STS Shuttle discussion thread

[PB666]

The shuttle help build the ISS and the ISS took over some of its function and it was merely a matter of transporting people on the cheapest/safest launch system you could afford, since RSA was a partner this gave them some skin in the game, while the US designed whatever NASA had in store. The SpaceX delivery system can be seen as part of the test. In this way part of the shuttles mission is complete .

So now the proper question what if we never have anything like the shuttle again (by like I mean capable of performing at least one of its currently diminished functions). Given we have already discussed material testing and the limitations. And a particularly shrewd individual could come up with a mini-test that an astronaut could take off the ISS, put on the side of the ISS for 2 years, after two years wrap a plastic around it, fill it with helium as pressure equilibrates to internal ISS pressure and then bring it back to Earth on the next soyuz mission. This can be done, but satellites will not be issued for material studies in the foreseeable future.

Of course if spaceX has a crew vehicle and the ISS rotations are 3 on, 3 off, then we don't need the shuttle crew compartment. And if SX can come up with a 1 or 2 man repair platform then we don;'t need the famous shuttle arm or cargo bay for repairing stuff.

So would we have all the functions covered . . . . . .no.

Suppose you want to start assembling bulky stuff in space. Things that have huge floppy solar panels that would be difficult to deploy without some assist, what then. So I designed a  factory for building spacecraft and while I can launch the factory from Earth its a kT to orbit, so its bigger than any payload lifted. So the alternative is to assemble in space. And the way it works is each assembly has a set of holes with wires feeding through pressurized tubes. You assemble the wires for the section with a double bolt connector, and then once every thing is in the matrix, the wires are tightened drawing the pieces together. and from the outside these thing are finally torqued until the rubber seals catch. Someone on the inside then bolts the pieces little by little together (the bolt sections are wide and have double seals so that we don't have to worry about leaking. And eventually the pieces are one solid unit, the wires are loosened and re-tighten from the outside. The factory at its middle has a large hinged door so that it can be closed for safety reasons, its wide, larger than 5 meters, and theoretically you could apply some pressure to make it easier to control motion inside factor, but not enough to breath. The door hinges would be mounted to the solid assembly bottom plate and then the door mounted and the craft is the factor and other things can be docked to this. Although not alot of this work is outside, the scaffolding stuff is almost entirely out of the ship, this is something were you might robotic drones capable of positioning and holding positions and then a few human hands to take over when the bots could not perform.

And this all basically needs a cargo bay (for the assembly robots) and some sort of robotic arm to grab a reference piece for which  torque can be applied. etc.

So why have a factory. The question of a factory really reached the point about range. we could project a human to anywhere in the outer solar system from LEO right now, but getting them into a gravity well change the SME significantly (such as landing) and out again is a problem. Its not a small problem, its one of the biggest problem NASA faces for manned missions to Mars. We know that we can have these fantastic ISPs with ION drives, but we don't have a power supply, and so this is the problem. There are two fronts to solve this problem, one is to have a fusion reactor and some power conversion (heat to elec) and this means the reactor (by itself the heaviest PL ever put in space) and a frame with a cooling system attached, and the more you want to cool the more spread-out these need to be. But that is far future stuff so we don't have to worry about it.

And so the second is Solar power ION. And so we need some new age panels (Ion/magnetic storm resistant) and we need a scaffold many time longer than the longest spaceship ever put into orbit. So this then needs something to connect in space, and so in my factor design the core is added scaffolding, and then the Cargo unit  and pushed out where panels are added as it exits the orifice, and then finally the lagging scaffolding and then the solar panels, and its good to pick up cargo and fuel. And so that is a logic for having a mobile station that can provide assembly support.

This is to say, what progress is NASA making beyond the ISS that is actually in space and something more than docked modules, what are its current off-ISS complex assembly capabilities.
 

9 hours ago, Starman4308 said:

EDIT: To further clarify a point, the New Glenn's gigantic 7 meter fairing is filled with my hopes and dreams for an ISS replacement. It's a pretty large fairing.

You mean vapor ware.

Edited January 16, 2018 by PB666

[tater]

We'd be far better off with a dedicated assembly platform/module than something like shuttle. Need large solar arrays attached to whatever? Launch "whatever" on an HLV. Launch the large bits that need "assembly" (presumably there are not designed to just dock for some reason).

Launch the assembly module, then launch the crew (assuming teleoperation isn't a thing). The assembly module now gives the new station a robotic arm (which a station likely needs anyway), and is used for the assembly, if needed while attached to the CSM as a tug. Alternately, the assembly module is itself a tug.

 

[CatastrophicFailure]

2 minutes ago, tater said:

We'd be far better off with a dedicated assembly platform/module than something like shuttle. Need large solar arrays attached to whatever? Launch "whatever" on an HLV. Launch the large bits that need "assembly" (presumably there are not designed to just dock for some reason).

Launch the assembly module, then launch the crew (assuming teleoperation isn't a thing). The assembly module now gives the new station a robotic arm (which a station likely needs anyway), and is used for the assembly, if needed while attached to the CSM as a tug. Alternately, the assembly module is itself a tug.

