Looking back: Was the shuttle a flop?

I'm sitting here, shaking my head and laughing in a mixture of amusement and amazement, and thinking: "I can't believe even you could write something like that!"

Submarines transformed into spaceships is a downright reasonable concept compared to landing "airplane style" on an airless moon.

Regardless of the shuttle's impressive technology (for its time) and operational achievements, overall I would have to say the entire program was a flop.

Why?

For the simple reason that it stuck humans in LEO for more than 3 decades.

and now the legacy of it will keep us there for decades to come, assuming we ever even get back to LEO.

I haven't done enough research to say with authority. It has certainly played a key role in all the space-based infrastructure we've built in the last generation. Telescopes, GPS constellations, communication satellites, the satellite photography from Google Earth--we owe a lot of that to the space shuttle. More significant is probably technology that was developed for the shuttle and later commercialized. Like the rest of the space program I don't even know where you'd begin on that. And I'd say it was also an iconic program. For as impressive as, say, the Saturn looks on the pad or arguably the Apollo capsule, parachuting down to the ocean, it can't compare to the big white and black shuttle, gliding in for a landing.

Now that the shuttle program is dead, it's time to start funding the Eagle Program.

You can land like an airplane on the moon, but use full flaps and hold the nosewheel up as long as possible. That lunar regolith can be a might soft.

What's the stall speed of an airfoil in a vacuum, anyway?

I fail to see why you would need air for a wheels down landing. Right now we have planes that use reverse thrust to slow the speed. Once the wheels are down gravity and friction would help with the braking. There are long fairly flat areas on the moon.

:coolit:

African? Or European?

Laden or unladen?

There is no known stall speed for a conveyor belt.

Blame Dick Nixon Pt. 1

Almost all the failings of the shuttle program can be placed squarely at the feet of Dick Nixon.

Blame Dick Nixon Pt 2

Interesting article.

Beyond Nixon and so forth, I hadn't heard of the relationship between no longer painting the ET's and that allowing moisture to seep into cracks and dislodge a chunk of the foam. It makes perfect sense: one of the reasons you paint is to waterproof.

A very simple decision made very early in the shuttle program led to a fatal disaster many years later.

Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

What possible benefit comes from such a god awfully convoluted scheme?

"Ok this is a no brainier, Hubble can peer back in time billions of light years....right.
So point the the dang thing at this star and lets see if its still a star or has gone nova on us."

That you EP? Cause looking at your posts in this thread I'm thinking you one and the same.....

I don't know why I'm even bothering here, but I guess it's the engineer in me that just can't look at that kind of nonsense and let it go unchallenged.

A vertical landing and a gliding landing are two entirely different principles. In a gliding landing, like a plane, you can take all the time you want (if your runway is long enough) to dissipate your horizontal speed. Your vertical speed, however, has to be cut pretty close to zero before you contact the ground, or you will end up looking something like a pancake.

Sure, you can use reverse thrust (you'd have to either land backwards or have additional thrusters facing forwards, since rockets can't just run in the opposite direction, which would be monumentally stupid engineering but it could at least be done in theory) to slow that forward speed, but how do you reduce the vertical speed? An airplane does it with lift from the flaps. Without wings (edit: that is, without the lift that comes from wings biting air; it is not enough just to "have wings" if there is no air for them to work with), you would have to have rockets underneath to kill the vertical speed. There is no other way.

So, if you have to have the rockets underneath anyway, in order to bring the vertical speed down pretty close to zero before touching the ground, what possible advantage is there to having any horizontal speed at all? Airplanes do it so they can use lift to kill the vertical speed, then kill the horizontal speed on the runway once they're down, but that horizontal speed wouldn't be good for anything at all if it can't be used for lift.

Therefore, there is no possible use to "landing like an airplane" without air. You would have to come up with a completely ridiculous configuration (rockets front, back, and underneath, or else back and underneath and then land facing backwards) that would be heavy, costly, ungainly and downright dangerous, and not get anything for it!

So please, stop trying to play engineer. You simply don't have the training for it. You are just making yourself look foolish, and causing the rest of us to require corrective eye surgery from rolling our eyes too much.

^^^ Wish I could rep that post but the damn board is broken (at least from my end).

^ I am finding that, in order to rep people, I have to hit the rep button several times. Then, after I finally get the rep box, it won't disappear until I hit the button to add the rep a second time, which results in a "You can't rep the same post twice" box popping up, but at least it works.

I does mean investing a good 30 seconds in each rep given...

Doesn't ep pretend to be an engineer of some sort?

Love to see that glide path.

It's easy enough to set up a functioning, real-life model and observe it. You can use an ordinary stone. Just throw it a distance of 20 feet or so, and admire its "glide path"...

You are the dumbest wing wiper ever.

No, he is a maintenance man/installer. And I would imagine he is pretty good at it.

You guys are falling for a troll, and it is hilarious.

^ Actually, that is the conclusion that a lot of people have come to regarding a lot of what he posts. Pretty much like JohnM. Nobody could really be dumb enough to actually believe all that ridiculous stuff.

JohnM was smart enough to bait me into my only warning in TNZ back in the day. It really was funny, since I was warned for using the term "Shit for Brains Dickhead" without naming JohnM. Of course everyone, including BM knew to whom I was referring...
At any rate, I've always appreciated the fact that Dayton3 politely called bullshit on the warning on my behalf. I wasn't too worried about it since, I figured I'd skated on much more flagrant "violations" before then.

^ You got a warning in TNZ? Was that when I was moderating it? I was part of the "reign of terror" before I repented, went into exile, and joined the rebels...

I don't think so. It was when Borgminister was still new at it. I think you had already joined the exodus.

So you are WF's Lando.