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You seem to be stating two contradicting things, that the Saturn V was too expensive to be maintained and that the space shuttle was even more expensive and yet

You seem to be stating two contradicting things, that the Saturn V was too expensive to be maintained and that the space shuttle was even more expensive and yet continued operating for decades. If the space shuttle was never pursued we could reasonably assume that its budget would have gone into a launch system like the Saturn V or even just kept cranking Saturn Vs out on the assembly line. If they were the case then it seems like many of their plans would have played out, the continued moon missions at least.

stetrain 4y ago
Part of that was the alluring promise that the shuttle would be cheaper. But that was doomed by the design requirements tug-of-war between government agencies, being a bit too early and ambitious, and the drop in flight rate and commercial and defense payloads after Challenger.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  The shuttle is still an interesting science experiment in what it did teach us about reusability in space craft, failures included. At the time reliable booster recovery and reuse seemed unlikely and command module reuse seemed the best way to drive costs down. The shuttle was a good command module design for reuse based on available data at the time (even with all the design by committee compromises), but proved to be difficult and expensive to maintain/refit between missions. Today we've seen incredible advances in booster recovery and reuse in part spurred by learnings from shuttle reuse including the learning about how expensive heat shield maintenance/refitting turned out to be on the shuttle. (A bit of an aside, but ironically and sadly the Challenger disaster didn't "fail hard enough" to drive costs down or do much to reimagine the shuttle program: that problem was a dumb booster problem that had nothing to do with the shuttle directly and could have happened to any payload. (It was still terrible that it happened to that shuttle and its crew, specifically, of course.) It's curious to wonder if something more like the Columbia disaster, which did more reflect shuttle maintenance issues, may have had an interesting scientific impact if it had "switched places" in a different timeline.)
  - thaeli 4y ago
    There was a near miss of heat tile damage from a foam strike very early in the STS program - STS-27 but it was on a classified military payload flight and the whole thing was ignored. I wouldn't quite say "covered up" but the damage would have been a lot harder to hand-wave away if this had been a normal mission with all the media coverage those got.
bsder 4y ago
> You seem to be stating two contradicting things, that the Saturn V was too expensive to be maintained and that the space shuttle was even more expensive and yet continued operating for decades. It was worse than that. NASA never received sufficient funding for the STS. So they turned to the miltary who wanted it and were willing to fund it. However, the military needs were also what made the space shuttle so stupidly hard to engineer. Think about how much harder all of the current commercial space programs would have it if they also had to engineer switching to a polar orbit. That's why the STS has those stupidly big engines. So, because Congress neither gave the project sufficient funding (would take money from my favorite pork barrel!) nor allowed the project to shut down (don't you dare take away pork barrel from my district!), NASA created a vehicle that killed a bunch of astronauts.
- dreamcompiler 4y ago
  The shuttle was originally intended to be launchable into polar orbit from Vandenberg AFB, but it never happened [0]. I rather doubt anybody ever seriously contemplated a transition to polar orbit from a Florida launch; the shuttle couldn't carry enough fuel for that. (One cannot launch a rocket into polar orbit directly from Florida for safety reasons. That's what Vandenberg is good for; there's no inhabited land south of it.) [0] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27506/vandenberg-afbs-space-shuttle-processing-facility-now-has-a-very-mysterious-mission https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27506/vandenberg-afbs-...

stetrain 4y ago

Part of that was the alluring promise that the shuttle would be cheaper. But that was doomed by the design requirements tug-of-war between government agencies, being a bit too early and ambitious, and the drop in flight rate and commercial and defense payloads after Challenger.

WorldMaker 4y ago
The shuttle is still an interesting science experiment in what it did teach us about reusability in space craft, failures included. At the time reliable booster recovery and reuse seemed unlikely and command module reuse seemed the best way to drive costs down. The shuttle was a good command module design for reuse based on available data at the time (even with all the design by committee compromises), but proved to be difficult and expensive to maintain/refit between missions. Today we've seen incredible advances in booster recovery and reuse in part spurred by learnings from shuttle reuse including the learning about how expensive heat shield maintenance/refitting turned out to be on the shuttle. (A bit of an aside, but ironically and sadly the Challenger disaster didn't "fail hard enough" to drive costs down or do much to reimagine the shuttle program: that problem was a dumb booster problem that had nothing to do with the shuttle directly and could have happened to any payload. (It was still terrible that it happened to that shuttle and its crew, specifically, of course.) It's curious to wonder if something more like the Columbia disaster, which did more reflect shuttle maintenance issues, may have had an interesting scientific impact if it had "switched places" in a different timeline.)
- thaeli 4y ago
  There was a near miss of heat tile damage from a foam strike very early in the STS program - STS-27 but it was on a classified military payload flight and the whole thing was ignored. I wouldn't quite say "covered up" but the damage would have been a lot harder to hand-wave away if this had been a normal mission with all the media coverage those got.

bsder 4y ago

> You seem to be stating two contradicting things, that the Saturn V was too expensive to be maintained and that the space shuttle was even more expensive and yet continued operating for decades. It was worse than that. NASA never received sufficient funding for the STS. So they turned to the miltary who wanted it and were willing to fund it. However, the military needs were also what made the space shuttle so stupidly hard to engineer. Think about how much harder all of the current commercial space programs would have it if they also had to engineer switching to a polar orbit. That's why the STS has those stupidly big engines. So, because Congress neither gave the project sufficient funding (would take money from my favorite pork barrel!) nor allowed the project to shut down (don't you dare take away pork barrel from my district!), NASA created a vehicle that killed a bunch of astronauts.

dreamcompiler 4y ago
The shuttle was originally intended to be launchable into polar orbit from Vandenberg AFB, but it never happened [0]. I rather doubt anybody ever seriously contemplated a transition to polar orbit from a Florida launch; the shuttle couldn't carry enough fuel for that. (One cannot launch a rocket into polar orbit directly from Florida for safety reasons. That's what Vandenberg is good for; there's no inhabited land south of it.) [0] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27506/vandenberg-afbs-space-shuttle-processing-facility-now-has-a-very-mysterious-mission https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27506/vandenberg-afbs-...