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original plan was smaller, but military had a mission in mind that required it be bigger, so they went bigger to get military buy in. And of course the imagined

original plan was smaller, but military had a mission in mind that required it be bigger, so they went bigger to get military buy in. And of course the imagined mission never happened. I wonder how much money would have been saved!

spaetzleesser 5y ago
The space shuttle is a sad story. On the one hand the military’s money made it possible but they also influenced the design in a very bad way.
- gameswithgo 5y ago
  This is the case with almost all large scale human endeavors. To get things done with lots of people takes compromises. Apollo program was the same way. I assume the pyramids and roman roads and so on as well. Though to be fair at some point once the shuttle program got going someone could have aborted on it and said that really this doesn't make sense.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    And the Mercury program, which launched on adapted Redstone ICBMs [0], themselves improvements on V-2s. An unfunded project that never gets built is objectively worse than a military-funded project. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGM-11_Redstone#Redstone_derivatives https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGM-11_Redstone#Redstone_der...
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      If the military-funded project creates $1M worth of value using $1B of funds, the unfunded project is objectively better.
      - beerandt 5y ago
        That's what army mapping service essentially did with early radar distance measuring projects. Huge expensive fleet of 18-wheeler trucks failure. And classical surveying methods beat it in every way at the time. But it was the direct predecessor to microwave communications. It was just portable military distance measuring equipment (like the model-99 dme w/ ~1cm @50km) that used a signal they found easy to piggyback voice and data on. And included that in the field units. AND 2nd, after a dozen or so more hugely expensive projects (ranging from failure to moderate success to "achieves objectives"), it led to the Airforce NAVSTAR program, which you know as... GPS. So the question becomes: What was the actual "objective" value provided by those expensive initial radar experiments, despite failing to achieve their direct objective?
        whatshisface 5y ago
        It's difficult to say without access to the counterfactual world where GPS was invented based on civilian microwave communication which itself would have evolved from civilian radio communication. We live in a world where the DoD redistributes money away from private industry and towards another sector of private industry, and it is hard to say what would happen if R&D tax laws were changed to move that money back from private military industry R&D to industry-industry R&D.
        beerandt 5y ago
        Maybe microwave transmission, but the economics of GPS or GNSS in general would preclude civilian investment in such an expensive constellation without obvious revenue channels. And it's moot for both these cases because the technology was needed for direct military applications anyway. What's the practical or ideological benefit of industry-industry R&D when the military is going to be the only customer, or at least the only paying customer for the first years/decades of use? I agree with you in general, with it being better for governments not picking the winners of markets or deciding who gets research money. But military is such a unique (yet universally needed) type of market, that practicality here means treating them as a large customer with unique product needs ( products unlikely to be revenue generating on the public market), even if you don't treat it as direct government allocation or a fixed/manipulated market. The only way I can think of to avoid that entirely would be some libertarian version of an all private, defense-by-contract type military. And then you'd have concerns about whether that could hold up to peer adversaries, and dozens of other wildcard concerns.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      And sweeping von Braun's Nazi complicity under the rug while others were hanging from the gallows at Nuremberg.
      - spaetzleesser 5y ago
        As A German this really bugs me. Von Braun and friends knew exactly what was going on in their production facilities, didn't care and never had to confront their role in this.
        jrockway 5y ago
        "Once the rockets are up who cares where they come down, that's not my department" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro
        meepmorp 5y ago
        don't say that he's hyp-o-critical, say rather that he's a-po-litical
        ethbr0 5y ago
        (For those who aren't familiar with 1967 humor: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro&t=17s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro&t=17s )
