A former NASA administrator seems to think so.
Considering what a disappointment the STS was, does he have a point? He seems to think we would have a manned moon base, firm Mars missions plans, etc etc, instead of the “wheeee, we have showed we can go into space for the 662nd time”, that we have now.
Yes, he has a point: in hindsight, it would have been less expensive (in dollars, at least) to continue with expendable rockets instead of betting the farm on STS.
However, it doesn’t mean that anybody would have allocated a budget for establishing a permanent base on the Moon or for sending humans to Mars.
Mr. Griffin wrote this text in 2007, while he was in office as NASA administrator, and trying to get the Constellation program off the ground. It’s just common sense to appeal to the past greatness of Apollo when trying to sell “Apollo on steroids” to the taxpayers.
I was following nasaspaceflight.com at the time, and most people there (people who actually know their delta-v from their specific impulse and stuff – unlike me) found the Constellation program to be technically flawed (and oddly managed) from the start. There are a few different ways to reuse Shuttle infrastructure and hardware to make a Saturn/Apollo-like system, and the choices made for Constellation (by Mr. Griffin) were considered penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Moved from General Questions to IMHO.
samclem, moderator
The problem wasn’t that they built the Shuttle; the problem is that they built the Shuttle and stopped, They should have kept on improving it, making a newer, better model every few years. As far as I’m concerned, 95% of NASA’s budget should be spent on finding efficient ways of getting stuff into orbit. Everything else is just chaff.
Use the Saturn to lift station components and mount lunar and deep space missions, and develop a small spaceplane that could be lifted on Delta, Atlas or Titan to get to the stations. Ahhh, hindsight.
Don’t use the Saturn. Make rockets better than the Saturn, and use those. Never use the same rocket design twice without improving it.
The Russians kept the same booster design-and concentrated on improving it…seems to have worked for them.
I think the Space Shuttle was a dumb choice and there was plenty of mainstream technical opinion saying that at the time. As I recall, none other than Van Allen himself (of Van Allen Radiation Belt fame) had an article saying this in the issue of Scientific American that was on store shelves the day of the first Space Shuttle disaster.
I think the point of the Space Shuttle was to serve the International Space Station and the point of the International Space Station was to justify the Space Shuttle.
Perhaps the biggest flaw in the Space Shuttle concept is that you have to put multiple people into space to use it, so it does nothing for unmanned space missions – and there is just about zero technical reason to put people into space. But, the cost to add people is insane. People are versatile and can repair things? What a non-starter! You can launch many unmanned copies of your favorite space probe for what it costs to put one up with the Space Shuttle. I think the incremental cost to use the Shuttle once was about $500,000,000.00, and that’s without building and staffing whatever it is launching, or building the shuttle itself; that’s basically to take it out of the hanger and fly it around the block.
Supposedly, the drama of manned space flight was necessary to keep voters sufficiently amused to support NASA, but NOAA has a similar budget and voters don’t say a word about that.
Incremental development like that is impossible when your budget is controlled by Congress. For instance, suppose it was a smart move to switch the boosters to liquid fuel from solid fuel. But it never would have happened as long as Utah had influential congressmen, because that’s where the solid boosters were manufactured.
That’s also why the SLS is such a hunk of garbage. The components are divvied up the same way as on the Shuttle. But it’s the only thing they could get away with, politically.
On the other hand, SpaceX doesn’t have to ask anyone if they want to switch fuels, or start manufacturing a part in-house, or develop a reusability program that will cut back on the manufacturing demands. They just do it.
I can only hope that the SLS dies, and NASA gets out of the launcher business permanently. They’re good at probes and satellites and stuff. Keep them doing that.
NASA’s ambition was to put up a permanent space station and the Space Shuttle was part of the package. Nixon killed the former for cost reasons along with the remainder of the moonshots (Apollo 18 through 20). The Space Shuttle was a bone tossed to NASA to avoid massive layoffs. But the whole existential reason for the Shuttle’s purpose was gone.
The Shuttle was largely 1980’s era technology up to the very end, and that is kind of the way NASA works. With space travel, every little technological upgrade is massively expensive because it has to be tested and retested and retooled and retested for fail-safety. Imagine if one of the newer shuttles was running some newfangled control system written the previous summer by three grad students and running it on Windows Me. Oh the humanity.
Captain: “I need full thrusters ahead”
Engineer: “I canna do it, cap’n! The screen’s gone blue again.”
Captain: “Damn! Control, alt, delete, and get Houston on the line again.”
Engineer: “Phones are displaying an Error 44A4-33FF in Routine 3!”
Things we don’t do are always cheaper then things people actually do. Because when you’re designing a space mission purely in your head, there’s no cost over-runs, no catastrophic failures, there’s no need to make allowances for political realities, etc. I suspect in the alternate reality where Nixon decided against the Shuttle, this guy is writing basically the same article where the massive cost-overruns of continuing the Saturn V system would have been avoided if we’d developed the shuttle.
Anyhoo, manned space missions are expensive because of reasons that are intrinsic to manned space missions. The same political and physical realities would’ve existed for a continued Saturn V, and it would’ve run into the same mixture of needing to placate the public and Congress regarding its expense, a lack of practical reasons to send humans into space and the fact that launching people into space is an enormous technical challenge.
I think the shuttle was a significant achievement but frankly the only thing it really has in its favor is the cool factor. It brought us into the reality of reusable spacecraft like we see in the movies. Unfortunately what should have been an interesting experiment became the backbone of the NASA space program. I suspect there was not enough funding to continue both the shuttle and Saturn programs and difficult decisions were necessary but it’s a shame that the truly fantastic heavy lifter we already had became a memory.
