7 ms·

Beam Me Out of This Death Trap, Scotty (1980)

83 points by juliusdavies 3y ago

throwanem 3y ago
Really remarkable to see the failure modes that caused both the Challenger and Columbia disasters enumerated here, respectively six and twenty-three years ahead of time.
- kolinko 3y ago
  True, on the other hand author seems just negative about everything - he expects just single digit satellite launches a year needed, or expects that a permament space station won’t ever happen
  - rob74 3y ago
    Be that as it may, he was basically right about one thing: that the Shuttle was a technological dead end that cost a lot of money, wasted a lot of time and, most importantly, killed 14 people.
    - andyjohnson0 3y ago
      > the Shuttle was a technological dead end that cost a lot of money, wasted a lot of time This seems to be a popularly held view. But I wonder what you think the last ~40 years of crewed spaceflight would have looked like if the shuttle had never been built? Would the US still be using single-shot vehicles that are little more than incremental upgrades of 70s Apollo technology, as Soyuz basically is? Or would some other reusable spacecraft have been built? If so, and given that the STS design was very much a product of the cold war era's military influence, would it have been much different? I dont think it would. Among many things, the shuttle development produced the RS-25, which is the basis for the engines used on the SLS. So I'd argue that, from that alone, it wasn't a dead end.
      - rob74 3y ago
        Not sure actually - maybe we would have arrived at what SpaceX is doing (reusable rockets and space capsules) earlier? As for the RS-25, it's used in the SLS mostly because NASA still has left-over engines from the Shuttle program in storage, otherwise it wouldn't make sense to use an engine designed for reusability on a single-use rocket. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25#Space_Launch_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25#Space_Launch_System, "Once the remaining RS-25Ds are exhausted, they are to be replaced with a cheaper, expendable version designated the RS-25E".
      - marcosdumay 3y ago
        The Shuttle had a similar problem to the F-35. It was designed to do everything. I have no idea if anything linked to the US military could design a specialized device in the last ~40 years. But if you just took the bay out of the Shuttle, you'd get a much more reasonable design.
      - TMWNN 3y ago
        >Would the US still be using single-shot vehicles that are little more than incremental upgrades of 70s Apollo technology It would have been better than the road we took. Don't believe me? While NASA Administrator, Michael Griffin wrote in 2007 that the shuttle program had been a colossal mistake and that Apollo-Saturn-Skylab should have continued <http://aviationweek.typepad.com/space/2007/03/human_space_exp.html http://aviationweek.typepad.com/space/2007/03/human_space_ex...>: >Let’s assume that we had kept flying with the systems we had at the time, that we had continued to execute two manned Apollo lunar missions every year, as was done in 1971-72. This would have cost about $4.8 billion annually in Fiscal 2000 dollars. >Further, let us assume that we had established a continuing program of space station activities in Earth orbit, built on the Apollo CSM, Saturn I-B, and Skylab systems. Four crew rotation launches per year, plus a new Skylab cluster every five years to augment or replace existing modules, would have cost about $1.5 billion/year. This entire program of six manned flights per year, two of them to the Moon, would have cost about $6.3 billion annually in Fiscal 2000 dollars. The average annual NASA budget in the 15 difficult years from 1974-88 was $10.5 billion; with 60% of it allocated to human spaceflight, there would have been sufficient funding to continue a stable program of lunar exploration as well as the development of Earth orbital infrastructure. I suggest that this would have been a better strategic alternative than the choices that were in fact made, almost 40 years ago. SpaceX has finally done reusability the right way, but that does not mean that the shuttle was ever the right way.
  - kragen 3y ago
    to be fair, if https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38485847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38485847 is correct, the shuttle did in fact manage only single-digit satellite launches per year
grogenaut 3y ago
[flagged]
theodorejb 3y ago
> When Columbia's tiles started popping off in a stiff breeze, it occurred to engineers that ice chunks from the tank would crash into the tiles during the sonic chaos of launch: Goodbye, Columbia. So insulation was added to the tank. I didn't realize this was the reason for the thermal insulation. It's ironic how in the end the insulation popped off and crashed into the tiles during launch, causing the very disaster it was intended to prevent.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  Did it do more damage than the raw ice that would have been there instead? If not, then "caused" isn't the right word, it's just an incomplete mitigation and not ironic.
  - rob74 3y ago
    It did enough damage to cause the heat shield to fail on reentry, so "caused" is warranted. Even if the foam had a purpose, it would have been a reasonable requirement to make sure that it doesn't turn into a risk itself...
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
resolutebat 3y ago
