8y agoI love how, despite things like the Cold War and the Vietnam War, projects for the future have been so optimistic and ambitious back then. We really need of these dreamers, people who's goal to land on Mars and build space stations, instead of getting rich by selling adds over social media. Let's hope Elon cools down, or someone else steps up to it.
- wnkrshm 8y agoThe project was intended as dual-use from the start, the shuttle was pitched as a way for the USAF to get classified payloads into space and experience for their military personnel. The shuttle has flown some classified missions for the DoD but not as many as initially intended, because the platform didn't turn out as reliable as they had hoped. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Spaceflight_Engineer_Program#Shuttle_missions_with_classified_payloads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Spaceflight_Engineer_Pr...
- black6 8y agoFor those interested, there is a good series of essays on The Space Review detailing the National Reconnaissance Office’s effort to integrate Space Shuttle operations into its spy satellite servicing schedule. Part 1: http://thespacereview.com/article/3172/1 http://thespacereview.com/article/3172/1 Part 2: http://thespacereview.com/article/3302/1 http://thespacereview.com/article/3302/1 Part 3-1: http://thespacereview.com/article/3390/1 http://thespacereview.com/article/3390/1 Part 3-2: http://thespacereview.com/article/3394/1 http://thespacereview.com/article/3394/1
- wongarsu 8y agoThe originally envisioned Space Shuttle was much smaller, but NASA couldn't get funding without USAF. In the process USAF and NRO demanded a much larger shuttle, which required the boosters and the additional orange fuel tank, and generally raised operating costs. You could argue that this significantly contributed to the overall failure of the shuttle program (outside of narrow use cases) Then came the Challenger Disaster, which grounded the Shuttle fleet for three years and lead NASA to cancel all performance improvements, leading to the NRO giving up on the Shuttle as a launch vehicle. In the end the space shuttle was neither reliable enough nor powerfull enough for NRO missions. [1][2] 1: https://de.scribd.com/document/348134338/Declassifying-the-Fact-of-the-NRO-s-Use-of-the-Space-Shuttle-as-a-Launch-Vehicle https://de.scribd.com/document/348134338/Declassifying-the-F... 2: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB509/ https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB509/
- JKCalhoun 8y agoAlways fascinated by this — I suppose during my formative years, this was the kind of stuff in space books I checked out from the library: space tugs, lunar colonies.... As a hobbyist, I am trying to create a model of the "space tug" featured so frequently in the 1970's NASA studies. Here is more information on the Space Tug than anyone could need including links to NASA documents/studies: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacetug.php http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacetug.php My progress on a model: https://www.therpf.com/showthread.php?t=294711 https://www.therpf.com/showthread.php?t=294711
- zackmorris 8y agoA little easter egg as part of the usual Wikipedia crawl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA#NERVA_rocket_stage_specifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA#NERVA_rocket_stage_speci... NERVA had a greater thrust than the weight of the rocket, so could at least theoretically be turned into a ground launch system (probably after a few more iterations). Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto Nuclear ramjets were viable just before they were cancelled out of environmental and nuclear proliferation concerns. I'm fairly certain that a denser working fluid like nitrogen/oxygen creates a higher thrust than hydrogen, at the cost of having a lower specific impulse (ISP). So it should have been straightforward to build a final rocket that could use either. Maybe someone knows for sure? Even as a tree hugging hippie in spirit, I'm saddened that we have hundreds of nuclear reactors around the world that may very well begin spilling more and more radiation into the oceans and air as our scientific wisdom declines under pressure from (insert dystopian endgame here: late stage capitalism/communism, austerity, fascism, what have you), but don't use nuclear power for scientific pursuits. Also I'm a bit saddened that we never had nuclear launch systems, because they might have been a stepping stone to a microwave or laser rocket that used power transmitted from a ground station to run as an electric ramjet and transition to hydrogen in the upper atmosphere. To me, that's probably the only feasible way to reduce launch costs to something comparable to a space elevator.
- sien 8y agoKeep it quiet, because the nuclear-phobia of many people, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_systems_in_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_systems_...
- nickik 8y ago> I'm saddened that we have hundreds of nuclear reactors around the world that may very well begin spilling more and more radiation into the oceans and air as our scientific wisdom declines under pressure from To really do harm with nuclear reactors or waste from nuclear reactors you actually need to do a lot of stuff and once you shoot one down, doing nothing is a reasonable policy. Seems to me its highly unlikely that we will ever see significant radiation impact on humans from current nuclear. Sadly the destruction of nuclear has essentially slowed our whole civilization, we have never really jumped from becoming a chemical to an atomic society. Had nuclear energy won out we would have lots more research in applications for these technologies. Nuclear trains, ships and rockets. Nuclear batteries. Medical isotopes. Materials for medical diagnostic.
- rladd 8y agoThis NASA publication shows the plans in much more detail. Space Settlements: A Design Study, NASA, SP-413 https://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/Table_of_Contents1.html https://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/Table_of_Conte... The space shuttle was only the first step in a very ambitious program that culminated with a spinning cylindrical space community housing 10,000 people and growing its own food. There are detailed discussions about construction (using moon rocks), shielding, what plants and animals to use for farming, etc. etc.
- benbreen 8y agoThanks for posting, that's an interesting resource. Table 3.2, laying out projections of community space usage in outer space (including churches!), could be good fodder for future historians writing about the mid-20th century cultural assumptions that structured early space travel. Also this sentence is fascinating to me: "Whether space colonization is a unilateral effort on the part of the United States or a cross-national enterprise, it will most likely be sponsored by a public or quasipublic organization with a bureaucratic structure which permeates the early settlement." I've always thought the Alien movies strike the most realistic tone in this regard, with the Weyland Corp lurking in the background.
- WorldMaker 8y agoI'm mostly finished with the "Lady Astronaut" duology (The Calculating Stars/The Fated Sky) from Mary Robinette Kowal. Highly recommended. She started with predecessor works to these Shuttle-era dreams (such as Wernher von Braun's original treatise on colonizing Mars, most of which the science still holds up today, and was written prior to NASA's moon work) and posits a timeline to make that happen in the 50s/60s to eventually push humanity to Mars colonies by present day. (Via international cooperation in that case, sparked in large part by a meteorite hit that caused massively sped up global greenhouse effect/climate change on Earth.) The bibliography for the books has some other interesting early space travel reading that's worth revisiting with present day eyes.
- mundu_wa_hinya 8y agoNerva sounds very interesting. Hmm, I wonder if spacex would have use for a Nerva LEO to anywhere tug.... So launch a geosynchronous payload with a minimal upper stage to get to LEO, get a tug to dock with the payload and boost it to wherever.... Every so often an f9 or FH would put up a fuel tanker into orbit to refuel the tug... Are there any other options to nuclear propulsion for the tug? Solar? Lasers?
- 7952 8y agoFor longer distances like earth to mars I don't think it really makes sense. The tug will be out orbiting the sun for quite a while before it is useful again. So you might as well leave it attached to the cargo and use it for a return journey. But then isn't really a tug any more. Maybe could be useful for moving things between LEO and Lagrange. Then the tug could be used again quickly.
- rbanffy 8y agoI just love the concept of modular spacecraft. Even if we can get better performance out of custom designs for space probes, there is a compelling case for building more probes sharing the cost of a common architecture with mission-optimized sensor and communication packs riding commodity boosters. And even then, the communications package for Neptune or Pluto or for KBOs probably would share a lot of common parts. As would power and guidance.