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What's the purpose of the plane-like rocket? It looks like something that was built to fly in an atmosphere, but it's designed to be in space. Does it eventuall
by SwiftyBug 6y ago
What's the purpose of the plane-like rocket? It looks like something that was built to fly in an atmosphere, but it's designed to be in space. Does it eventually re-enter the atmosphere, thus the need to be able to fly in it?
- CarVac 6y agoThe Space Shuttle was designed to be able to steer itself during reentry to a large extent, over 2000 kilometers. This is why it has such large wings. The military wanted to launch it in a polar orbit, gather intelligence, and then land back where it started in a single orbit, which moves 2000 km east of where it was at launch.
- SwiftyBug 6y agoSo it just falls gracefully rather than actually fly?
- Ididntdothis 6y agoIt looked like a falling brick when it landed. The angle it came down at was incredibly steep.
- db48x 6y agoSlightly less steep than the landing angle of an actual brick though. Edit: glide slope is the word I was looking for.
- Ididntdothis 6y agoI watched it come down over Orlando and it looked like this could never work out. Much steeper than any airplane I have ever seen.
- Gwypaas 6y agoReally love this paragraph on the Shuttle Training Aircraft wikipedia page. To match the descent rate and drag profile of the real Shuttle at 37,000 feet (11,300 m), the main landing gear of the C-11A was lowered (the nose gear stayed retracted due to wind load constraints) and engine thrust was reversed. Its flaps could deflect upwards to decrease lift as well as downwards to increase lift. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Training_Aircraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Training_Aircraft
- Sharlin 6y agoReally drives home how you need to drag any normal airplane kicking and screaming into a regime where it’s as bad at staying in the air as the shuttle was :)
- jaywalk 6y agoDepends on the forward velocity of the brick.
- evgen 6y agoA fun little talk that describes the whole process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb4prVsXkZU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb4prVsXkZU
- JshWright 6y agoAw man, I went to go find this to link it, got caught up in watching it again, and by the time I got back you had beaten me to it...
- wondringaloud 6y agoIt is an unpowered flight, not a graceful fall.
- 9999px 6y agoI got very excited to see someone who hasn't heard of the Space Shuttle. It's quite the feat of engineering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2011/07/the-history-of-the-space-shuttle/100097/ https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2011/07/the-history-of-the...
- g3e0 6y agoRelevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ But I also have to admit I cannot fathom how someone could have not heard of the space shuttle? It was only retired in 2011?
- PuffinBlue 6y ago9 years ago. I have a 9 year old who wouldn't know what it was exactly if asked. But she'd recognise a Falcon landing. I'm sure there are teenagers out there who are discovering the shuttle just now. This thread might have been started by one.
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoWould those same teenagers also not know that the ISS exists or that humans went to the moon 50 years ago?
- PuffinBlue 6y agoWhat kind of odd question is that? If, as your tone implies, you believe that every teenager knows everything and it's not possible for some of them to have not heard or these things, then you must in fact be a teenager yourself.
- wondringaloud 6y agoI don't think it's unreasonable to be surprised that a teenager (at least, an American teenager) isn't aware of such a thing. They've managed to get through school without once being shown a photo of the space shuttle? Not one blurb? Never seen it in a TV commercial? Photograph?
- macksd 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle There's a few things that led to this. Culturally, the American space program has tended more towards the ideal of the "hero" astronaut than others, and there's been some tension between the technical/automated approach and the pilot-astronaut approach to things. I see this as an extension of that. They even considered having pilots manually control the pitch, etc. of the rockets on their way to orbit with the pilots hand on a joystick just following a "recommended" course to orbit. NASA had explored various ideas for very precise landings, believing that to be useful especially for rapidly-reusable aircraft. There was very serious consideration to having Gemini capsules land with a glider and the astronauts facing forward similar to an aircraft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Gemini#Gemini_Paraglider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Gemini#Gemini_Paragli....
- KineticLensman 6y agoThe book Digital Apollo [0] is fascinating on this subject. It describes the tensions that had to be resolved in terms who had overall authority, e.g. mission control vs. the crew vs. automation. [0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digital-apollo https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digital-apollo
- asudosandwich 6y agoTom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff talked about this too, with the Mercury astronauts being called spam in a can.
- JackFr 6y agoIn the movie version, there’s a scene where the test pilots are deriding the Mercury astronauts as being no better than monkeys that had been sent up in earlier rockets. Yeager shuts them up by pointing out that a monkey doesn’t know he’s sitting on a bomb.
- pjc50 6y agoThe Space Shuttle was massively handicapped by the Air Force giving it unreasonably difficult requirements. They were the ones who wanted it to be most plane-like. Especially the requirement to take off, capture a satellite (friendly or hostile), and land again at Vandenberg in a single orbit.