> The space station sparked a lot of interest, but it too was overwhelmingly expensive. Its components would be so heavy, NASA's entire budget would be required to pay for the launch rockets--to say nothing, as space proponents are wont to do, of building or servicing it. Which is is fact pretty much exactly what happened with NASA and the ISS. > There is something noteworthy a rocket can do that the shuttle cannot. A rocket can be permitted to fail. What if a billion dollar spaceship wipes out on a "routine" mission "commuting" to space with some puny little satellite? Cooper fears it might drive a stake through the heart of the manned space program. Nailed this one too. > But to require six shuttle launches a year, there would have to be 18 satellites. "Barring some extraordinary breakthrough in technology," says an informed communications industry source, "that's inconceivable." This prediction, though, didn't work out so well. (SpaceX alone has more than 5,500 satellites, and is launching thousands yearly.)
- ben_w 3y ago
  In fairness, there were extraordinary breakthroughs in technology between when the article was written and when SpaceX started constellation building.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    ... like a reusable rocket that's affordable
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Not only but also. On the demand side: There was no web in 1980 (that was 1989), the non-web internet was barely getting started and home use of it was science fiction (even home computers themselves were only few years old, 3 years if you take the 1977 release of the Apple 2 given the 1 didn't have a case). Mobile phones had been car phones and experimental devices until just the previous year, they wouldn't become commonplace for about two more decades, and even then wouldn't be significantly bandwidth hogs with video calls and streaming until smartphones three decades after the article. On the satellite side: Satellites are mostly powered by PV, which itself was expensive in 1980 (I'm not certain, but guessing from the size of the Starlink satellites and the exponential growth curve for PV production and total installation having been only 105 MW globally in 1992, Starlink might have exceeded worldwide 1980 PV production all by itself). Packet switching comes with computational costs, and the computers in the satellites themselves were expensive (both in dollars and watts) and low performance. Phased array antennas were really hard, computational beam forming moreso. Ion drives existed in various forms, but Hall effect thrusters wouldn't be introduced to the west for another 12 years (1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union). Laser communication was being researched, but the first successful laser intersatellite link was 2001.
a2800276 3y ago
The only thing more ridiculous than another manned visit to the moon is the colonization of mars (especially one intended to "save" humanity). Yet both are being planned. Idiots are just too horny for human space exploration after decades of Star Trek/War consumption.
- southernplaces7 3y ago
  I'd hardly call these innovators, adventurers, (also in some cases profiteers) and dreamers idiots. They may be making all kinds of mistaken assumptions and "overindulging" in optimism, but they're not stupid. They just dream of bigger things and wider horizons with what's at least feasibly reachable, even if right now, some of us, particularly those with a scarcity of imagination, can't conceive the same without dismissing them as stupid. What a miserly way to look at the world when you yourself live in it benefiting from centuries of similarly flexible-minded people working towards similarly extreme ideas for their time. There's nothing innately wrong with the idea of colonizing these worlds. It's just a hard thing to do for the time being, like so much else was that's now not only accepted but so routine as to be a fundamental part of daily civilization.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    > There's nothing innately wrong with the idea of colonizing these worlds. That is a subject of disagreement. Kim Stanley Robinson depicted a coming clash between proponents of Mars colonization and keep-it-untouched environmentalists in his Mars trilogy. (And from his later novel Aurora, one wonders if KSR has actually gone over to the anti-human-expansion side.) Thirty years ago, that might have seemed fanciful, but not today when environmentalism has made wider inroads, especially among younger generations. It is easy to find rhetoric now about the future of humanity where the writer talks about the need for degrowth, humanity as a virus, etc.
    - southernplaces7 3y ago
      There's still nothing innately wrong with the idea of colonizing these worlds. Just because certain groups of people have beliefs about the "wrongness" of something, doesn't mean that they're in the least bit rational or need to be given weight. The uh space, beyond the Earth is literally a blasted wasteland created from ancient formation violence. Nothing we do in that sterile, radioactive, chemically toxic vastness of planets, rocks, ice and open void would by any sane definition be comparable to some sort of ecocide on earth, where extremely precious flora and fauna are destroyed. The philosophy of degrowth is entirely a subjective moral view, no more morally valid than a philosophy of more growth, and humanity is emphatically not a virus, it just is, like any other complex species on Earth.
dash2 3y ago
I think of NASA vs SpaceX as the equivalent of East vs West Germany: a clear demonstration that private companies work better than state bureaucracies.
