If you look at the Space Warfare page on wikipedia, it says:
This strikes me as BS. The source it lists is
Draper, Alfred C.; Buck, Melvin L.; and Goesch, William H. “A Delta Shuttle Orbiter.” Astronautics & Aeronautics. 9 (January 1971): 26-35.
which sounds legitimate but what the hell do I know. I don’t have access to the source material.
It sounds implausible from pretty much every angle. I’ve never heard of the shuttle being designed as a space warfare weapon (presumably a low warning first attack craft) - the military tends to be very inclusive and rigid about its nuclear forces and I doubt they’d try to involve NASA in their SIOP or have plans to comandeer the shuttle for nuclear attacks.
Even beyond that, it sounds dubious that the delta wing would be for that purpose. The Delta wing is there because of the high speeds the shuttle does during re-entry, right? And in general, delta wings are better in pretty much every aspect at high speeds. Why then would it need delta wings if it were meant as an orbital attack platform but not if it were merely a space shuttle? Would delta wings somehow be necesary for a quick deorbit after bombing, but not normal re-entry?
Plus the scenario just sounds implausible. The Soviets did have some rudimentary antisatellite weapons at the time of the shuttle’s design, but I doubt a serious concern was that in the unlikely event that the shuttle was used as a first strike bomber, the Soviets are going to get their shit together fast and be able to quickly shoot down the shuttle in orbit.
So really, you need to accept 3 things at least: That the shuttle was designed with this purpose in mind, that the re-entry profile of being used as a weapon somehow dictated the wing shape when its mission otherwise wouldn’t have called for one, and that the safety of the shuttle crew after such a mission was enough to justify changing the design features to accomodate it. All three of those sound like BS to me, but I find myself curious if anyone has more info.
I really don’t know one way or the other. But the space race took place during the height of the Cold War, it doesn’t sound implausible that both the US and the USSR had military ideas in mind when they began developing spacecraft. In fact, that sounds exactly like what I’d expect them to do.
It seems improbable to me, and I’ve never heard of it before… and I’d think I would have, considering the fact that I read all kinds space stuff, as often as possible.
Its my understanding that shuttle ended up being the design it is MAINLY because of the requirement to land within one orbit at/near the same place it was launched. There are some reasons militarily why you might want that. I don’t really think there are any good non-military reasons to want to be able to do that.
This Wikipedia article implies that to get one-orbit capability, including the ability to launch from and land at the same place, you need to be able to glide the extra hundreds of kilometers that the Earth has rotated under you while you were orbiting. This would require more maneuverability in the atmosphere, which would affect the wing shape.
This seems plausible to me. It’s a poorly cited Wiki article, though, so take it with a grain of salt.
I’ve read that they could have used much smaller wings, but the shuttle had a requirement that it needed to be able to maneuver a very large distance away from its glide path during re-entry. However, I have no idea if this was because of some military requirement or if they just wanted to make sure that it could reach a secondary runway if necessary.
I have to wonder how practical smaller wings would have been for the shuttle. Several of its pilots have already complained that it has all of the handling characteristics of a brick as it is.
I don’t think the point was to use the shuttle as a first strike bomber. The point of the shuttle was to basically be a space plane (which it never really became close to being). The idea was that we could take all kinds of stuff into orbit, just as easily as we could toss stuff onto a plane and ship it somewhere. If we randomly put things like satellites armed with nuclear missiles directly into orbit over Russia, you might imagine that they would tend to get a little pissed off about it after a while and might wing a missile or two our way.
The shuttle was designed to have a fairly long service life. When the SR-71 first went into service there wasn’t anything that could shoot it down either, but the Soviets soon came up with missiles that could reach it. It’s not unreasonable to assume that if we had some sort of military space plane that the Soviets would find some way to shoot at it as well.
The shuttle was used for military missions, and they planned for a while to have a shuttle dedicated just for military use, but I think this got scrapped after the Challenger disaster.
The Shuttle has flown military missions, but they were all just launching spy satellites. I’m sure the Russians knew that’s what we were doing every single time, but spy satellites aren’t something that’s worth starting a war over by shooting down the launch vehicle.
The Space Transportation System (colloquially known as the “Space Shuttle” although the actual shuttle portion is just the orbiter, not the Solid Rocket Boosters that provide the bulk of the impulse or the External tank that carries the liquid propellants used by the Shuttle Main Engines) was intended as a general purpose replacement for all heavy lift vehicles (at the time, the various Titan IIIB-E rockets, the Delta 1000-5000 Series, and Atlas SLV-3). The principle idea was that it would be cheaper and easier to deliver a payload to orbit–specifically, surveillance satellites, which at the time of conception of the STS were still dropping film capsules from orbit for retrieval and had lifespans of a few months–with a “space truck” that could perform one-orbit-return-to-launch-site trajectories rather than the existing ICBM-based expendable multi-stage launch vehicles.