 

Which is also exactly what they're planning to do with the Deep Space Gateway and snicker SLS launches beyond EM-1. 

[tater]

6 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Which is also exactly what they're planning to do with the Deep Space Gateway and snicker SLS launches beyond EM-1. 

Yeah, well the difference with my idea is that I'd not use a 4 billion dollar launch for each of those parts, and SLS would cost that (optimistically).

A 100 M$ FH launch for a station part (BA330). A 100 M$ launch for the huge solar array (?). A 65 M$ launch for the assembly module. A 100 M$ D2 or CST-100 launch. Round up for slop, and it's 400 M$ in launch costs (retail), vs 4 B$ for a single SLS launch (it'll be up to 40+ billion in cost by the first flight, so 4+ B/launch assumes they manage 10 flights, lol).

Edited January 16, 2018 by tater

[sh1pman]

26 minutes ago, tater said:

Yeah, well the difference with my idea is that I'd not use a 4 billion dollar launch for each of those parts, and SLS would cost that (optimistically).

A 100 M$ FH launch for a station part (BA330). A 100 M$ launch for the huge solar array (?). A 65 M$ launch for the assembly module. A 100 M$ D2 or CST-100 launch. Round up for slop, and it's 400 M$ in launch costs (retail), vs 4 B$ for a single SLS launch (it'll be up to 40+ billion in cost by the first flight, so 4+ B/launch assumes they manage 10 flights, lol).

"worst trade deal in the history of trade deals" 

[RCgothic]

Given all its design compromises, its impressive that STS even worked in the first place.

Manned launches have no business being on a rocket with no abort modes. This was entirely foreseeable and my big beef with the shuttle. At some point somewhere someone went "we don't need those" and that's unacceptable when an alternative design with capsule on top has no issues. Possibly rapid reusability wasn't possible without compromising on the abort modes, but in that case the goal shouldn't have been pursued until it could be done in a way that preserved the abort modes, and yes, I apply this reservation to BFR as well.

The second fundamental problem with shuttle is cargo and crew on the same vehicle. You just don't have to risk a crew and pay for crew rating to put up a comsat. If what you need to put up is a crew, there's no reason why you can't rendezvous with whatever they need to be doing in orbit. The only ability unique to shuttle was significant downmass, and there's no reason a low-g return module could not be designed and deployed at a fraction of the price of a couple of shuttle missions had that ability ever been really needed.

The third big problem is that shuttle became a pork project. It went on so long subcontractors and senators feel entitled to the work shuttle provided. The program has never really been allowed to end despite not flying anymore, and that stops NASA from doing any better in subsequent designs.

Finally, a replacement should have been designed in parallel to shuttle operation. That budget for doing so was not available was a congressional issue, not an issue with NASA.

On a side note (because not shuttle specific) the comparison of what happened to Challenger to wind shear detectors at airports. It's not the same thing. The engineers knew the o-ring wasn't good for those temperatures and said so. The risk was known at the time and they were ignored, it's not an unknown phenomena suddenly tripping us up. The failure could happen to any craft abused beyond its limits. If you want all-weather launch capability it needs to be designed in from the start. That shuttle didn't have it isn't really shuttle's fault as it's lack of a design requirement.

Edited January 16, 2018 by RCgothic

[mikegarrison]

10 minutes ago, RCgothic said:

On a side note (because not shuttle specific) the comparison of what happened to Challenger to wind shear detectors at airports. It's not the same thing. The engineers knew the o-ring wasn't good for those temperatures and said so. The risk was known at the time and they were ignored, it's not an unknown phenomena suddenly trying us up. The failure could happen to any craft abused beyond its limits. If you want all-weather launch capability it needs to be designed in from the start. That shuttle didn't have it isn't really shuttle's fault as it's lack of a design requirement.

OK, so let's talk o-rings.

1) The engineer who was really worried about it was primarily Bob Ebeling of Thiokol. He told his bosses about the problem. They believed him enough to tell NASA to scrub the launch. But NASA had a conference call with Thiokol management where they complained about the recommendation. Thiokol management decided to reverse their recommendation and tell NASA to go ahead with the launch. Basically, NASA didn't want to hear about it and Thiokol management didn't back their engineer.

2) The most basic root problem was really much more fundamental. O-rings have been around a long, long time. They are used to create seals under *compression*. They are not designed to be used under tension. But the way the SRB joints worked, as pressure build inside the casing, the joint would flex to put the o-ring into tension. It was an inherently bad place to use o-rings at all. (The later fix redesigned the joint so that the o-rings would not be under tension.)

3) NASA had no idea if the shuttle could be safely launched in freezing temperatures, and when one of their contractors told them it could not, NASA insisted on hearing a different answer! That's basically a Dilbert situation. Dilbert says the project needs six months, the pointy hair boss says it will ship in a week, and he thinks because he said it that means it will happen. NASA seems to have thought that if they just made Thiokol give a different answer, the real risk would disappear.

