Looking back: Was the shuttle a flop?

Now that the end of the space shuttle is within sight (and the fact that I have Netflix), I have been watching alot of documentaries on our space shuttle program.

The simple question; was the space shuttle program a success of a gigantic fucking flop?

It was billed as a cheap, reusable orbiter from the very beginning, but everything I have watched has pointed out that NASA tried as hard as possible to hide the fact that the shuttle cost a billion dollars to get into space. Far more than traditional rockets with similar payload capacity would have cost.

Every time the shuttle came home, it went through a process of extensive repairs to get it flight-worthy again. Months of effort to repair the beating it took trip after trip.

We lost two fifths of the fleet. Because of the configuration of the orbiter, it's simply not possible to have an escape plan the way it is relatively simple to have a well to get the hell out of dodge when you're sitting ON TOP of a rocket. Well, that would account for at least one of the two disasters, but even the Columbia couldn't have possible experienced the failure it did in a simple rocket configuration.

"The more they overtake the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain." - Scotty

Sure, it's cool to watch what is essentially a plane being blasted off on some big-ass rockets, but was the shuttle program really a success? Is it possible that sticking with a straight forward rocket design would have provided with just as much cargo capacity at a much lower cost?

After watching everything I have, that's my take on it.

What say you?

No, I would say that the shuttle was a rousing success. No doubt that we could have had a better shuttle if we had politicians with a sense of vision.

The shuttle enabled astronauts to capture, repair, and deploy satellites, space telescopes, and large interplanetary probes, to carry up and return large payloads, construct the space station...

It's a pretty amazing vehicle.

Mixed bag. It never became the cheap ticket to orbit it was promised to be and it ultimately killed fourteen astronauts with its shortcomings, but it still racked up an amazing operational history...

Turn the cargo bay into an expanded crew module, strap on warp nacelles, and in my world they'd still be running.

I think it wasn't as successful that it could've or should've been. That is because like so many other things the federal government does, the program was never given the support it needed. It goes back to the scaled down, budget limited redesign from the original concept for the space shuttle.

I would have to say yes in every way. The worst thing about it was that it turned. NASA and the nation from a deep space exploration (Apollo) mindset into an LEO taxi. We could have achieved everything the shuttle did forgiven cheaper and still kept our focus on real exploration

Now, our mission in space is Muslim ego building.

The space shuttle has the dubious honour of being statistically the most dangerous manned launch system ever used.

Even aside statistics, it's about the most dangerous since it's the only manned launch vehicle in the last 4 or 5 decades with no launch escape system.

Given that politicians demanded it be something it was never intended to be, I'd say it was a tremendous success. But only by the brute force method. It's a shame, though. It could've and should've been so much more.

In terms of meeting its original goals of providing cheap reusable access to space, largely a flop.

In terms of the actual vehicles though, they are goddamn amazing pieces of engineering.

In retrospect seeing the long term success of Soyuz it would probably have been best to keep the Saturn V/Apollo production line running with a smaller rocket being used just for crewed launches. It's very interesting to imagine a timeline where the same budget used to keep the shuttle flying was pumped into Saturn V launches. The International Space Station could potentially be carrying 100+ astronauts right now.

That said, with the way the real world works it is unlikely that the budgets would have remained as high, and would have been cut further than they were.

They were also at one point going to add an internal fuel reservoir for the orbital engines (the smaller two engines at the aft end) that would have sat in the payload bay and allowed the shuttle to reach much higher orbits, at the expense of a bit of payload capacity. They nixed that due to underfunding.

The two books about the space shuttle program by T.A.Happenheimer give a great look at the problems the program had including:

1) How the Nixon admin. only gave NASA enough money to build the shuttle orbiter and not the booster section. Forcing NASA to adopt the dangerous and complicated "stage and a half" design. Which ultimate destroyed Challenger and Columbia.

2) How NASA was forced to ally with the Air Force to get the shuttle approved and how Air Force requirements forced NASA to build a much larger and more complex orbiter than it planned to build.

And then the shuttle was seldom used by the Air Force anyway.

3) How the shuttle program was forced to steal money from the rest of NASA for years because no one would approve the money it needed to be properly developed.

4) How NASA had numerous plans for dramatically improving the existing shuttle fleet but never could because of lack of money.

5) How NASA became at fault for many problems with the space program because the shuttle (and space station) became the focus for the careers of huge numbers of NASAs best engineers.

Interesting reads.

By the standards set by previous programs and the expectations set, of course it was.

The accomplishments are pretty amazing and getting the Great Observatories set up without them would have been a much different challenge. Interesting that some who decry "government waste" and "overspending" blame the government for not spending enough on it. (that's not an attempt to derail an interesting thread. It's just an observation and it does show that one man's waste and overspending may be another's "vital national interest") That might be true and it's definitely true that making it take on too many different kinds of missions was a huge problem. Expecting politicians not to stick their fingers into such a huge program (pork barrel? Again, it depends on your point of view) is kind of like asking dogs not to pee on a mailbox post.

Certainly the shuttle concept itself proved flawed because our technology just isn't ready to cheaply and reliably deliver payloads into space via an "economical" reusable vehicle. We were only able to do it in a hugely expensive fashion that forced our technology into new territories that proved to be quite risky. Ironically at a time when the idea was to make space flight "routine" it became as dangerous as the testing programs described by Tom Wolfe in "The Right Stuff".