- ben_w 3y ago
  There are plenty of inept private bureaucracies. Free market doesn't always clear them out, cash cows can support a lot of waste. The orbiters were built by Rockwell International, the external fuel tanks by Martin Marietta/Lockheed Martin, the SRBs by Thiokol/ATK United Space Boosters Inc./Pratt & Whitney.
- pavlov 3y ago
  Why even look as far as space, you can see this principle producing tremendous value to millions of ordinary people in the brilliant effectiveness of America’s private healthcare industry.
  - dash2 3y ago
    Come over and enjoy the delights of the NHS. How's your dentistry? We no longer have any.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Eliezer 3y ago
How incredible it seems today that this story could ever have been written by a mainstream reporter. It tells the story of a technology without any attempt at "human color" or "character portraits" to "interest the public". It is written for an adult readership that seems scarcely conceivable today. A lost artifact of lost social technology that could never be reproduced within the modern West.
- kragen 3y ago
  i was marveling at that too, and at the reporter who understood the subject matter, which is not unrelated. yesterday i had the displeasure of reading an article that confused risc with risc-v
Reason077 3y ago
From the article: > ”You've probably heard, for instance, that the space shuttle will retrieve damaged satellites and return them to earth for repair. Not so. It can't. Simply and flatly, can't.” Interesting article, but the Washington Monthly’s sources were wrong here. The space shuttles could, and did, retrieve satellites from orbit and return them to earth several times during their operating life: STS-41-C (launch) / STS-32R (retrieve): LDEF STS-41-B (launch) / STS-51-A (retrieve): Palapa B-2 and Westar 6 STS-46 (launch) / STS-57 (retrieve): EURECA STS-72 (retrieve): Space Flyer Unit (SFU)
- uberuberuber 3y ago
  Was this a more economical approach than launching those missions on an expendable rocket, and just building brand new satellites? The shuttle program launched 135 missions at a cost of $209 billion (2010 dollars).
  - dirtyhippiefree 3y ago
    Vision is only 20/20 in hindsight.
    - mannykannot 3y ago
      In this case, hindsight merely justifies the foresight: at no point did satellite return-to-Earth provide any economic justification for the shuttle program, even in conjunction with other imagined benefits.
      - dirtyhippiefree 3y ago
        Agreed…just like the Fog of War… Hindsight brings sharper clarity because fifty years of distance changes how FUD looks in retrospect…
  - Reason077 3y ago
    > "Was this a more economical approach than launching those missions on an expendable rocket, and just building brand new satellites?" Assuming you already have a Space Shuttle, then the answer was apparantely yes. Lloyd's of London, as insurers, paid NASA for the recovery of Westar 6 and Palapa B2. The cost of the recovery was said to be $10m, vs. the $180m insurance value of the satellites (both in 1980s dollars). [1] I suppose many of today's satellites are relatively cheap and considered more expendable, but back in the 1980s these things were very valuable pieces of kit. Besides, most of the retrieval missions performed by the Space Shuttles were not "failed" satellites but rather long-life science platforms that were designed to spend time in space and then be returned to earth for analysis. Now days, many of those sorts of missions can be performed on the ISS, but back then the shuttle was the only option. [1] https://www.lloyds.com/about-lloyds/our-market/what-we-insure/space/crowded-space/space-rescue-mission https://www.lloyds.com/about-lloyds/our-market/what-we-insur...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
uberuberuber 3y ago
Highly recommend this irreverent podcast by 2 engineers and former NASA contractors. They get out above their skies on some topics but the shuttle content is fun. Episode 1: Why do Blake and Craig think the Space Shuttle was stupid? https://youtu.be/KRlD8SdFmaE https://youtu.be/KRlD8SdFmaE Episode 18: Challenger https://youtu.be/H98IGl7pSfQ https://youtu.be/H98IGl7pSfQ
amacbride 3y ago
"Would the public stand to lose a quarter of the fleet in a single day? Would it fork over another billion dollars to build a replacement? Would it stand for spending millions to train astronauts to be truck drivers, only to lose truck and drivers both?" Amazingly prescient article, but I don't think the author expected the answers to these heartbreaking questions to be "yes." Twelve-year-old me stayed up all night to watch Columbia launch in '81, and I watched the last flight of Atlantis in 2011; I still can't watch the Challenger footage to this day.
JohnCClarke 3y ago
I worry that the business case for StarShip is similarly optimistic. Launching once per week, a single StarShip will carry 10,000 tons to orbit. Fully 50% of all mass launched to orbit since Sputnik 1. Given the hopes for even more frequent launches with a fleet of StarShips makes me wonder who is going to pay for it all and why? I do understand it's supposed to be much cheaper. But someone still has to pay. And that person still has to be sure that SpaceX - as a single, critical, supplier - won't eat their business model any time SpaceX chooses. So I do hope there's a secret cunning plan I'm not aware of.
- kragen 3y ago
  this seems like the good kind of problem to have? not the kind of problem the shuttle had

