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Inside a Last-Ditch Effort To Save the Space Shuttle
SkinnyGuy writes "NASA's Space Shuttle could have flown again as early as 2014 if a secret effort to repurpose them for commercial flight had succeeded. From the article: 'Though secret, the plan quickly gained support and Dittmar described how funding and interest grew dramatically. "Initially skeptical," she wrote, "people became caught up in the vision of a Commercial Space Shuttle funded entirely by private and institutional investors and put back into service to shape new markets." ...In the end, two crucial factors made it all but impossible to revive the shuttle program as a commercial enterprise or in any fashion. One was that so much of the Shuttle infrastructure has already been shifted to other efforts that the revival team could never pull together sufficient funds to return those resources to the Space Shuttles. Two: The SLS program.'"
the revival team could never pull together sufficient funds
Really, you mean some eccentric English millionaire couldn't find ready funding for the mere $600-million-per-launch costs of the shuttle, along with a few billion to build the private infrastructure to put it up? Why you could have put satellites up for only 20x more than a rocket could do it. Or maybe you could have sent passengers up for only 100x what a ticket on Virgin Galactic would cost.
Where do I send my money to invest?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Somethings are best left to die. The world is moving on with other, more cost effective promising technology.
3. It's incredibly expensive, and no private entity is going to fund it at half a billion dollars per launch.
Have you read my blog lately?
To Oblivion... and beyond...
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
I'd expect a major reason commercial repurposing of the Space Shuttle fleet would fail would be a lack of need (the true seed of demand) for a commercial space program. Space programs in general are so expensive and have little practical value, which is why they are funded by governments in the interests of discovery. You can't really market something that no one would ever be able to afford, even if the demand was there... which I find hard to believe was ever there in the first place.
The Admin and the Engineer
The STS is NOT the best vehicle to use for a private space venture, check out the consumables and maintenance schedule (or guess from the component list). It'll sump all your dough. It would be MUCH smarter to make a liquid fuel space plane / space car from scratch. Make sure that you learn the orbital mechanics side and safety critical systems side or you will break.
The purpose of existence is to make money.
if this were turned over to private industry they would centralize the entire project in one or two locations and piss off a lot of congress people who currently have a piece of the pie.
no nonsense of putting parts together in different locations and transporting them around the country
This is tripping my BS detector. Googling for "Kevin Holleran" site:uk returns next to nothing about this "millionaire" other than that someone of that name was the director of a half dozen companies, not of which look particularly spacey. Can you really get to be a Shuttle-investing millionaire and leave no google trail at all?
It was a dumb design from the beginning.
1) You don't haul cargo in the same vehicle as humans. Cargo doesn't need the super-expensive "last 1%" reliability that a human crew demands.
2) You don't put the vehicle next to the rocket. You put it on top, where ice can't hit it, and exploding booster rockets are survivable. The astronauts on the Challenger, as least some of them, survived the explosion and died on impact with the water. A small crew capsule perched on the top, with a parachute system, might, just might, have survived.
3) You don't need humans up there at all. The future, for a generation or two at least, is unmanned exploration of the solar system. Look at where virtually all the meaningful scientific knowledge has come from in the last 20 - 40 - 60 years: unmanned probes.
Stop thinking about space and get over it. Our bodies can't handle fast space travel anyway, so leave it to the octopi.
Ave Molech Setting
Doesn't the Shuttle have a horrible track record? 2 out of 135 flights blew up? Who would roll those dice anyway?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
In the end, two crucial factors made it all but impossible to revive the shuttle program as a commercial enterprise or in any fashion.
Ok, this is offtopic, but this has been bugging me for some time. Is it just me or the statement "all but impossible" doesn't actually say whether it was possible or not? "All but impossible" as in "everything except impossible"? Or as in "almost impossible"?
How can a phrase have two meanings that are conflicting (according to this)? And if it does why do people keep using it....
I prefer to think of it as " more bang for the buck ".
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
... and why it was designed the way it was. What was their intentions (flight every two weeks) but what resulted (astronomical operating costs). Cannot really blame those that made the decisions as Shuttle was the ***first*** attempt for a lowcost reusable spaceship. It was a huge effort requiring lots of work and tough decisions, the kind that mentally cripples most folks*. Consider the first "reusable" airplanes for transport of multiple passengers and cargo had their host of problems (i.e. Tri-motors).
Here it from the guys that made the decisions in these MIT lectures (there are many, below just a few). What moved me the most is much of talent, infrastructure and companies that designed, built, and tested items of the Shuttle no longer exists. I say give it up on trying to revive Shuttle. First rebuilt the industrial base, otherwise we will struggling like Korolev trying to get resources.
MIT 16.885J Aircraft Systems Engineering, Fall 2005
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/lecture-notes/
Lecture 1: The Origins of the Space Shuttle by Dale Myers
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/lecture-notes/lecture-1/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiYhQtGpRhc
Lecture 2: Space Shuttle History by Aaron Cohen
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/lecture-notes/lecture-2/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ2H06sseLM
Lecture 3: Orbiter Sub-System Design by Aaron Cohen
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/lecture-notes/lecture-3/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDMbBjH8ZSs
Lecture 4: The Decision to Build the Shuttle by John Logsdon
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/lecture-notes/lecture-4/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOAyzURugaw
*I talked to someone that worked on wind tunnel tests of various Shuttle configurations in the early 70s (his work was dynamic pressure measurements from shockwaves). There was a period when people were working double shifts in the wind tunnel facility (16 hours on, 8 hours off instead of usual day, swing, grave shift crews) while people at NASA HQ were arguing with the OMB. Idea of SRBs meant they drilled holes and mounted SRB segments on the ET portion of wind tunnel model (didn't bother to remove it from test section for work in machine shop). This double-shift work went on and on. Finally after (I think it was months) and on a Friday, they said "alright, we can go back to regular single shifts and will see you Monday." This person I spoke with said him and another guy he worked with went to have some pizza and beer. The other guy died the next day, he was only 49 years old.
mfwright@batnet.com
for reference, albeit somewhat off topic, is the american effort to remedy discomfort experienced when utilizing a superior system developed by soviet engineers decades ago to quickly and inexpensively launch orbital and interstellar spacecraft. It was arguably not outsourced to a corporation as we would know it during its inception.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The space shuttle has a very high failure rate and is simply too dangerous
In watching the MIT Opencourseware series on engineering the shuttle it was pretty flatly stated that the engineers that worked on the shuttle did the same jobs on the shuttle program that they did on the Apollo program.