We accomplished a lot of missions with the shuttle, but there really was no where to go afterwards. Ironically, that was the real message from the Soviets stealing the design for their own Buran. After they proudly rolled it out and flew it once, they parked it and let it rust. Unlike I us, I guess they decided not to throw good money after bad and continued to go with Soyuz for their manned program. They are also at a crossroads and I hesitate to say they got their more cheaply than we did, but it looks like both programs are facing very similar issues about where to go next and with their experience in building heavy lift rockets and Soyuz they might have a slight edge over us.

With all the stunning accomplishments, it's hard for me to call the program a flop, but I do think it's fair to call it a dead end.

Actually, we did have the technology and abilty to build a fully resusable, cheaper, and safer shuttle than what was built.

But the technology was cutting edge and would've required much more front end investment.

Probably at least twice or three times the three billion (IIRC in 1972 dollars) that the Nixon Admin. approved.

Ironically, as we're going back to rockets with capsules on them now, we most certainly have the technology to build the shuttle the way it should've been built in the 1970s.

Especially if you built it without the expensive add ons that the Air Force insisted on.

A shuttle for the U.S space program should not have wings (it never needed cross range capability) and it didn't need a payload bay capable of holding 65,000 lbs. (Air Force requirment because of the projected size of the KeyHole spy satellites-they look similar to the Hubble Space Telescope but heavier).

A straight up lifting body with a payload capabilty of no more than 30,000 lbs. would serve all significant U.S. earth to LEO needs.

It was a flop because of its limited range. It should have been designed to land on the moon airplane style and take off again from there (which would require a much smaller amount of fuel than leaving earth). They could have started building a proper base there on the moon (Moonbase Alpha). From there we could have launched real deep space missions.
There real fail was the wheel in space.

I don't think the Moon has an atmosphere or a runway.

But a space shuttle taking off from the Moon on a conveyor belt would be pretty awesome.

Ah, wait...

Don't need an atmosphere to take off. Our current rockets do not use air as part of the fuel mix, it uses tanks of liquid gas. Same could be used to take off from the moon, but with no atmosphere it would take much less fuel for take off. You get the right wheels, you don't need a proper run way to land, especially since the weight of the shuttle on the moon would be much less. They could possibly land with the back end down like the apollos. The shuttle could have carried gear to make a proper station on the moon. Colonize the moon and get it going on and then we would have a real base to reach out.

You could land that way if you don't mind crashing.

Otherwise, you're pretty much committed to the helicopter style landings of the LM and the proposed Altair. A shuttle isn't real practical for that.

Now, what you could do is ride the shuttle up to the space station, where you dock and move over into an Orbital Transfer Vehicle and lander that takes you to the Moon. That would be pretty cool.

Hey, wait, that was the original plan before Washington screwed it up.

Yes it does. I've seen it... on Space 1999. :bong2:

This. Not a flop, but far, far less than we were initially led to believe back in the day.

Dude, don't even ask. I don't anymore.

FTFY

To be fair, as you know the shuttle was conceived as part of a Space Transportation System: Shuttle-Space Station-Orbital Transfer Vehicle. The shuttle was just one side of that triangle. It was designed to build and service a space station and the OTV.

The OTV and any lunar return was nixed pretty quickly. The station lasted a little while longer, but was was reviewed by Congress and then redesigned by NASA so many times they could have put the damned thing in orbit with the money they spent reviewing and redesigning it.

The only way we got the space station was as an international agreement.

It took from 1981 until the mid 1990's and the first Mir dockings before the shuttle finally started doing what it was designed to do: service a space station. It didn't start constructing a space station, what it was best suited to do, until ISS construction began in 1998.

It was like buying yourself a big tractor and trailer truck that you can haul a lot of cargo long haul with and then just driving it around town making a few pickups and deliveries.

The shuttle itself is one helluva vehicle. Nothing else can haul up and return large cargos or is better suited for on orbit repair and construction than the shuttle. It has no equal. None.

The shuttle didn't let us down; we let it down. We didn't use it to its full potential until it was old technology.

I've always said that we could and should have built a better shuttle and kept flying Apollo/Saturn too. It was wrong to put all our space eggs in the shuttle's basket. You don't need the shuttle for everything; sometimes you just need an Apollo capsule. Or a Soyuz.

It's always been one of the greatest signs of the decline of the American spirit to me. We gave up the Moon almost as soon as Neil Armstrong's boots hit the surface.

And that's just sad.

Well, considering I watched Airplane II last night...

You can't LAND LIKE A PLANE if there is no atmosphere, silly. You can't even use parachutes to slow you down.

The moon is paradoxically the easiest solar system body to get to but one of the hardest to soft-land on, because you can't use the atmosphere to slow your descent. You must bring your entire descent-slowing energy with you in the form of rocket fuel.

Even mars with its thin atmosphere can slow you down to a few hundred mph, requiring a much smaller retro rocket effort, and on worlds like Titan you could literally land like a plane. Actually with its low gravity and thicker-than-earth atmosphere you could equip a Titan lander with rotors and set down like a helicopter.

You can land like a plane on the Moon, but you have to have a conveyor belt.