I was under the impression it was initially conceived as such, got sidetracked into some experimentation, was re-purposed as a way to launch spy satellites to the USAF’s requirements so it could call on their budget, and then eventually morphed into a way of squandering enormous amounts of money on a pointless boondoggle. It was a great experimental system but really shit at delivering low-cost launch, which is unfortunately what it was supposed to do.
My WAG is that real investment in heavy lift could have given us something like the Energia system in about the same timescale as the original shuttle, and refined that within 20 years into something capable of lifting 150tons into orbit at a much much much lower cost than the hundreds of millions it takes to lift 25 tons on the shuttle.
It’s a bit of a stretch to call it pointless - it does some very useful things (e.g. HST servicing). “Boondoggle” may not be such a stretch.
But isn’t the Shuttle about what you get when in the 1970s you give an outfit like NASA orders and budget to develop a reusable launch system? Was there another organization that could/should have done the development? Given political realities (and without benefit of hindsight) was there any obviously better path that should have been followed?
Seriously? You’re going to conflate here exposure to terrestrial natural and modest amounts of artificially-induced radiation to the high energy radiation environment of interplanetary space? We have the good fortune to be protected by not only a 30 mile thick blanket of air which absorbs most ionizing UV radiation and diffuses high energy cosmic radiation into less energetic products, but also a massive magnetic field which deflects or traps high energy magnetic particles coming from the Sun. Proton storms and X-ray and gamma emissions resulting from solar flares, coronal mass ejections can do significant and potentially lethal damage to an unprotected person, and a thin steel or aluminum hull be insufficient protect against the highly energetic particles and high frequency wavelengths; for that, you need to carry a substantial amount of mass, which means the ability to either lift a lot of bulk mass or collect it from Near Earth Objects.
Radiation in interplanetary space is, in fact, very bad for you. If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand the fundamental problems with manned spaceflight.
The difference in complexity, risk, and required reliability between putting a couple guys on the Moon for a few days, and sending a crew to Mars on a 8.5 month transit each way plus a 15 month layover (Hohmann minimum energy trajectory) is several orders of magnitude. And it isn’t as if one can simply negate these problems by accepting a higher risk of harm or death to astronauts and ask for volunteers; the mission cost of this would be in the tens of billions of dollars not including development and non-recurring costs; a single critical failure can wash all of that down the drain, which would be an unacceptable risk by any measure.
Sending a manned mission to Mars isn’t infeasible but it would take a lot of development; it isn’t a task that is going to be done with conventional propulsion and space habitation systems. Doing such a mission with an extrapolation of Apollo era hardware would be foolhardy and highly risky.
This doesn’t actually help you much; aside from the difficulty of launching off of such a platform, the altitude doesn’t win you anything significant, as you still need to achieve orbital speed in addition to height. (There is some modest advantage to the reduction in ambient pressure giving a higher effective exhaust velocity, but compared to motor exhaust pressure of several hundred ksi it is only a couple of percentage points at best, and also partially counteracted by requiring a larger and more massive nozzle to owing to a higher expansion ratio at low ambient pressure. The net effect might be a slightly smaller vehicle (not having to carry the mass of fuel for the first 20k feet), but in the end you’d have to achieve orbital speed, which would require motors of essentially the same capability in terms of specific impulse as a sea level launch.
If the same folks who’d built the Saturn V had been given a brief in 1970 or so to evolve a low-risk, low-cost heavy-lift vehicle, within a budget equal to that for the space shuttle, and a service date of 1982 or so, I’m pretty sure whatever came of it would have been a heck of a lot more useful than the shuttle. Saturn 2.0 would have been able to lift a big heavy load reliably, and if a Shuttle-type vehicle proved absolutely necessary they could just have strapped one to the top.
Throwing away all the skills, components, tooling and experience gained from the most successful space programme ever was just nuts. It’s as if Boeing had decided to follow on from the 367-80 by building the 707 as a three-engined variable-geometry SST.
Yes, but people aren’t “merely” worried about the massive solar events which can flood space with instantly lethal levels of radiation, but also low-level crap which isn’t instantly fatal. The Apollo crews which went to the Moon (IX and XI-XVII, IIRC) all got slightly elevated doses of radiation and have fared pretty well in the years since. Simply picking when you launch your mission in the cycle of sunspot activity can reduce the chances you getting hit by lethal doses of radiation. Screaming “OMG!! Radiation!!” isn’t really a valid reason to not go.
