New NASA Shuttle Program "Doomed To Failure"

Heartbreak writes "In a recent press release, the Space Frontier Foundation warns that NASA's Oribital Space Plane program, its latest initiative to take the load off the aging STS (the 'Space Shuttle'), is essentially doomed before it starts. 'NASA's unbroken string of cancelled vehicle programs' going back 20 years makes it a good bet that OSP will also fail. Is this just really, really, bad luck, or is NASA little more than a multi-billion-dollar jobs program for important U.S. aerospace contractors?"

Comments

Re:Shame

[Wyatt Earp]

That's what pushed NASA and the Soviet program in the first place, and there is nothing wrong with using increased defense spending to fund technology. It's what drove pretty much every advancement in aviation, ships, cargo handling, communications, materials science, and aerodynamics in the last 100 years. And in the US intergration of the races in the military happened before the private sector intergrated. Military doesn't always mean bad.

All the early launchers were based on MRBM/ICBMs, getting a man in space simply meant you had the throw-weight to get a bigger fusion bomb to New York or Moscow. Back in the 50s and 60s fusion bombs were big.

Joint USAF/NASA work pushed technology in the 1960s. What became Skylab was going to be an Air Force Orbital Workshop. In Chuck Yeager's bio he talks about training pilots with F-104s modified to manouver with thrusters the same way that Dyna-Soars or X-15s would operate as they went to orbit.

The Soviets worked on the same sorts of military stations. Even MIr was designed to have a military application.

http://www.astronautix.com/craft/mir.htm

"The original Spektr design was to be armed with Oktava interceptor rockets and equipped with sensors to identify and track ballistic missile re-entry vehicles as well as discriminate decoys. In 1992, as directed by the Soviet Union's military and political leadership, all work on such projects was discontinued. The Spektr module was mothballed, then later converted into a civilian platform, partially funded by the United States."

"Minister of Defence Ustinov requested that the Americans be challenged. As a 'warning shot' the Terra-3 complex was used to track the space shuttle Challenger with a low power laser on 10 October 1984. This caused malfunctions to on-board equipment and temporary blinding of the crew, leading to a US diplomatic protest."

http://www.astronautix.com/craft/almaz.htm
http ://www.astronautix.com/craft/mol.htm
http://www.a stronautix.com/craft/speginal.htm
http://www.astr onautix.com/craft/usb.htm
http://www.astronautix. com/craft/terra3.htm

Re:The Shuttle is the best replacement

[LooseChanj]

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt, wrong answer. It wasn't cheaper, and it could put A HELL OF ALOT more payload into orbit. The real shame is that the Saturn V only had one production run, if they'd kept making them there would have been improvements, and who knows what we could have come up with to do with them?