  - adamc 5y ago
    Right, this is basically a "human politics" thing.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  A pretty typical big government project to me. Lot's of power centers pulling in different directions, little focus on actual needs. Space X does better work in part because it can make its own decisions and focus on long term goals.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    That's the stereotype of government promoted by private business like SpaceX, so they can get the funding shifted from NASA to them. But no private business has accomplished in space anything approaching what government has. NASA has been spectacularly successful, orders of magnitude beyond any explorers in human history. We're talking about just one of many successses on this page.
- toss1 5y ago
  OTOH, they also influenced it in many good ways that you don't hear about. E.g., my astronomy professor mentioned to me in a conversation that the original design for the Hubble was smaller due to expected budget, but that it got up-sized because it turned out that they could piggy-back off of other relevant military development, and iirc, that went beyond just the larger available size of the shuttle bay.
- Symmetry 5y ago
  I thought the military money was promised but never ended being provided, making it doubly tragic.
samstave 5y ago
>>the imagined mission never happened The X37s would like a word. Also, "Rods from God" has something to say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37 https://endwar.fandom.com/wiki/Kinetic_Strike https://endwar.fandom.com/wiki/Kinetic_Strike --- Rods from god may be the source of "jewish space lasers" <-- the comment by a senator on how the wild-fires have been started in US and AU, meaning that a tungsten rod from space rained down molten tungsten to start fires... Fun stuff to speculate on.
- simonh 5y ago
  The mission being referred to was capturing a Russian satellite in a polar orbit in the cargo bay and returning it to earth. The shuttle also needed big wings to provide the cross-range capability it would need to complete one polar orbit and land at the original launch point (Vandenberg) despite the earth having rotated, moving the airbase by many hundreds of miles since takeoff. The original NASA spec had a smaller cargo bay and wings because it would have mainly been a crew ferry. As a result it would also have been launchable on top of a rocket instead of strapped to the side, giving better safety. Significant cargoes would have been launched independently.
amelius 5y ago
Russians had the Buran, with more or less the same dimensions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)
- wongarsu 5y ago
  I've heard the (probably unfounded) story that the Soviets saw the Space Shuttle, couldn't figure out why the Americans would build it but figured there surely must be a good reason; so they copied it to also have whatever capability the Americans were after.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Buran was also superior in capabilities; greater lift capacity, ability to transport more people, and attain higher orbits. It could also perform a mission entirely autonomously. The US Space Shuttle was the (heavy) inspiration, but the Soviets put their own spin on it.
    - ch4s3 5y ago
      That's the second mover advantage right?
      - toomuchtodo 5y ago
        That's part of it (with regards to rocket motor tech). The other is that the Soviet's designed the vehicle through a different process, versus the American's where it was design by committee (between NASA and the DoD [1]). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_design_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_design_process
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      It had one test flight. Hardly comparable to a system which had (six?) models fully deployed and operational.
tobylane 5y ago
What was the intended mission? I’ve read about the classified missions that went ahead, iirc one of them did use the full capacity.
- enave3 5y ago
  > What was the intended mission? There were several. A couple of examples: the shuttle could delay release of a payload, maneuver while in orbit, release the payload, then maneuver again. So conceptually, you just put a satellite into an orbit and your enemy doesn't know exactly what orbit its in. I'm sure eventually they would find it, but the military still wants stuff like that. Another example is the ability to grab a satellite and bring it back to Earth. To my knowledge, this was only ever used with the "long-duration exposure facility" because it'd probably be considered an act of war to steal another country's satellites but here again, it's the kind of thing the military would ask for.
  - kzrdude 5y ago
    Isn't the shuttle so big that it would be easy to track and see it?
    - enave3 5y ago