So in at least that aspect the team wasn't broken up.
They could have built a big rocket instead of a side-saddle launch vehicle, it had a lot to do with politics (Nixon and the Vietnam war) and who was head of NASA at the time.
Promises were made on the reuseable launch side and how many launches a year we'd get out of the system bringing the lifecycle cost way down.
If you really were going to get the band back together, do a new vehicle a top mounted shuttle alike with self-diagnostic engines and a vehicle that doesn't need to be rebuilt every launch. Many comments were made in the MIT lectures about what they'd do if they redesigned the shuttle with AutoCAD instead of on drafting tables.
A shuttle continuation program now would have higher upfront capital costs because lots of the program facilities were dismantled. This would not be for much more than nostalgia's sake and would be proof man can't learn from his mistakes.
The shuttle was a step backward from the Saturn V. One tenth the load capacity! The main reason we built it was to entice the Russians into building the Buran and strain their economy.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Ok, you are a venture capitalist....someone brings an idea to you. Hey, here we have 3 NASA space shuttles, designed 40 years ago, that pretty much have to be rebuilt after every use, are only able to get into low space orbit, costs millions per mile to fly. Would you be interested in throwing some money into this investment, to fly people & maybe small objects into space? They would be laughed out of the office!
Indeed. Remember the sick joke about NASA standing for "Need Another Seven Astronauts"? The shuttle has a terrible safety record, and a lot of the problems are fundamental to the design. Best to let it go.
All of this talk of the space shuttle being dead is pretty silly considering there is a space shuttle (unmanned) orbiting the globe spying on everyone and their brother, and run by the US Gov't. And who is paying for that? That's right, US taxpayers.
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
I think one key point was SpaceX does a lot of their work in house instead of contracting parts out to companies that gouge.
That's because the shuttle program's primary purpose isn't to get to space, it's to distribute congressional pork. It's a welfare program for aerospace companies, and a way to reward campaign contributors. The shuttle was carefully engineered to spread the work across as many different congressional districts as possible. That's not what NASA was originally designing for, of course, but Congress was the one paying for it. The customer's always right.
And in case anyone thinks I'm some kind of "national military-industrial complex" whiner: I *work* for an aerospace/defense subcontractor. That doesn't mean I like how this stuff gets funded.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The shuttle was simply unsafe for commercial use. We lost two spacecraft with all hands in less than two hundred launches. That may be an acceptable risk for test pilots. But if one out of every hundred commercial airlines exploded on take off or fell to pieces on landing... I imagine that people would have a far dimmer view of flying. Commercial use is for proven technology... and that was something the fairly ramshackle Shuttle never achieved.
Yeah, yeah, expensive and really difficult to engineer. Stop being wimps and just do it. We've sent chimps into orbit just for shits and giggles, now do something useful again. Call it environmentally friendly and you'll have all the money you want.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I find it sad that so many people call the Shuttle a failure. Statistically, it has a greater success rate than Soyuz. I'm not saying that it was a perfect design, either. It's funny that they noted tile damage after the first flight and just assumed it happened on re-entry. It wasn't until Columbia that they started looking into just when the tiles were damaged. That alone is amazing. The shuttle was indeed a compromise though, I acknowledge that. In fact, the main engine was originally supposed to be a nuclear thermal rocket engine (Look up the Nerva project) but was sadly scrapped. If left without being crippled, the shuttle would have been far more advanced than it was, and would have easily breached LEO. Sadly, the main engines only provided a fraction of the power the F1 could provide. Thus the solid rocket boosters, which actually each produced 2.8 million lbf of thrust compared to the 1,522,000 lbf of the Saturn F1 engine. So, technologically, the Shuttle was an advancement in terms of flexibility, re-usability, engine design, and crew living space. We just always seem to look at what the shuttle "Could or should" have been rather than the achievement it was. True, it should have been replaced in the 90's with a suitable replacement (like a next-gen space plane with a hypersonic scramjet engine or the X37). Personally, I'm saddened that we won't see a space plane capable of greater than LEO, and that we're going back to the capsule based design. I know its more robust, but not nearly as inspiring IMHO.
NASA always drastically understated shuttle per launch costs - when giving the public the 3-600M per launch number, they took the total cost of the program when there were 7 flights and subtracted the average of the years where there were 6 flights. This number does not included facility costs, or salaries of those maintaining the shuttle. Real historical costs are on the order of $2 Billion per flight.
You have to realize, every time the shuttle flew, it basically had to be totally dis-assembled. The original cost model assumed 25 flights per year, which proved impossible with the end design and technical challenges posed. There is NO WAY the space shuttle could make money commercially - even if they got the price down to $1B per launch, and they filled the payload bay with 20 tourists, thats $143M per person to fly on one of the most dangerous manned spacecraft ever built - good luck competing with the russians who have a far better safety record, or spacex, which will be far cheaper and probably safer.