3 ms·
It seems the Space Shuttle’s orange fuel tank should’ve been a flyback booster. It’s fuel was connected to the shuttle main engines via a tube. And the main eng
by blackrock 6y ago
It seems the Space Shuttle’s orange fuel tank should’ve been a flyback booster. It’s fuel was connected to the shuttle main engines via a tube. And the main engines were useless in space, once the tank was de-staged.
The tank burned up in the atmosphere. But it would’ve been nice if it flew back and landed instead.
- mlyle 6y agoYou'd lose a lot of performance, then, because the tank would have to separate while still containing enough fuel to slow down and come home. You'd make a little bit of it back because the OMS wouldn't have to use thrust to circularize the orbit of the SSME mass or to deorbit it...
- nickik 6y agoYou would need to remove the Solid Boosters first to make it worth it. If you do that hydrogen becomes a bad choice. So you should have built an RP-1 or Methane single booster without solids and then you could have done it.
- nickik 6y agoThe whole shuttle designs was simply not a good one, it has a lot of compromises and false assumptions. The Soviet version where you simply have a space plane on the side of a independent booster was much better design that had much broader use case. It would have been much easier to build ISS if you had that capability. Remove the Solid Boosters and make the Core Booster better to further reduce risk. Once you are there you can just make the first stage land like SpaceX Falcon 9 does and have the Orbiter land like a plane. Even better to put the Space plane on top of the booster, rather then the side to reduce risk. And if your at that point, you realize you don't need the massive cross range capability, you can remove the massive wings. Then you are already pretty close to SpaceX Starship design.