      yes, but no country can track a given object in LEO for its entire orbit (unless it's transmitting its position to another satellite). So the idea is that the shuttle launches with a secret payload, and every 90 minutes you see it pass overhead. This goes on for days or weeks. Eventually it lands. What happened? Well what you don't know is that on day 2, while it was over the Pacific and you weren't tracking it, it fired the OMS, deployed a payload, then fired the OMS again to return to it's previous orbit. There's a whole other satellite out there and you don't know about it until you find it by some other means. And eventually you will find it. But the military is happy to pay for that short window of subterfuge.
- ddalex 5y ago
  Likely snatching enemy satellites in a single orbit (i.e. launch, snatch sattelite, land, all in the same orbit) before enemy can even detect that the shuttle is up there.
echelon 5y ago
> And of course the imagined mission never happened. There were 11 classified (ten successful) DoD space shuttle missions: https://www.space.com/34522-secret-shuttle-missions.html https://www.space.com/34522-secret-shuttle-missions.html That's roughly 8% of shuttle missions.
- macintux 5y ago
  The mission I believe the parent comment was referring to was a foreign (Soviet) satellite recovery. It required a larger payload bay and as I recall a very aggressive launch profile that I believe also imposed some undesirable design constraints, but my memory is fuzzy.
  - bewaretheirs 5y ago
    My understanding was that the specific requirement was for a launch into polar orbit (southbound from Vandenberg AFB, just north of Los Angeles) and then a landing ~90 minutes later at Vandenberg, clearly to snatch something out of orbit. Since the earth is rotating under the orbital plane of the shuttle, this requires a large amount of cross-range maneuverability on reentry so it could land back in California rather than ~22.5 degrees west of Vandenberg in the pacific ocean, and this required large wings. I don't believe it's known for certain outside of classified circles what was to be brought back. One theory was that it was to snatch a Soviet spy satellite out of orbit, but it's entirely possible given the timelines that the classified requirement was to pull a film cartridge from a US spy satellite in polar orbit and return it quickly to earth for processing.
    - echelon 5y ago
      > I don't believe it's known for certain outside of classified circles what was to be brought back. Given that many details of the keyhole program were recently declassified [1], is there any chance we'll get to know the true nature of the shuttle program? (And if so, when might it happen?) [1] (a decade ago) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon
    - 5y ago
barkingcat 5y ago
re military mission never using the size, there could always have been classified payload launches that ended up using it.
- beerandt 5y ago
  There were plenty, the military missions existence and classified nature weren't classified themselves. (Or at least plenty enough weren't. We wouldn't necessarily know of ones that were.) So the "classified DOD project xyz" tasks are listed right there on the published official mission lists and schedules, and quite easy to look up on both Wikipedia and straight from NASA. But the thing not achieved was Vandenberg launches, which would allow more N-S polar orbits that are often more useful to the military. The less official but still obvious thing not achieved was the Airforce building a manned military space station (as far as we know...).
beerandt 5y ago
The shuttle had plenty of military missions, and most are still classified. No, we never got the Vandenberg polar launches we were promised. And I don't think anyone anticipated just how quickly miniaturization and automation were going to advance when it was designed in the 70's or even as missions began in the 80's. Even autopilot was a controversial cutting edge technology that was excluded because of the focus on human centered missions. But back to military- it's not a coincidence that Hubble fit so perfectly in the shuttle cargo bay. (Hubble being a spare keyhole spy satellite body, with borrowed mirror fab tech.) But it would be interesting to know just what else the military had in mind, besides their not-so-secret ambitions for militarized manned space stations.
- Buttons840 5y ago
  > But back to military- it's not a coincidence that Hubble fit so perfectly in the shuttle cargo bay. I assume Hubble was built that size because it would fit? No coincidence indeed. And what does that have to do with the military?
  - zargon 5y ago
    > what does that have to do with the military? Hubble is a military spy satelite design.
    - beerandt 5y ago
      Development of which presumably predated or coincided with setting the design parameters for the shuttle.
    - c0npr 5y ago
      Not exactly, I think they just use a specific mirror design (2.4m dia.) because they are already manufacturing them to be used in spy satellites.