83 points by juliusdavies 3y ago

Really remarkable to see the failure modes that caused both the Challenger and Columbia disasters enumerated here, respectively six and twenty-three years ahead of time.

kolinko 3y ago
True, on the other hand author seems just negative about everything - he expects just single digit satellite launches a year needed, or expects that a permament space station won’t ever happen
- rob74 3y ago
  Be that as it may, he was basically right about one thing: that the Shuttle was a technological dead end that cost a lot of money, wasted a lot of time and, most importantly, killed 14 people.
  - andyjohnson0 3y ago
    > the Shuttle was a technological dead end that cost a lot of money, wasted a lot of time This seems to be a popularly held view. But I wonder what you think the last ~40 years of crewed spaceflight would have looked like if the shuttle had never been built? Would the US still be using single-shot vehicles that are little more than incremental upgrades of 70s Apollo technology, as Soyuz basically is? Or would some other reusable spacecraft have been built? If so, and given that the STS design was very much a product of the cold war era's military influence, would it have been much different? I dont think it would. Among many things, the shuttle development produced the RS-25, which is the basis for the engines used on the SLS. So I'd argue that, from that alone, it wasn't a dead end.
    - rob74 3y ago
      Not sure actually - maybe we would have arrived at what SpaceX is doing (reusable rockets and space capsules) earlier? As for the RS-25, it's used in the SLS mostly because NASA still has left-over engines from the Shuttle program in storage, otherwise it wouldn't make sense to use an engine designed for reusability on a single-use rocket. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25#Space_Launch_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25#Space_Launch_System, "Once the remaining RS-25Ds are exhausted, they are to be replaced with a cheaper, expendable version designated the RS-25E".
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      The Shuttle had a similar problem to the F-35. It was designed to do everything. I have no idea if anything linked to the US military could design a specialized device in the last ~40 years. But if you just took the bay out of the Shuttle, you'd get a much more reasonable design.
    - TMWNN 3y ago
      >Would the US still be using single-shot vehicles that are little more than incremental upgrades of 70s Apollo technology It would have been better than the road we took. Don't believe me? While NASA Administrator, Michael Griffin wrote in 2007 that the shuttle program had been a colossal mistake and that Apollo-Saturn-Skylab should have continued <http://aviationweek.typepad.com/space/2007/03/human_space_exp.html http://aviationweek.typepad.com/space/2007/03/human_space_ex...>: >Let’s assume that we had kept flying with the systems we had at the time, that we had continued to execute two manned Apollo lunar missions every year, as was done in 1971-72. This would have cost about $4.8 billion annually in Fiscal 2000 dollars. >Further, let us assume that we had established a continuing program of space station activities in Earth orbit, built on the Apollo CSM, Saturn I-B, and Skylab systems. Four crew rotation launches per year, plus a new Skylab cluster every five years to augment or replace existing modules, would have cost about $1.5 billion/year. This entire program of six manned flights per year, two of them to the Moon, would have cost about $6.3 billion annually in Fiscal 2000 dollars. The average annual NASA budget in the 15 difficult years from 1974-88 was $10.5 billion; with 60% of it allocated to human spaceflight, there would have been sufficient funding to continue a stable program of lunar exploration as well as the development of Earth orbital infrastructure. I suggest that this would have been a better strategic alternative than the choices that were in fact made, almost 40 years ago. SpaceX has finally done reusability the right way, but that does not mean that the shuttle was ever the right way.
- kragen 3y ago
  to be fair, if https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38485847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38485847 is correct, the shuttle did in fact manage only single-digit satellite launches per year

