
A Rocket to Nowhere (2005) - kick
https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm
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Rebelgecko
>Why go through all the trouble to give the Shuttle large wings if it has no
jet engines and the glide characteristics of a brick?

I believe the delta wings were mostly to assist with stability when the
shuttle was hypersonic.

>Why build such complex, adjustable main engines and then rely on the
equivalent of two giant firecrackers to provide most of the takeoff thrust

Anyone who has played Kerbal Space Program has come up with a similar solution
in their attempts to escape the tyranny of the rocket equation— use your big
brutish solid boosters to get off the ground, in conjunction with your less
powerful but more efficient liquid ones. Since they burned for ~4x as long as
the solids, I think the RS-25 engines actually did about the same amount of
work while needing a lot less fuel

>What kind of missions would require people to assist in deploying a large
payload

I would think it's less "deploying a payload" and more like retrieving one
(which is actually alluded to later in this article). When the shuttle was
being designed, the US was still taking satellite reconnaissance photos on
_film_ , which was then returned to Earth and scooped up by a plane. Being
able to put more film in your satellite would save a lot of money, as would
being able to develop film without having to send one of your half dozen
retrieval pods back to Earth.

>the Air Force demanded that the Shuttle be capable of gliding over a thousand
miles cross-range during re-entry

Was this requirement only from the Air Force? How far would they have need to
go cross-range to support the shuttle's various abort modes? It's not like you
have a lot of other options in the area if you can't make it to the runway on
Ascension Island.

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simonh
The large wings are specifically to support a particular Air Force mission
profile. They wanted to be able to do a polar launch (requiring a bigger
rocket than equatorial launches to start with), grab a Soviet satellite, then
land the vehicle after just one orbit.

After one polar orbit, the Vandenburg base would have moved east about a
thousand miles, so the Shuttle would have to fly a thousand miles cross-range
to get back to it's runway. Hence the big delta wings.

The Air Force never managed to get the Vandenburg facility commissioned, so
the Shuttle never few any polar missions. If those requirements had been
ditched, the Shuttle could have been small enough have been built on a
vertical stack with a lot more flexibility in abort modes.

~~~
Rebelgecko
Do you have more info than that? Most of the links in the article's sources
are dead and I'm not familiar with that requirement. I didn't even realize
that the USSR put things in polar orbits (as opposed to Mulniya). Speaking of
the USSR, I think Bran's wings were even bigger than the shuttle's. Was that
just a case of copy-and-paste design?

And did that cross range ability reduce the number of abort sites that NASA
needed to maintain?

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simonh
Molniya orbits put the satellite at a relatively high altitude when it's over
the target area, compared to a low polar orbit. If you absolutely have to get
the highest resolution close up photos possible of a whole bunch of Capitalist
military sites all over the world, low polar is the way to go, or at least was
back when the Shuttle was designed.

Molniya orbits are best thought of as an alternative to geostationary orbits,
for applications requiring sustained coverage over large areas up north.

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kristianp
A lost decade-plus for manned spaceflight and rocket development. A bunch of
very funny things in there, such as this about the ISS:

"Launched in an oblique, low orbit that guarantees its permanent uselessness,
it serves as yin to the shuttle's yang, justifying an endless stream of future
Shuttle missions through the simple stratagem of being too expensive to
abandon."

The article suggests Nasa cynically kept the shuttle and ISS going, in order
for each to justify the existence of the other.

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dang
A thread from here (2016):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411416](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411416)

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xg15
> _By the time Shuttle development began, it was clear that the original
> vision of a Shuttle as part of a larger space transportation system was far
> too costly and ambitious to receive Congressional support._

[...]

> _Moreover, there was no way to launch a polar mission safely from Kennedy
> Space Center — it would mean overflying either heavily populated areas in
> the Carolinas or risking capture of a fuel tank by the wily Cubans. So the
> Air Force also demanded, and got, billions in funding to build a new Shuttle
> launch facility at Vandenberg Air Force base in California._

No further questions.

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ceejayoz
I wish I could get Maciej to write my eulogy some hopefully far-off day.

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xixixao
I wonder what this means for manned spaceflight that SpaceX is working on. Is
it still a waste of money, or have things changed enough to make it worth it?

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Rebelgecko
A good chunk of the costs of the space shuttle was because it didn't launch as
often as it was originally supposed to, which made it harder to amortize R&D
costs.

The rockets themselves were expensive, and refurbishing the "reusable" parts
wasn't cheap. I think SpaceX is in a good position to dramatically lower the
costs, as long as they can keep refurbishment costs down and share as much
architecture as possible between their manned and unmanned launches. Being
able to use a rocket from a manned F9 launch another 20 times (even if they're
only certified to use it on unmanned launches) would do wonders for reducing
costs.

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eru
Also: SpaceX doesn't have to manufacture in each congressional district; and
while their contracts are mostly paid by the taxpayer, if they screw up they
go under by themselves.

