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The Rise and Fall of NASA's Shuttle-Centaur (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: An article at Ars Technica tells the story of Shuttle-Centaur, a NASA project during the mid-1980s to carry a Centaur rocket to orbit within the cargo bay of a space shuttle. As you might expect, shuttle launches became vastly more complex with such heavy yet delicate cargo. Still, officials saw it as an easy way to send probes further into the solar system. They developed a plan to launch Challenger and Atlantis within 5 days of each other in mid-1986 to bring the Ulysses and Galileo probes to orbit, each with its own Shuttle-Centaur. Though popular opinion at the time was that the shuttle program was "unstoppable," individuals within NASA were beginning to push back against slipping safety standards. "While a host of unknowns remained concerning launching a volatile, liquid-fueled rocket stage on the back of a space shuttle armed with a liquid-filled tank and two solid rocket boosters, NASA and its contractors galloped full speed toward a May 1986 launch deadline for both spacecraft." The destruction of Challenger in January, 1986 put Shuttle-Centaur on hold. The safety investigation that ensued quickly came to the conclusion that it presented unacceptable risks, and the project was canceled that June.
I knew there were safety issues with it
The biggest safety issue was using a manned flight for something that didn't need people. All other things being equal, you will have 10 times the death rate if you launch 100 manned missions rather than 10 manned missions and 90 unmanned rockets. When the Challenger exploded, killing 7 astronauts, it was on a "stick a satellite in orbit" mission, that did not need to be manned.
But yet the Russians didn't develop the Buran under the idea that it would be some sort of cost effective space taxi like the shuttle was sold to the American people as. The Buran (as revealed in the 2000s from soviet archives) was developed solely to avoid a "missile gap" situation with the US.
When the shuttle was announced the Soviets shrugged their shoulders, they already had something cost effective and didn't see the benefit of such a vehicle for them. When the size of the cargo hold was announced they raised an eyebrow. But when the wing specs where revealed there was no longer any question that the shuttle was also intended for some very dangerous military applications, up to and probably including the covert testing of weapons in space in such a way that the Soviets wouldn't know the Outer Space Treaty was being broken until it was too late and there was a proven killsat over Moscow.
No it wasn't. The wing specs were because the DoD spec was to be able to launch into polar orbit, deploy a satellite, and land at the launch site on the same orbit. The Earth will have rotated about ~1500 miles in that time, so it needed 1500 miles of cross-range to get back to the launch site. That set the size of the wings.
Of course most of their suspicions where true.
If those really were their suspicions, none of them were true.
Frankly, the shuttle would have made a lousy weapons platform-- too big, too fragile, too visible. Really a weapon isn't useful when there are only two places it can launch from, and any launch is telegraphed weeks in advance and is visible from hundreds of miles away.
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