grogenaut 3y ago

[flagged]

theodorejb 3y ago

> When Columbia's tiles started popping off in a stiff breeze, it occurred to engineers that ice chunks from the tank would crash into the tiles during the sonic chaos of launch: Goodbye, Columbia. So insulation was added to the tank. I didn't realize this was the reason for the thermal insulation. It's ironic how in the end the insulation popped off and crashed into the tiles during launch, causing the very disaster it was intended to prevent.

Dylan16807 3y ago
Did it do more damage than the raw ice that would have been there instead? If not, then "caused" isn't the right word, it's just an incomplete mitigation and not ironic.
- rob74 3y ago
  It did enough damage to cause the heat shield to fail on reentry, so "caused" is warranted. Even if the foam had a purpose, it would have been a reasonable requirement to make sure that it doesn't turn into a risk itself...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

resolutebat 3y ago

> The space station sparked a lot of interest, but it too was overwhelmingly expensive. Its components would be so heavy, NASA's entire budget would be required to pay for the launch rockets--to say nothing, as space proponents are wont to do, of building or servicing it. Which is is fact pretty much exactly what happened with NASA and the ISS. > There is something noteworthy a rocket can do that the shuttle cannot. A rocket can be permitted to fail. What if a billion dollar spaceship wipes out on a "routine" mission "commuting" to space with some puny little satellite? Cooper fears it might drive a stake through the heart of the manned space program. Nailed this one too. > But to require six shuttle launches a year, there would have to be 18 satellites. "Barring some extraordinary breakthrough in technology," says an informed communications industry source, "that's inconceivable." This prediction, though, didn't work out so well. (SpaceX alone has more than 5,500 satellites, and is launching thousands yearly.)