In the case of the STS, it would be launch from Vandenberg AFB Space Launch Complex 6 (“Slick-6”, previously outfitted to support Titan IIIC launches for the X-20 ‘Dyna-Soar’ and the Blue Gemini/Manned Orbiting Laboratory programs, and then refurbished in the vicinity of US 4 billion dollars to support Blue Shuttle), and land at nearby Edwards AFB, to be returned by truck to SLC-6 for refit; yet another example of your tax dollars hard at work. The most optimistic turn-around schedule offered by anyone technical associated with the program was two weeks, and because cryogenic propellants (liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen) are used, the vehicle cannot be kept on standby, it would hardly make an effective weapon for delivering time-critical weapons or information; indeed, according to many in the Air Force Space Command (in charge of space operations such as deployment of satellites and proposed defensive systems, i.e. space-based SDI systems) the STS was utterly unsuited to many of their missions and would be both more costly and a bottleneck given the diminutive size of the Shuttle fleet (reduced from 5 to 4 by Reagan) especially since the Air Force would not have a dedicated shuttle fleet and would have to share Orbiters and launches with everything else on the NASA and commercial manifests. However, it was regarded as critical to STS development that it fill all necessary roles for space launch vehicles so that it had no plausible competition.
This notwithstanding, a requirement was levied upon the STS development for a vehicle that could provide enough crossrange to achieve a once-around trajectory (the ability to glide sideways upon reentry to return to launch site), while the Air Force was directed to stop buying expendable launch vehicles. This placed a significant burden on the Orbiter development in terms of both the aeroloads on the wing structure during launch and the thermal protection system which had to be larger and heavier than a strictly lifting body design with minimal L/D needed for gliding reentry with low crossrange capability. However, following the catastrophic destruction of Challenger during launch of STS-51-L, the Air Force terminated the Blue Shuttle program and initiated what became the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program while supporting near-term Titan IV development to make sure they were never stuck relying on NASA. Meanwhile, NASA was stuck with a design that had both significant vulnerabilities and thousands of pounds of useless dead weight with a crossrange capability that was never utilized.
So the answer to the question posed by the o.p. is that no, the STS was never intended to be a bomb truck or deliver space weapons. However, it was designed to deliver military payloads such as “spy” satellites and the eventual possibility of defensive systems like space-based interceptors (Brilliant Pebbles), kinetic kill vehicles (Homing Overlay Experiment), and space-based relay mirror platforms (High Precision Tracking Experiment). Its practical utility in these roles compared to ICBM-based expendable platforms is, in hindsight, highly questionable.
I’m not sure I understand why you need to glide a lot to land where you took off. Is it some inherent property of orbital mechanics? Why couldn’t you just de-orbit on a path that set you back to where you came from? And for that matter, why was it considered necesary for a shuttle to land at its launch point instead of some other airport?
It costs a fortune to transport the Shuttle from another location back to KSC, so as a practical matter it makes sense to have the Shuttle land back home as frequently as possible.
Once you’re in orbit, the path you take is pretty much a fixed circle in space; think of it as a hula hoop surrounding the Earth. Where this hula hoop is located relative to the Earth depends on how you launch and where you launch from. However, the Earth keeps rotating on its axis after you’ve launched. This means that when you come back to a given point on the hula hoop on your next orbit, the point on the Earth’s surface that was directly beneath the hula hoop last time around has now rotated away from you. This site has some pretty good diagrams.
So if you want to go around once and land at pretty much the same place you started out, you have to be able to move a significant distance away from the hula hoop. You could pack more fuel to change your orbit (i.e. move the hula hoop), but this would take up more weight; better to design your craft so that it can use the atmosphere to glide the extra distance.
It is very possible that the concept was explored by the military, but that dose not mean the shuttle was designed around that concept. It does make sense that the military would at least look into the practicality of using the shuttle.
Also, its important to realize that the Soviet objections were extremely hypocritical. They attempted to launch a honest to goodness space battle platform named Polyus, which would have been a global threat to world stability as opposed to the conspiracy theories about the STS used as a nuclear bomber. Not to mention FOBS. Or the cannon on Salyut 3.
The main effect the military had on the shuttle design - that the shuttle payload bay handle the huge military spy satellites (Keyhole series?) Hence the 15x15x60 payload bay. As monetioned above, it was mandated to be a replacement for all those throw-away boosters in the optimistic world of space and satellites.
Using the shuttle to bomb anywhere would be like using an 18-wheeler to deliver pizza. It’s ludicrously expensive overkill. Yes a shuttle would be a sitting duck, even if for 1 orbit. Besides, a warhead designed to fall halfway around the world needs a diffeenet trajectory than a craft that does 1 or more orbits. You would have to unload a mess of warheads with their own de-orbit retro engines almost the moment you got up into space.
In the minds of the enthusiastic do-anything NASA engineers of the late 60’s and early 70’s, the shuttle would become a space truck, turning around every 2 weeks to load up another payload for space, making all those silly discardable rockets obsolete. Instead, the moment a shuttle lands, it is stripped of parts needed to make the next shuttle ready for the launch pad and undergoes a billion-dollar 6-month or more refurbishment.
Good stuff, but just to note on this passage-- EELV didn’t follow from Challenger, it followed from the Titan IVA/B, which followed the termination of the Air Force Shuttle program (there were a lot of ideas for heavy lift after Challenger but well before EELV showed up).
Fun fact: after the Titan failures in the late 1990s but before EELV showed up on the scene, the Air Force made contingency plans to again launch some military payloads on the Shuttle, specifically the last of the DSP satellites. But with the success of the Delta IV, there wasn’t a need, so the plans were shelved.
The secondary landing site after Kennedy Space Center is Edwards AFB - in California (though it can theoretically land all over, and in lots of places much closer to Cape Canaveral). To get the orbiter back from California, they have to stick it on the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (a modified 747), which takes time, is not ideal in terms of airframe stress, and costs a shit-ton of money as AD notes.