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.'"

Comments

Seems like an obvious money-maker to me

[elrous0]

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?

Re:Dumb design

[DerekLyons]

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.

Right - which is why all the unmanned cargo rockets have pretty much the same reliability as the manned boosters. In reality, yes, cargo does require that reliability because they costs billions of dollars and nobody is going to put cargo that valuable on anything but the best.
 

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.

This sounds suspiciously like you've defined yourself into a circle - by using the weasel word 'meaningful'. I'd consider the results of the analysis of the rocks brought back by Apollo (manned BTW) pretty meaningful. (Not to mention all the science that's *not* part of the space program.)
 
You also fail to consider just how slow and limited unmanned craft are: In just four days on the Moon, the Apollo 16 rover (manned) covered 7.2 miles. In five *years* on Mars, Spirit covered just 5 miles. (The couple of times the Lunar Rover became stuck, either the crew drove it out with a few minutes work, or in one instance they picked the Rover up and turned it so that it was on better ground.) Between the two of them, in twelve *years* worth of combined operations, the Mars rovers have covered 25 miles. In total driving time of eight *hours* (and total surface time of nine *days*) the Lunar rovers covered a combined 27 miles. And when you count in the time spent on foot across all the Apollo missions...
 
You also fail to consider that currently, everywhere it's practical to send men rather than robots - we send men. Whether it's inside a failed nuclear reactor, on the Antartic ice sheet, or at the bottom of the ocean. Robots just aren't as versatile as a people.
 
Where the 'science' consists of just collecting raw data, like the strength of a magnetic field or taking pictures by the gross lot, yeah, robots rule. But once you want to do anything but simple repetitive tasks, robots fall way behind.

Re:Good

[demachina]

Except we are. SpaceX is doing some wonderful work, bringing launch costs down by significant percentages and they are funding themselves with a mix of private and government launches so they aren't completely at the mercy of Congress and the POTUS which NASA's launchers are. They are also keenly focused on manned missions to Mars eventually which is the one manned mission that would be really exciting.

Excellent article on the cool stuff they are doing here.

I recall a recent story that NASA was so taken back by how low SpaceX's R&D costs were for a new launcher compared to NASA's, NASA sent in a team to study their economics. I think one key point was SpaceX does a lot of their work in house instead of contracting parts out to companies that gouge. There is a mention of this in the article linked above. SpaceX asked an outside company for a quote on a part, it was astronomical, so they built it in house instead for a fraction of the price, and when the salesmen called back they rubbed his nose in it.

P.S.

Anyone who thought they could fly the Shuttle as a commercial program and come anywhere close to break even was purely delusional. The Shuttle program was an extravagent jobs program masquerading as a space program at least as far back the Challenger accident which completely crippled everything it was supposed to do.