You do realize that when a shuttle goes kablooey we have people screaming the exact same things, don’t you?
Define “extrapolation” since by some definitions any manned craft put up in the years since Apollo has drawn upon the lessons learned from those times. Again, I will point out, that neither I nor Armstrong was making the claim that one could do it with “simple” modifications to the Apollo hardware, only that we had the skillset and the technological knowhow since the late 1960s to do this. Yes, there would be things that we’d have to figure out before we could build the rocket, but given the proper budget, these things wouldn’t be insurmountable.
See the above link as to why the budget wasn’t adequate. Had we continued just using the Apollo-era designed hardware, spaceflight would have dropped in price (the tooling and R&D costs would have been paid off at around Apollo 19, IIRC). We would also be looking month-long stays on the surface of the Moon. We could have also had a space station for orbiting research (Skylab was built from cannabalized parts that NASA had laying around, it wasn’t something they’d planned to do from the beginning. It was more a case of, “Well, we’ve got all this stuff and since Nixon won’t let us go back to the Moon, lets see what we can do with it.”)
Addtionally, with Saturn Vs, Apollo capsules, and LEMs rolling off an assembly line, you can improve the technology in them with each successive model. Had we kept flying the Saturn gear, we could have modified the design to take advantage of new materials, which isn’t really possible with shuttles. On those, we can upgrade some of the electronics, put in new engines, but we can’t swap the entire airframe over to something like carbonfibre.
Thank you for this… I wondered if it would just be gilding the lilly. Seems it would be, and for no real good reason, so I will scrap that idea. Excellent.
Even with tooling costs fully amortized, those month-long stays would have been hideously expensive. Would US taxpayers have embraced that?
This sounds rather like a contradiction in terms - an assembly line is what you use when you want to make each one the same, not when you want to make continual changes aimed at improvement.
Thin layers of wood are just as pliable as prepreg or tow when they’re steamed. That’s how they (used to) make wooden tennis rackets. The fact that wood tennis rackets are heavier, but not much heavier, than “graphite” (i.e. composite) ones suggests that a wooden motor case would be heavier, but not much heavier, than a composite one. You would need much more stringent quality control than with regular plywood (no knots or other defects, and no voids in the adhesive), but that’s nothing they couldn’t have handled in 1880.
Engine exhaust is typically only a few psi above atmospheric, if that. A larger, fully expanded nozzle can improve performance, but only if it’s light enough. You don’t have to use one if you don’t want to. Balloon-launched rockets (“rockoons”) offered significant performance benefits; the main drawback was lack of control over launch time and location.
Considering how little coverage the Apollo program got after XIII, would they have even noticed?
You can do both. You simply make sure that any changes you make can be easily incorporated into the production line. Car makers do it all the time with minor model year changes (and mid-year changes as well). To give you an example, say NASA wanted to put a better computer inside the Apollo capsule. The replacement computer would have to be the same size, weight, and have identical connectors and communication protocols as the existing model, so that it could be “dropped in” at the appropriate point on assembly line. If, for example, we’d kept building Apollo capsules up to the modern era, you’d wind up with an insanely powerful unit crammed into the space which once held something as powerful as a cheap pocket calculator is today.
If, for example, they were pumping out 4 capsules a year, they could make gradual changes to each one. You’d wind up with 4 capsules which were 90% (or so) identical to one another, but much different than those which were produced the year before (or the year after). NASA did exactly this with capsules that they built. The Apollo VIII capsule was a much different beast than the Apollo XVII one. That’s why the crew of Apollo XVII was able to stay on the Moon longer than Armstrong and Aldrin, and why the later missions had rovers and the early ones didn’t. As they went along, NASA was able to tweak the designs here and there to save a bit more weight, and they then used this to be able to add more gear and extend each mission longer than the previous one.
Its not “easy,” however. An engineer can’t wake up one day with a great idea and immediately incorporate it into the design (there are exceptions, of course, but they’re pretty rare), they have to plan out when they can add it into the line.
One of the big problems with the Shuttle program is that literally every single one is different. There is no Shuttle fleet as such, merely a collection of prototypes with various degrees of parts incompatability, which negates most of the reusability idea. Plus which, it’s so radically different from all the other systems there is less ability to share concepts and units with other things like Delta, Ariane and so on.