ben_w 3y ago
In fairness, there were extraordinary breakthroughs in technology between when the article was written and when SpaceX started constellation building.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  ... like a reusable rocket that's affordable
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Not only but also. On the demand side: There was no web in 1980 (that was 1989), the non-web internet was barely getting started and home use of it was science fiction (even home computers themselves were only few years old, 3 years if you take the 1977 release of the Apple 2 given the 1 didn't have a case). Mobile phones had been car phones and experimental devices until just the previous year, they wouldn't become commonplace for about two more decades, and even then wouldn't be significantly bandwidth hogs with video calls and streaming until smartphones three decades after the article. On the satellite side: Satellites are mostly powered by PV, which itself was expensive in 1980 (I'm not certain, but guessing from the size of the Starlink satellites and the exponential growth curve for PV production and total installation having been only 105 MW globally in 1992, Starlink might have exceeded worldwide 1980 PV production all by itself). Packet switching comes with computational costs, and the computers in the satellites themselves were expensive (both in dollars and watts) and low performance. Phased array antennas were really hard, computational beam forming moreso. Ion drives existed in various forms, but Hall effect thrusters wouldn't be introduced to the west for another 12 years (1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union). Laser communication was being researched, but the first successful laser intersatellite link was 2001.

a2800276 3y ago

The only thing more ridiculous than another manned visit to the moon is the colonization of mars (especially one intended to "save" humanity). Yet both are being planned. Idiots are just too horny for human space exploration after decades of Star Trek/War consumption.

southernplaces7 3y ago
I'd hardly call these innovators, adventurers, (also in some cases profiteers) and dreamers idiots. They may be making all kinds of mistaken assumptions and "overindulging" in optimism, but they're not stupid. They just dream of bigger things and wider horizons with what's at least feasibly reachable, even if right now, some of us, particularly those with a scarcity of imagination, can't conceive the same without dismissing them as stupid. What a miserly way to look at the world when you yourself live in it benefiting from centuries of similarly flexible-minded people working towards similarly extreme ideas for their time. There's nothing innately wrong with the idea of colonizing these worlds. It's just a hard thing to do for the time being, like so much else was that's now not only accepted but so routine as to be a fundamental part of daily civilization.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  > There's nothing innately wrong with the idea of colonizing these worlds. That is a subject of disagreement. Kim Stanley Robinson depicted a coming clash between proponents of Mars colonization and keep-it-untouched environmentalists in his Mars trilogy. (And from his later novel Aurora, one wonders if KSR has actually gone over to the anti-human-expansion side.) Thirty years ago, that might have seemed fanciful, but not today when environmentalism has made wider inroads, especially among younger generations. It is easy to find rhetoric now about the future of humanity where the writer talks about the need for degrowth, humanity as a virus, etc.
  - southernplaces7 3y ago
    There's still nothing innately wrong with the idea of colonizing these worlds. Just because certain groups of people have beliefs about the "wrongness" of something, doesn't mean that they're in the least bit rational or need to be given weight. The uh space, beyond the Earth is literally a blasted wasteland created from ancient formation violence. Nothing we do in that sterile, radioactive, chemically toxic vastness of planets, rocks, ice and open void would by any sane definition be comparable to some sort of ecocide on earth, where extremely precious flora and fauna are destroyed. The philosophy of degrowth is entirely a subjective moral view, no more morally valid than a philosophy of more growth, and humanity is emphatically not a virus, it just is, like any other complex species on Earth.

dash2 3y ago

I think of NASA vs SpaceX as the equivalent of East vs West Germany: a clear demonstration that private companies work better than state bureaucracies.

ben_w 3y ago
There are plenty of inept private bureaucracies. Free market doesn't always clear them out, cash cows can support a lot of waste. The orbiters were built by Rockwell International, the external fuel tanks by Martin Marietta/Lockheed Martin, the SRBs by Thiokol/ATK United Space Boosters Inc./Pratt & Whitney.
pavlov 3y ago
Why even look as far as space, you can see this principle producing tremendous value to millions of ordinary people in the brilliant effectiveness of America’s private healthcare industry.
- dash2 3y ago
  Come over and enjoy the delights of the NHS. How's your dentistry? We no longer have any.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Eliezer 3y ago

How incredible it seems today that this story could ever have been written by a mainstream reporter. It tells the story of a technology without any attempt at "human color" or "character portraits" to "interest the public". It is written for an adult readership that seems scarcely conceivable today. A lost artifact of lost social technology that could never be reproduced within the modern West.

