How long will it take for NASA, or some other country’s space program, or private industry to start sending up the next-generation space shuttle (defined as a reusable spaceship intended mainly for servicing satellites and stations in near-Earth orbit)? If it was a good idea in the 1970s it has to be a better idea now, there’s so much more up there. OTOH, back in the 1970s space travel seemed to have a lot more economic and strategic potential than it seems to have now.
Looks like a few years: Dragon
The capsule is fully reusable, but I am not certain about the launch rockets - the wiki article is unclear.
I like that the plan is to add retractable landing gear to the capsule, that would be interesting to see touching down on earth…
Say, that looks a lot like the single-stage-to-orbit craft – I think he called it a “Delta” craft or something – that General Daniel O. Graham was always talking about when he was touring campuses and SF conventions in the late-80s’-early-'90s touting Star Wars/Strategic Defense Initiative. To hear him tell it, the thing would be able to launch from and land (tail-down) on a rooftop heliport! (It was envisioned as a way for getting all those “brilliant pebbles” into orbit.)
What makes you think it was a good idea in the 70’s or now? The whole point to reusability was to make space access cheaper, but the Space Shuttle turned out to be insanely expensive. And not all of it is reusable anyway.
Of the space launch systems on the drawing board or currently in test flight, none of them are fully reusable except for Scaled Composite’s suborbital plane. SpaceX’s dragon capsule is reusable, including its escape launch system, but it lands like an Apollo capsule. Still, it’s a major component and it’s reusable.
The military has a small shuttle-like orbiter, but it’s unmanned.
Now that spaceflight is moving more into private commercial vehicles, I think you’ll see a drive towards simplicity and low cost, rather than massive infrastructure-based reusable vehicles like the Shuttle. Recovering boosters requires large ships with recovery gear and many personnel, and that drives up launch costs. Refurbishing and reusing a booster that’s already gone through the launch/recovery process isn’t necessarily cheap. And all of it adds complexity and slows time between launches.
It might be better to just crank boosters out on an assembly line and get the cost of the booster down as low as possible, then recover the manned capsule and reuse that.
No, the SpaceX Dragon is just a capsule, launched on top of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The reusable spacecraft you’re thinking of is the McDonnell-Douglas DC-X. Here’s a good video.
The DC-X program was cancelled, but a private company called Blue Origin is pursuing a similar design. The company is privately funded (mainly by Jeff Bezos, the founder of amazon.com) and is notoriously secretive; they had a sucessful low-altitude test flight in 2007 but not a lot of public info after that, as far as I know.
p.s. There’s also the Skylon, which is a reusable unmanned single-stage-to-orbit design. It recently secured funding for engine development.
:eek: That’s how it starts! The next generation will be passing for human!
The Earth’s surface is covered 2/3 by water and 1/3 by studies of reusable SSTO systems. SSTO would require a large upfront investment and sustained research and development phase, in exchange for potential long-term reductions in operational costs and improvements in reliability (due to “airliner-like” operations instead of needing a standing army to execute each launch). Think of it as building a 747 starting in about 1940. By 1960, after billions of dollars and probably some lives lost in flight test, you’d have it, and the long-term benefits would start rolling in.
The kind of vision and long-term commitment needed to develop SSTO is becoming less and less available as the years go on. NASA doesn’t have it. Either the economics have to change such that an SSTO could be run at a profit, or some national security imperative has to arise such as the Chinese developing a way to go up and grab our satellites. Then we’d have to build a ship that could stop them and pretty soon Earth orbit looks like the sky over Britain in 1940.
Why? Hasn’t a lot of the R&D groundwork already been laid, with the shuttle program?
Congress is bound and determined to just screw NASA up.
Remember Obama’s vision for using NASA as an incubator for private space by providing startup funding for Commercial Crew Development and other programs? Damned good idea.
Congress’s latest appropriations cuts funds for it.
Remember the James Webb Space Telescope? The successor to the aging Hubble? Congress wants to kill it.
Now, I could understand if everything was being cut. Tough times and all. But guess what’s actually getting its funding increased? The Senate Launch System, so-named because it’s the reincarnation of the Constellation program that’s already been canceled - revived by Senators and Congressmen in space districts.
This is pure pork. This is all about keeping NASA money flowing to the states of powerful politicians. The money is flowing in to pay for a system which has no defined mission, no serious engineering feasibility design, and which is based on another system that had already shown it had numerous flaws.