My rather uninformed opinion of designs like the Saturn is that the system as a whole is more modular. If you come up with a super-smart idea for redesigning the second stage to be lighter, stronger and cheaper then it’s not too complicated to alter that without affecting the first and third stages. Of if someone has built a nifty final stake you like for an Ariane launch, you can then adapt it, or just stick it on top of your heafy lifter. Obviously you’d need lots of people in short-sleeved white shirts to go over your design, calculation and manufacturing to make sure you don’t inadvertently cause a big kaboom, but it’s a heck of a lot easier than e.g. fitting an improved wing to one of the shuttles. Plus which, if the things are one-shot anyway then it’s not such a big deal if you have the odd kaboom - just try the new stuff on unmanned launches and pay some extra insurance on the satellites or whatever you’re lifting.
Well, by the standards of its time the cost of the Apollo program was huge - definitely a strain, and most unlikely to have been approved without the “We can’t let those russkies beat us!” aspect. As you note, interest in the program declined significantly toward the end.
So it seems almost certain that a proposal to keep doing a lot more of the same sort of thing at additional vast cost would have faced some tough sledding in Congress - those pols typically are aware that money handed to NASA is then not available for such things as local pork.
The OP might want to consider what real Victorian writers suggested to get their characters into orbit. Jules Verne, of course, used nitocellulose to fire his “space gun” in From the Earth to the Moon. Of course, his solution would leave any space travellers as squished blobs at the bottom of the capsule. Verne probably realized this, but got around it with judicious handwaving, because he really did want to tell the story of people getting into orbit. The second sequel to this book (a lot of people know about the first sequel, Around the Moon, but not many realize there was a second sequel), * Topsy Turvy/The Purchase of the North Pole* has Verne explicitly acknowledging that he really can’t do the things he’d like to do with nitrocellulose propulsion.
Edward Everett Hale actually wrote the first story about an artificial satellite. Presciently, it was about a satellite to be used as a navigation aid. Even more presciently, he had it made of ceramic to withstand atnospheric flight and the rigors of space. It was called The Brick Moon, and he wrote it in 1869
To launch his Brick Moon, he used gigantic flywheels (!)
In the sequel, he has people living in the Brick Moon.
The launching using mechanical means is clever, but I find it hard to believe it’d work. And, again, if you had people on board, they’d get squished.
Maybe there’s a reason so many Victorians imagined antigravity devices. Wells was famous for this, of course, with The First Men in the Moon, but he was by no means the first to use this method – lots of writers had used it before, including Roger cromie in A Plunge into Space. Cromie sued wells for plagiarism:
Looks like the propulsion system is well in hand, so I’ll address hypothetical uses for your satellite.
The first being the very first spy satellite. Outfitted with your basic clockwork camera calibrated to to snap a picture every 45° of arc traversed. Then once back over a recovery zone, eject the exposed film cannister in a re-entry vehicle and cycle the next one into the camera. Considering the very light mass of the payload I’d think a smaller return capsule would be manageable.
The 1890s was about when we were discovering radiation and its effect on film so it should only take a few fogged spools of film to work out that kink.
I seem to remember that the Saturn C5 was due to be replaced withna super-heavy lift rocket called “Nova”. anybody know har far it got(before being cancelled)?
Also: “KIWI” was the prototype nuclear rocket. I think it got some preliminary testing , and then was cancelled.
Sad to say, but I don’t think we have the will (or the money) to have a manned trip to Mars. In a sense, sticking with robots is the best thing-the expense and the danger are both unacceptably high.
From what I understand the boys at NASA have had to “improvise” that little proceedure (just like they had to do with buying the old computer parts off of eBay because it was cheaper than flight certifying newer stuff).
I believe that its mentioned in the CAIB that Columbia was the only shuttle with a flight data recorder. Also, Columbia was a heavier bird than the others and was incapable of docking at the ISS.
Cites? None that I can find in a minute or two before I start work, but one of the common themes mentioned in various articles as the facts came out after the Columiba explosion was that the shuttle design was never really bedded down. It was redesigned while the first ‘production’ example was being built, then three examples were built, then another one was cobbled together from spare parts and new components several years later.
Plus which, there are regular upgrades, replacements and reconfigurations of various systems so each vehicle will be slightly different from launch to launch. I would be surprised if more than a handful of launches had been flown with configurations that could be regarded as identical. Come to think of it, 120-odd launches in a quarter of a century is not exactly a solid base for thoroughly debugging and operationalising a system as complex as the Shuttle.