spaetzleesser 5y ago

The space shuttle is a sad story. On the one hand the military’s money made it possible but they also influenced the design in a very bad way.

gameswithgo 5y ago
This is the case with almost all large scale human endeavors. To get things done with lots of people takes compromises. Apollo program was the same way. I assume the pyramids and roman roads and so on as well. Though to be fair at some point once the shuttle program got going someone could have aborted on it and said that really this doesn't make sense.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  And the Mercury program, which launched on adapted Redstone ICBMs [0], themselves improvements on V-2s. An unfunded project that never gets built is objectively worse than a military-funded project. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGM-11_Redstone#Redstone_derivatives https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGM-11_Redstone#Redstone_der...
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    If the military-funded project creates $1M worth of value using $1B of funds, the unfunded project is objectively better.
    - beerandt 5y ago
      That's what army mapping service essentially did with early radar distance measuring projects. Huge expensive fleet of 18-wheeler trucks failure. And classical surveying methods beat it in every way at the time. But it was the direct predecessor to microwave communications. It was just portable military distance measuring equipment (like the model-99 dme w/ ~1cm @50km) that used a signal they found easy to piggyback voice and data on. And included that in the field units. AND 2nd, after a dozen or so more hugely expensive projects (ranging from failure to moderate success to "achieves objectives"), it led to the Airforce NAVSTAR program, which you know as... GPS. So the question becomes: What was the actual "objective" value provided by those expensive initial radar experiments, despite failing to achieve their direct objective?
      - whatshisface 5y ago
        It's difficult to say without access to the counterfactual world where GPS was invented based on civilian microwave communication which itself would have evolved from civilian radio communication. We live in a world where the DoD redistributes money away from private industry and towards another sector of private industry, and it is hard to say what would happen if R&D tax laws were changed to move that money back from private military industry R&D to industry-industry R&D.
        beerandt 5y ago
        Maybe microwave transmission, but the economics of GPS or GNSS in general would preclude civilian investment in such an expensive constellation without obvious revenue channels. And it's moot for both these cases because the technology was needed for direct military applications anyway. What's the practical or ideological benefit of industry-industry R&D when the military is going to be the only customer, or at least the only paying customer for the first years/decades of use? I agree with you in general, with it being better for governments not picking the winners of markets or deciding who gets research money. But military is such a unique (yet universally needed) type of market, that practicality here means treating them as a large customer with unique product needs ( products unlikely to be revenue generating on the public market), even if you don't treat it as direct government allocation or a fixed/manipulated market. The only way I can think of to avoid that entirely would be some libertarian version of an all private, defense-by-contract type military. And then you'd have concerns about whether that could hold up to peer adversaries, and dozens of other wildcard concerns.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    And sweeping von Braun's Nazi complicity under the rug while others were hanging from the gallows at Nuremberg.
    - spaetzleesser 5y ago
      As A German this really bugs me. Von Braun and friends knew exactly what was going on in their production facilities, didn't care and never had to confront their role in this.
      - jrockway 5y ago
        "Once the rockets are up who cares where they come down, that's not my department" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro
        meepmorp 5y ago
        don't say that he's hyp-o-critical, say rather that he's a-po-litical
        ethbr0 5y ago
        (For those who aren't familiar with 1967 humor: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro&t=17s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro&t=17s )
- adamc 5y ago
  Right, this is basically a "human politics" thing.
BurningFrog 5y ago
A pretty typical big government project to me. Lot's of power centers pulling in different directions, little focus on actual needs. Space X does better work in part because it can make its own decisions and focus on long term goals.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  That's the stereotype of government promoted by private business like SpaceX, so they can get the funding shifted from NASA to them. But no private business has accomplished in space anything approaching what government has. NASA has been spectacularly successful, orders of magnitude beyond any explorers in human history. We're talking about just one of many successses on this page.
toss1 5y ago
OTOH, they also influenced it in many good ways that you don't hear about. E.g., my astronomy professor mentioned to me in a conversation that the original design for the Hubble was smaller due to expected budget, but that it got up-sized because it turned out that they could piggy-back off of other relevant military development, and iirc, that went beyond just the larger available size of the shuttle bay.
Symmetry 5y ago
I thought the military money was promised but never ended being provided, making it doubly tragic.

samstave 5y ago

>>the imagined mission never happened The X37s would like a word. Also, "Rods from God" has something to say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37 https://endwar.fandom.com/wiki/Kinetic_Strike https://endwar.fandom.com/wiki/Kinetic_Strike --- Rods from god may be the source of "jewish space lasers" <-- the comment by a senator on how the wild-fires have been started in US and AU, meaning that a tungsten rod from space rained down molten tungsten to start fires... Fun stuff to speculate on.

simonh 5y ago
The mission being referred to was capturing a Russian satellite in a polar orbit in the cargo bay and returning it to earth. The shuttle also needed big wings to provide the cross-range capability it would need to complete one polar orbit and land at the original launch point (Vandenberg) despite the earth having rotated, moving the airbase by many hundreds of miles since takeoff. The original NASA spec had a smaller cargo bay and wings because it would have mainly been a crew ferry. As a result it would also have been launchable on top of a rocket instead of strapped to the side, giving better safety. Significant cargoes would have been launched independently.

amelius 5y ago

Russians had the Buran, with more or less the same dimensions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)

wongarsu 5y ago
I've heard the (probably unfounded) story that the Soviets saw the Space Shuttle, couldn't figure out why the Americans would build it but figured there surely must be a good reason; so they copied it to also have whatever capability the Americans were after.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Buran was also superior in capabilities; greater lift capacity, ability to transport more people, and attain higher orbits. It could also perform a mission entirely autonomously. The US Space Shuttle was the (heavy) inspiration, but the Soviets put their own spin on it.
  - ch4s3 5y ago
    That's the second mover advantage right?
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      That's part of it (with regards to rocket motor tech). The other is that the Soviet's designed the vehicle through a different process, versus the American's where it was design by committee (between NASA and the DoD [1]). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_design_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_design_process
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    It had one test flight. Hardly comparable to a system which had (six?) models fully deployed and operational.

tobylane 5y ago

What was the intended mission? I’ve read about the classified missions that went ahead, iirc one of them did use the full capacity.