When you’re living paycheck to paycheck you don’t get a Miyata, you get a minivan. You don’t need flash, you need to drop the kids off at school and get groceries.
I agree with you, but remember that the cool factor helps to determine how much money NASA gets. At the end of the Apollo missions folks were questioning whether we needed to spend any money at all in space. The shuttle was a neat idea, and while it never lived up anywhere close to its ideals, it did give everyone something new to focus on that they were willing to spend money on.
It’s difficult to say with any certainty, but I have a feeling that if we stuck to the Saturn system, even though it was cheaper and more capable, I don’t think we would have accomplished as much in space simply because there wasn’t anything new there to attract a big budget to NASA.
Of course it’s debatable whether manned space missions are necessary, but…
I think the next logical step would have been to send a habitat to the Moon. Perhaps a two-ship mission; one with the habitat, and one with a crew that would set it up and demonstrate living in it for a short time. If it were designed as a modular system, it would be expanded upon and eventually become a full-time manned Moonbase. An (Earth) orbital space station could be built and maintained by the Saturn 1B, though the STS’s robotic arm would be useful.
My point being that in the 1970s people expected a Moonbase. So we could have accomplished much (even if they were different accomplishments).
SF writer (and real scientist) David Brin has said that we should have upped the solid-rocket boosters just a bit, to boost the big (empty) liquid fuel tank into orbit, and used that as the basis for modules for a seriously big space station.
Could this have worked? Could they have multi-purposed the liquid fuel tank to be a space station “building brick?” It does seem wasteful to shove the thing, what, 90% of the way to orbit, and then just let it crash into the sea.
IMO NASA should be an R&D affair. Nothing wrong with switching to the shuttle but they should have farmed out the day to day missions and kept working on the NBT.
Sure, I understand that it’s a little too easy to compare rocket science that was done to rocket science that wasn’t.
But we can compare it to what the Russians and Space X are doing and NASA doesn’t come off looking good when it comes to efficiency.
Plus, one need not be a rocket scientist to see that getting an airplane to space and back will involve a lot more than getting a capsule.
A lot of the improvements which were promised simply did not occur. The Shuttle was supposed to require little prep time before missions. As it turns out, that’s not the case at all.
They seemed to want to go high-tech to prevent problems but it does not seem to have improved much compared to what they had. For example, the heat tiles were supposed to be an improvement over the ablative shield for re-entry. It does not seem to require less expense though, if only because there are more than 30 000 tiles which each have to be placed in one particular spot.
Plus, committing to one launcher type inherently provides less flexibility than having a number of types.
This begs the question of whether a Moon base would be any more useful or valuable than an orbiting station like the ISS. It might seem that the lunar environment is a good place to study and experiment with tools and procedures for crewed exploration of other planetary bodies. However, the Moon has environmental conditions which make it uniquely difficult to operate on the lunar surface; see NASA/TM—2005-213610/REV1 The Effects of Lunar Dust on EVA Systems During the Apollo Missions, James Gaier, April 2007. Landing an operating on, say, Mars or Titan, will be substantially different than the conditions and entry mode on the Moon. And going to the Moon doesn’t really develop the necessary technologies for interplanetary transportation or sustainable orbital habitation. In fact, what the Apollo program aptly demonstrated was that what we call destination oriented programs have grave difficulty in extending beyond their initial goals. Even before the Apollo XI reached the Moon and the Eagle had landed at Mare Tranquillitatis the Apollo program was being slashed, and none of the proposals for successor programs–not even the low cost Apollo Applications Program using hardware that was already fabricated–had any real traction. Only the political gratis of a joint US-USSR mission allowed for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, and competition with the Soviet Salyut station program that provided sufficient justification for the low cost Skylab program.
A space program that is sustainable for an indefinite duration needs to be focused on development of technology and processes to make future efforts at exploration and resource utilization easier and lower risk.
This was essentially what the Skylab station, based upon the S-IVB stage structure, was. The original plan was to use a real S-IVB third stage as an operating stage that was outfitted as a “wet workshop” which would ride up with CSM and then be converted as a space station module.
However, the problem with Brin’s suggestion, aside from the fact that the External Tank is not a primary load-bearing thrust structure like the S-IVB and does not have sufficient internal stiffness or load bearing members to really be useful as a station nor as a completely external structure could it readily be adapted with docking provisions the way the forward dome of the S-IVB was, is that “upp[ing] the solid-rocket boosters a bit” isn’t just an exercise in slightly stretching the motor case and loading proportionally more propellant; that would mean an entire redesign and requalification of the RSRM with a new grain configuration and bending modes. It would mean reevaluating the thrust loads, bending modes, and aerodynamic model on the STS, which already by far the most mechanically and aerodynamically structure to fly at hypersonic speeds. It would mean redesign and modification of the existing ground support structure and systems to handle these extended length boosters. In short, it would be a significant modification to an already complex system for the benefit of attempting to use an existing structure that is ill-suited as a habitat. It would likely be far cheaper to fly a Shuttle-derived system using a pared down Orbiter (sans wings and other reentry features) that itself turns into an orbiting space habitat with the ET still attached and available for use as a propellant depot or some other suitable bulk-handling application. I know that these types of ‘plug-n-play’ suggestions seem conceptually easy to execute, but the devil with such applications is in the details, and the details of trying to make a system suitable for space habitation are devilish indeed.
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