kragen 3y ago
i was marveling at that too, and at the reporter who understood the subject matter, which is not unrelated. yesterday i had the displeasure of reading an article that confused risc with risc-v

Reason077 3y ago

From the article: > ”You've probably heard, for instance, that the space shuttle will retrieve damaged satellites and return them to earth for repair. Not so. It can't. Simply and flatly, can't.” Interesting article, but the Washington Monthly’s sources were wrong here. The space shuttles could, and did, retrieve satellites from orbit and return them to earth several times during their operating life: STS-41-C (launch) / STS-32R (retrieve): LDEF STS-41-B (launch) / STS-51-A (retrieve): Palapa B-2 and Westar 6 STS-46 (launch) / STS-57 (retrieve): EURECA STS-72 (retrieve): Space Flyer Unit (SFU)

uberuberuber 3y ago
Was this a more economical approach than launching those missions on an expendable rocket, and just building brand new satellites? The shuttle program launched 135 missions at a cost of $209 billion (2010 dollars).
- dirtyhippiefree 3y ago
  Vision is only 20/20 in hindsight.
  - mannykannot 3y ago
    In this case, hindsight merely justifies the foresight: at no point did satellite return-to-Earth provide any economic justification for the shuttle program, even in conjunction with other imagined benefits.
    - dirtyhippiefree 3y ago
      Agreed…just like the Fog of War… Hindsight brings sharper clarity because fifty years of distance changes how FUD looks in retrospect…
- Reason077 3y ago
  > "Was this a more economical approach than launching those missions on an expendable rocket, and just building brand new satellites?" Assuming you already have a Space Shuttle, then the answer was apparantely yes. Lloyd's of London, as insurers, paid NASA for the recovery of Westar 6 and Palapa B2. The cost of the recovery was said to be $10m, vs. the $180m insurance value of the satellites (both in 1980s dollars). [1] I suppose many of today's satellites are relatively cheap and considered more expendable, but back in the 1980s these things were very valuable pieces of kit. Besides, most of the retrieval missions performed by the Space Shuttles were not "failed" satellites but rather long-life science platforms that were designed to spend time in space and then be returned to earth for analysis. Now days, many of those sorts of missions can be performed on the ISS, but back then the shuttle was the only option. [1] https://www.lloyds.com/about-lloyds/our-market/what-we-insure/space/crowded-space/space-rescue-mission https://www.lloyds.com/about-lloyds/our-market/what-we-insur...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

uberuberuber 3y ago

Highly recommend this irreverent podcast by 2 engineers and former NASA contractors. They get out above their skies on some topics but the shuttle content is fun. Episode 1: Why do Blake and Craig think the Space Shuttle was stupid? https://youtu.be/KRlD8SdFmaE https://youtu.be/KRlD8SdFmaE Episode 18: Challenger https://youtu.be/H98IGl7pSfQ https://youtu.be/H98IGl7pSfQ

amacbride 3y ago

"Would the public stand to lose a quarter of the fleet in a single day? Would it fork over another billion dollars to build a replacement? Would it stand for spending millions to train astronauts to be truck drivers, only to lose truck and drivers both?" Amazingly prescient article, but I don't think the author expected the answers to these heartbreaking questions to be "yes." Twelve-year-old me stayed up all night to watch Columbia launch in '81, and I watched the last flight of Atlantis in 2011; I still can't watch the Challenger footage to this day.

JohnCClarke 3y ago

I worry that the business case for StarShip is similarly optimistic. Launching once per week, a single StarShip will carry 10,000 tons to orbit. Fully 50% of all mass launched to orbit since Sputnik 1. Given the hopes for even more frequent launches with a fleet of StarShips makes me wonder who is going to pay for it all and why? I do understand it's supposed to be much cheaper. But someone still has to pay. And that person still has to be sure that SpaceX - as a single, critical, supplier - won't eat their business model any time SpaceX chooses. So I do hope there's a secret cunning plan I'm not aware of.

kragen 3y ago
this seems like the good kind of problem to have? not the kind of problem the shuttle had