The space shuttle and its legacy.

Itssoeasy

I was prompted to start this thread because I've been thinking and reading a lot about the space shuttle and, maybe it was the wondermeant of watching the launches live but I was a fan of it before it ended in 2011.

Since then I've read a lot more about the history and rewatched the challenger launch and the Columbia reentry breakup and just it's beginnings and the shine has come off the shuttle.

Also the question of did the shuttle advance human spaceflight like mercury, Gemini and Apollo and even Skylab ? Each one of these programmes built on something that the previous mission had done. I personally don't think it did.

The shuttle stack seemed like a spacecraft by committee and it's that make up that directly lead to the loss of fourteen astronauts. That's not a good legacy to have. The pictures of the families of challenger looking into the sky trying to figure out what happened is bad.

Now the shuttle did do many good things like launch interplanetary missions and the Hubble telescope so I don't want to be completely negative. It's just that unlike the Apollo era stuff hindsight doesn't do well for the shuttle.

So what are your thoughts and memories of the space shuttle and am I wrong in being negative ?

Beeker

I don't think you are wrong being negative, the shuttle system was a compromise from the word go. It was not what NASA wanted but due to political and budgetary pressures the final design was a compromise. Both accidents were directly related to the design compromises made but the reality was that without the compromises the system would never have been built. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo were magnificent programmes and drove technology and engineering advances, they made the Shuttle possible. The shuttle was a workhorse but it also allowed NASA the opportunity to test new technology and study the effects of spaceflight on a range of people over 30 years. These results will benefit future exploration into the solar system. So I guess I for one salute the Shuttle.

Capt'n Midnight

It was a money pit.

It was to replace all the existing launch systems, so babies and bathwater and no fallback.

In order to up the number of flights to make it "economic" they had to size it for military spy satellites. Every flight involved hauling 110 tonnes of spacecraft and 25 tonnes of external tank to orbit. That's a third of the weight of the ISS every flight.

Skylab was lost because the shuttle was late.

Galileo was late because they finally realised that having a booster filled with liquid hydrogen inside the shuttle was another disaster waiting to happen. The original plan was to leave Earth in 1982 and arrive two years later so would have had a ring side seat for the Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 impact.

Yes lots more people got into space, simply because there was loads of extra room otherwise going to waste.

There was the Pepcon explosion too.

beauf

I disagree. For a long time space was the shuttle. Look at all the things that wouldn't have happened had it not been there. It had a lot of successful missions. 130 ish?

All space fight has been dangerous and a money pit. That's hardly unique to the shuttle.

Beeker

Beeker

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

It was a money pit.

It was to replace all the existing launch systems, so babies and bathwater and no fallback.

In order to up the number of flights to make it "economic" they had to size it for military spy satellites. Every flight involved hauling 110 tonnes of spacecraft and 25 tonnes of external tank to orbit. That's a third of the weight of the ISS every flight.

Skylab was lost because the shuttle was late.

Galileo was late because they finally realised that having a booster filled with liquid hydrogen inside the shuttle was another disaster waiting to happen. The original plan was to leave Earth in 1982 and arrive two years later so would have had a ring side seat for the Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 impact.

Yes lots more people got into space, simply because there was loads of extra room otherwise going to waste.

There was the Pepcon explosion too.

I can't disagree with what you are saying. NASA was backed into a position from which they could not win. After Apollo, in fact even before Apollo 12 launched in Nov 1969 it was clear that NASAs grand plan for a moon base, a space station with a shuttle to service it and a manned flight to Mars was never going to happen. NASA's budget was falling since 1965 and one by one the future programmes were eliminated. Apollo 18,19 and 20 were cancelled, and all NASA had left was the Space Shuttle with no station to service. In order to keep the funding for the Shuttle they were forced to make it all thinks to everyone, science, military and commercial. Had they been given enough funding at the start they could have made it a fully reusable vehicle and avoided the problems they ran into over the years. Its a shame things went the way they did.
However for all its faults the Shuttle was a magnificent piece of engineering and a pleasure to watch.

Capt'n Midnight

beauf wrote: »

I disagree. For a long time space was the shuttle. Look at all the things that wouldn't have happened had it not been there. It had a lot of successful missions. 130 ish?

All space fight has been dangerous and a money pit. That's hardly unique to the shuttle.

I can't see what the shuttle could do that justified the horrendous cost and diversion of funds from real science.


Neither Skylab nor Mir were built with the shuttle.

Proton's have been lofting space station segments since the 1970's for Salyut, Mir and the ISS.

The shuttle recovered a handful of satellites. There was the repair job on Hubble , but the repair job on Skylab predated that. Yes there were some commercial experiments but stats are scary.

At present none of the shuttle hardware is flying. The SLS , like it's predecessors is soaking up billions of dollars a year to reuse old shuttle technology.

Compare that to the hardware from the Soviet era Energia. The side boosters are in use as the Zenit rocket, a derivative of the rocket motors are in use by ULA.


Remember when Halley's comet returned in 1986 all NASA had was the old International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 craft at L1. Because you-know-what was soaking up all the funding.

https://phys.org/news/2014-10-citizen-scientists-aspaceship.html

Bob Farquhar and the team running ISEE-3 hatched an audacious plan, making the most of ISEE-3's remaining fuel to perform some complex manoeuvring through a series of changes in orbit and the slingshot effect of the moon, sending it far from Earth. On its new course, ISEE-3 would encounter the smaller Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner, beating the international armada heading for Halley by several months.

for the cynical https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10350/why-didnt-nasa-use-the-shuttle-to-make-a-profit

Launching from Vandenberg, delivering a classified satellite and coming back to Vandenberg in one orbit -- that was DRM 3A. DRM 3B involved going up empty from Vandenberg and coming back to from Vandenberg one orbit later with a classified satellite [snatch a Russian spy satellite] in one orbit. Both scenarios share a common problem. In one orbit, Vandenberg has rotated eastward by 1200+ miles. Those two DRMs are the singular reason why the Shuttle had such big wings.

East - West isn't the problem in and of itself , it's that from Vandenberg it's a polar orbit so East West is a problem like North south would be from Florida on a equatorial one.

Link from the above article to tiles - http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/03/us/loss-shuttle-heat-shields-protective-tiles-have-been-major-concern-start.html

https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4221/ch8.htm - the big killer was the constraint of reducing the annual development budget. All throughout the message is that expendable tanks save launch weight and hence cost.

beauf

The shuttle was meant to be vastly cheaper than it ended up being. So in hindsight it was too expensive, but that's hindsight being 20:20 vision.

namloc1980

Shuttle was a money pit and 14 people lost their lives because it was a fundamentally flawed machine. It's finest hour was easily the Hubble repair missions undoubtedly. I believe the shuttle set back human spaceflight by decades however. The US space program went from being capable of reaching other worlds to being stuck in LEO for decades, and it's still in the midst of trying to undo that.

beauf

...However, the number of failures over the past year has been abnormally high. Many rockets have success records around 97 or 98 percent... the space shuttle, which NASA retired in July after 30 years of service, failed just twice in 135 missions, putting its reliability at about 98.5 percent (though those two failures tragically resulted in the deaths of 14 astronauts)....

https://www.space.com/13620-spaceflight-difficult-launch-mission-failures.html

The shuttle was meant to be cheaper and re-usable. it wasn't.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1598/1