enave3 5y ago
> What was the intended mission? There were several. A couple of examples: the shuttle could delay release of a payload, maneuver while in orbit, release the payload, then maneuver again. So conceptually, you just put a satellite into an orbit and your enemy doesn't know exactly what orbit its in. I'm sure eventually they would find it, but the military still wants stuff like that. Another example is the ability to grab a satellite and bring it back to Earth. To my knowledge, this was only ever used with the "long-duration exposure facility" because it'd probably be considered an act of war to steal another country's satellites but here again, it's the kind of thing the military would ask for.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  Isn't the shuttle so big that it would be easy to track and see it?
  - enave3 5y ago
    yes, but no country can track a given object in LEO for its entire orbit (unless it's transmitting its position to another satellite). So the idea is that the shuttle launches with a secret payload, and every 90 minutes you see it pass overhead. This goes on for days or weeks. Eventually it lands. What happened? Well what you don't know is that on day 2, while it was over the Pacific and you weren't tracking it, it fired the OMS, deployed a payload, then fired the OMS again to return to it's previous orbit. There's a whole other satellite out there and you don't know about it until you find it by some other means. And eventually you will find it. But the military is happy to pay for that short window of subterfuge.
ddalex 5y ago
Likely snatching enemy satellites in a single orbit (i.e. launch, snatch sattelite, land, all in the same orbit) before enemy can even detect that the shuttle is up there.

echelon 5y ago

> And of course the imagined mission never happened. There were 11 classified (ten successful) DoD space shuttle missions: https://www.space.com/34522-secret-shuttle-missions.html https://www.space.com/34522-secret-shuttle-missions.html That's roughly 8% of shuttle missions.

macintux 5y ago
The mission I believe the parent comment was referring to was a foreign (Soviet) satellite recovery. It required a larger payload bay and as I recall a very aggressive launch profile that I believe also imposed some undesirable design constraints, but my memory is fuzzy.
- bewaretheirs 5y ago
  My understanding was that the specific requirement was for a launch into polar orbit (southbound from Vandenberg AFB, just north of Los Angeles) and then a landing ~90 minutes later at Vandenberg, clearly to snatch something out of orbit. Since the earth is rotating under the orbital plane of the shuttle, this requires a large amount of cross-range maneuverability on reentry so it could land back in California rather than ~22.5 degrees west of Vandenberg in the pacific ocean, and this required large wings. I don't believe it's known for certain outside of classified circles what was to be brought back. One theory was that it was to snatch a Soviet spy satellite out of orbit, but it's entirely possible given the timelines that the classified requirement was to pull a film cartridge from a US spy satellite in polar orbit and return it quickly to earth for processing.
  - echelon 5y ago
    > I don't believe it's known for certain outside of classified circles what was to be brought back. Given that many details of the keyhole program were recently declassified [1], is there any chance we'll get to know the true nature of the shuttle program? (And if so, when might it happen?) [1] (a decade ago) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon
  - 5y ago

barkingcat 5y ago

re military mission never using the size, there could always have been classified payload launches that ended up using it.

beerandt 5y ago
There were plenty, the military missions existence and classified nature weren't classified themselves. (Or at least plenty enough weren't. We wouldn't necessarily know of ones that were.) So the "classified DOD project xyz" tasks are listed right there on the published official mission lists and schedules, and quite easy to look up on both Wikipedia and straight from NASA. But the thing not achieved was Vandenberg launches, which would allow more N-S polar orbits that are often more useful to the military. The less official but still obvious thing not achieved was the Airforce building a manned military space station (as far as we know...).

beerandt 5y ago

The shuttle had plenty of military missions, and most are still classified. No, we never got the Vandenberg polar launches we were promised. And I don't think anyone anticipated just how quickly miniaturization and automation were going to advance when it was designed in the 70's or even as missions began in the 80's. Even autopilot was a controversial cutting edge technology that was excluded because of the focus on human centered missions. But back to military- it's not a coincidence that Hubble fit so perfectly in the shuttle cargo bay. (Hubble being a spare keyhole spy satellite body, with borrowed mirror fab tech.) But it would be interesting to know just what else the military had in mind, besides their not-so-secret ambitions for militarized manned space stations.

Buttons840 5y ago
> But back to military- it's not a coincidence that Hubble fit so perfectly in the shuttle cargo bay. I assume Hubble was built that size because it would fit? No coincidence indeed. And what does that have to do with the military?
- zargon 5y ago
  > what does that have to do with the military? Hubble is a military spy satelite design.
  - beerandt 5y ago
    Development of which presumably predated or coincided with setting the design parameters for the shuttle.
  - c0npr 5y ago
    Not exactly, I think they just use a specific mirror design (2.4m dia.) because they are already manufacturing them to be used in spy satellites.