It’s one advantage - it’s built out of old shuttle parts, so it can keep all those voters employed. NASA has become a jobs program. Actually, it became one long ago, but now it’s official. This bill specifically demands that NASA retain and reuse all the infrastructure and personnel it already has, and that it must use Shuttle components and components built or designed for the failed Ares 1 rocket.
The kicker is that if they were actually serious about building this system and not just saving some jobs through the next election cycle, they’d have to give this program a lot more funding. They’re funding it just enough to keep the people in place, but not enough for them to actually build out the program. This is exactly what happened to Constellation - NASA was told to build it, then shorted about 3 billion dollars per year required to actually finish it.
In addition, the construction by NASA of a heavy lifter, coupled with the cutbacks to the Commercial Crew program, threaten to cut off the nascent private space industry at the knees. SpaceX is already well underway in its buildout of a heavy launch system (Falcon 9), and so are several other companies. NASA will be going into direct competition with the very companies that were supposed to be the ‘next generation’ of space development.
So, good bye James Webb telescope, and with it one of the major legs of deep space science. That probably means no terrestrial planet finder either, since it was to build on what we learn with Webb. And probably no life finder mission after that. The most exciting part of NASA’s next 30 years has essentially been killed.
And this heavy lifter and capsule won’t be built. It will struggle along for a few years, running over budget and out of schedule, until the next administration puts another bullet in it. Then it will probably rise phoenix-like from its ashes as the next Congress refuses to do anything that might cause their constituents any pain.
I don’t think this is a partisan issue. I have no idea if this is being pushed primarily by Republicans or Democrats. It’s just old-fashioned pork at the expense of science. And if it’s being pushed by Republicans - shame on them, for speaking the language of private enterprise, then signing a bill that does immense damage to the private space industry.
Shuttle, X-15 and some other less famous programs have provided useful data, but most work on SSTO has been of the form “If we had an engine 20% more efficient than existing engines, and if we had a material with 20% higher specific strength than existing materials, then we could build a system like this…” With existing technology, SSTO is just barely possible, in principle. So you’d have to expect a long, costly and tortuous period of designing and qualifying an actual implementation.
Problem with that vision being, that in the meanwhile the economics of satellites have evolved such that save for a few cases like Hubble it’s still more viable to just abandon and replace than to service and maintain in orbit or recover and bring back; and that manned orbital laboratory platforms are still mostly waiting for a mission other than long term micrograv experiments.
One of the things that could be in the future would be giving up on STS’s all-things-to-all-people approach and go for division of labor between crew launch-and-recovery vehicles with light-to-moderate cargo capability, and proper heavy construction vehicles.
They’ve been at it since the creation of the Shuttle itself. A lot of its design compromises were related to requirements that were in the specs to “satisfy constituencies”.
Even earlier than that. Why do you think Apollo launched from Florida, but mission control was in Texas?
Well, that would mainly be Florida. The state is powerful, in electoral-vote terms, etc., but our present delegation of Congresscritters, not so much. The only one who might fit your bill is Senator Bill Nelson (from the Space Coast) – our other senator, Rubio, is a freshman.
No, it makes perfect sense to launch things from Florida. Right latitude, nearly ideal weather, big ocean to crash in.
Sam means it didn’t make any sense to have Mission Control in Houston and shuttle assembly in California.
No, I meant what I said. Apollo launched from Florida, but mission control for Apollo was in Houston. My understanding is that this arrangement was done to appease Lyndon Johnson.
Brainglutton Florida is by no means the only benefactor of the shuttle program. United Space Alliance, the consortium of contractors to the shuttle, has facilities in many states. If the shuttle program is fully wound down, they will have to lay off almost 11,000 employees.
NASA is going to get stuck with the pension bill, which is about 3% of their budget. This money is unbudgeted and the funds will have to come from extant program funding, so expect to read news of more NASA mission cancellations in the future.
From what I understand, exploration will continue.
BBC story on five possible successors to the shuttle.
Clickable article on each one. The picture shows all five craft in proportion to the shuttle – they’re all much smaller. [shrug] Well, smaller means cheaper, that’s the real challenge here.
Michael Lind: Why we should embrace the end of human spaceflight. Depressing but convincing. 
Why do we want a reusable shuttle system? It seems that the thing is under so much stress, usually at the design limit, and add to that salt water splashdowns, that you may want to rethink the reusable craft plan. It also stifles moving forward with new designs (which many are ironically capsule like again). And in short time you are sending people up in 40 year old craft with no replacement.