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>Which people who are critical of the shuttle love to do because it allows them to ignore all the great research, study, and orbital practice we built up using

by xoa 2y ago

>Which people who are critical of the shuttle love to do because it allows them to ignore all the great research, study, and orbital practice we built up using the shuttle. And people who are defenders of the shuttle both love to strawman the criticism, and love to pretend that all the great research, study, and orbital practice we built up using the shuttle could ONLY have been done by the shuttle, vs continued evolution of Apollo and concepts like Sea Dragon or the less well known Nova [0]. The fact of the matter is that the Space Shuttle was objectively, fundamentally a shit design. That's simply the physical truth. Putting the vehicle with all your valuable personnel and cargo on the SIDE of the enormous column of cryogenic explodey vroom is madness, which is why nobody ever did before and nobody will ever do it again. It adds major complexity and entire new realms of failure modes that simply do not exist, period, with a normal stack. It's near impossible to have proper escape modes the entire flight, and indeed the Shuttle did not. Both our lost shuttles with all crew would simply never have happened with other crewed rockets. Normally ones sitting on top can escape from failures below, and have [1]. Ice or insulation falling off a rocket during launch simply cannot hit the thing sitting up above it at all. Adding primary engines on is even worse, messing with many of the benefits of staging and adding huge worthless dry mass. Same with the huge delta wings, which not just further hurt $/kg but meant a hair raising high risk landing using a fat unpowered glider with a subsonic glide ratio of just 4.5:1 (a 737 for contrast is 18:1). Then on top of all of that was all the political BS that it was able to fuel. The congressional pork that genuinely compromised the design further. And of course the effect of America taking its foot off the gas for a good long period vs continuing to evolve what worked. The ultimate result sucked up enormous amounts of limited money and resources on fundamentally worthless activities as well as killing lots of people. We could have done much, much much better. The Shuttle was cool but also an albatross that badly set back US space potential. Thank goodness for SpaceX, and now a whole new crop of promising hungry startups at long, long last. ---- 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_(rocket) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_(rocket) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_MS-10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_MS-10

akira2501 2y ago
> could ONLY have been done by the shuttle I'm certainly not one of those people and I actually have never met one. It's ironic that you flag the issue of strawmen then seemingly immediately create one yourself in order to argue an issue that has already been conceded to. We actually did spacewalks to inspect and practice repairing tiles. We had known prior to Columbia that strikes could happen and displace entire tiles. We had contingencies upon contingencies for this and we just completely dropped the ball on that flight. It was a combination of management and program failures on top of a compromised vehicle design. If you walk away from that tragedy with your only observation being the design of the vehicle was flawed then I fear you have completely failed to study the situation appropriately. I also think people forget what the prospect of conducting medium term orbital operations in the 1970s and 1980s was like. We didn't have deep space networks. We didn't have TDRS. We didn't even have GPS. We just _barely_ started putting stuff into geosynchronous orbit. Spy satellites used to drop film canisters into atmosphere to return imaging to Earth. The orbiter was a highly compromised design born out of an absolutely strange era between military and civilian use of outer space. It absolutely had problems; however, this hindsight view that if we had just built a different vehicle we could have done so much more or had more impactful of a scientific and civilian space program is not grounded in reality or the logistics of the program as a whole. > sucked up enormous amounts of limited money and resources on fundamentally worthless activities Here you are carried away and go too far. The 1980s were some of the most efficient NASA budgeting years and the total budget for NASA has been an absolute fraction of the entire nations budget. We consistently spend more on _worthless_ wars than on NASA. To say that these activities were "fundamentally worthless," again, is _precisely_ the attitude which annoys me so greatly. It's a foolish position that I feel can only be born out of absolute ignorance of all the things we did with that vehicle. NASA and our astronaut core worked as hard as they could to squeeze every possible benefit out of those launches and the testament of that work stands to this day. > Thank goodness for SpaceX You don't have to hate the history of the shuttle to appreciate SpaceX. Although for some people it does seem to be true.
- justin66 2y ago
  > The 1980s were some of the most efficient NASA budgeting years Strange and funny stuff. Somewhere between when NASA estimated the cost of a shuttle flight would be less than ten million dollars and when it became apparent they cost well over a billion dollars, the country should have chosen a different approach.
Log_out_ 2y ago
I wonder what they will say about stacks for material cargo the day the first linear accelerator starts working in tibet. Madness, to glue a container to fireworks.

by xoa 2y ago

akira2501 2y ago

> could ONLY have been done by the shuttle I'm certainly not one of those people and I actually have never met one. It's ironic that you flag the issue of strawmen then seemingly immediately create one yourself in order to argue an issue that has already been conceded to. We actually did spacewalks to inspect and practice repairing tiles. We had known prior to Columbia that strikes could happen and displace entire tiles. We had contingencies upon contingencies for this and we just completely dropped the ball on that flight. It was a combination of management and program failures on top of a compromised vehicle design. If you walk away from that tragedy with your only observation being the design of the vehicle was flawed then I fear you have completely failed to study the situation appropriately. I also think people forget what the prospect of conducting medium term orbital operations in the 1970s and 1980s was like. We didn't have deep space networks. We didn't have TDRS. We didn't even have GPS. We just _barely_ started putting stuff into geosynchronous orbit. Spy satellites used to drop film canisters into atmosphere to return imaging to Earth. The orbiter was a highly compromised design born out of an absolutely strange era between military and civilian use of outer space. It absolutely had problems; however, this hindsight view that if we had just built a different vehicle we could have done so much more or had more impactful of a scientific and civilian space program is not grounded in reality or the logistics of the program as a whole. > sucked up enormous amounts of limited money and resources on fundamentally worthless activities Here you are carried away and go too far. The 1980s were some of the most efficient NASA budgeting years and the total budget for NASA has been an absolute fraction of the entire nations budget. We consistently spend more on _worthless_ wars than on NASA. To say that these activities were "fundamentally worthless," again, is _precisely_ the attitude which annoys me so greatly. It's a foolish position that I feel can only be born out of absolute ignorance of all the things we did with that vehicle. NASA and our astronaut core worked as hard as they could to squeeze every possible benefit out of those launches and the testament of that work stands to this day. > Thank goodness for SpaceX You don't have to hate the history of the shuttle to appreciate SpaceX. Although for some people it does seem to be true.

justin66 2y ago
> The 1980s were some of the most efficient NASA budgeting years Strange and funny stuff. Somewhere between when NASA estimated the cost of a shuttle flight would be less than ten million dollars and when it became apparent they cost well over a billion dollars, the country should have chosen a different approach.

Log_out_ 2y ago

I wonder what they will say about stacks for material cargo the day the first linear accelerator starts working in tibet. Madness, to glue a container to fireworks.