[Hesp]

6 hours ago, PB666 said:

The logic is kind of corrupt. You cannot plan a material test if you have no means to bring it back to Earth. There are a variety of new materials develope since the last material test was concluded that will never be tested in space because of the extreme difficulty in bring them back without a shuttle. You could do them outside the space station, that would require 2 space walks and the size of the test would be limited to what an astronaut can safely take and mount in space. The shuttle conducted several of these during its tenure.

There has been at least a materials experiment payload launched with a Shuttle and retrieved with a Dragon (MISSE-8), and other experiments are already up there:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/2531.html

http://www.alphaspace.com/about-misse-ff.html

Hint: for moving big items around ISS you don't have to rely on what an astronaut can handle, there is a robotic arm and all you need to do is to design the item with adequate attachment points (see berthing operations of cargo capsules)

[PB666]

7 hours ago, tater said:

We'd be far better off with a dedicated assembly platform/module than something like shuttle. Need large solar arrays attached to whatever? Launch "whatever" on an HLV. Launch the large bits that need "assembly" (presumably there are not designed to just dock for some reason).

Launch the assembly module, then launch the crew (assuming teleoperation isn't a thing). The assembly module now gives the new station a robotic arm (which a station likely needs anyway), and is used for the assembly, if needed while attached to the CSM as a tug. Alternately, the assembly module is itself a tug.

 

It would be nice if we had something, anything.

7 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Which is also exactly what they're planning to do with the Deep Space Gateway and snicker SLS launches beyond EM-1. 

MOre vaporware

[JEB'S DESTINY]

They could've made it more safer with ejection seats (Challenger), better external tank (Columbia), and more careful engineering. Overall, the shuttle is one of my favorite spacecraft because it is very specially engineered, and is complicated because of it's moving center of mass.

 

[PB666]

3 hours ago, Hesp said:

There has been at least a materials experiment payload launched with a Shuttle and retrieved with a Dragon (MISSE-8), and other experiments are already up there:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/2531.html

http://www.alphaspace.com/about-misse-ff.html

Hint: for moving big items around ISS you don't have to rely on what an astronaut can handle, there is a robotic arm and all you need to do is to design the item with adequate attachment points (see berthing operations of cargo capsules)

MISSE-8 was deployed but nauts and retrieved by nauts on EVA. its <500kg so basically its compact enough to be moved by man . . . .but not to argue the point, for most cases this will suffice.

[sevenperforce]

13 hours ago, Jaff said:

Ok realistically at some point during design they must have thought “what if one of these not turney offey things doesn’t behave” so why wasn’t there an option to get shot of them with adequate warning of something being not right? 

Granted if it went 100ft in the air there wouldn’t be much that could be done but challenger was a Fair way down range before things went wrong. I’d imagine light enough to blow the boosters away and maintain some sort of flight back to the floor 

Realistically, someone probably did think "what if one of these giant tubes of bomb doesn't work", but they were ignored.

From SRB ignition to SRB jettison, there was no abort. ANY malfunction of the SRBs meant LOCV (loss of crew & vehicle). One of the SRBs fails to ignite? The one that DOES ignite melts the pad, rips free, and cartwheels the stack across the landscape, and everyone dies. One of the SRBs has a thrust fluctuation in flight? The stack will start to tailspin and rip itself apart, and everyone dies. An O-ring fails and the side of the SRB burns through? The struts will melt and fail, the SRB will smash into the ET, the orbiter will rip free and disintegrate, and everyone dies.

That's why it was a death trap. Once the SRBs were ignited, you held on and hoped.

What others have said is correct; there was no contingency for dropping the boosters, because dropping the boosters before burnout were instant LOCV. For one thing, the mechanics of separation required that the SRBs burn out while the SSMEs continued to fire; if the separation motors fired while the main motors were still firing, they'd be pushed forward, into the tank. And even if the SRBs could be magically removed, the stack was not aerodynamically stable without them. The thrust vector of the SSMEs went up and through the forward center of the tank; the whole thing was flying off-prograde. The tank would roll and yaw beyond the SSMEs' ability for gimballed correction, the orbiter would rip off, tumble, and disintegrate. Everyone dies.

They couldn't just separate the orbiter from the rest of the stack, either. The attachments of the SRBs were below the centerline of the external tank, to balance the thrust from the main engines. If the orbiter separated, the thrust vector would be under the stack COM and the tank and SRBs would pitch backward, colliding with the orbiter as it separated.

Even if the orbiter could be safely separated from the stack, it was not passively aerodynamically stable at any point in the ascent. It was built for entry, gliding decent, and unpowered landing; it was in a stalled state through the entire ascent and was carried only by its engines and the SRBs. In the Challenger failure, the orbiter likely did not take significant collision damage from the SRBs or the ET; rather, the orbiter simply ripped itself apart in the off-axis airstream.

10 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

The orbiter too was extremely fragile, which seems like an odd thing to say, but most of the shuttle’s abort modes, such as they were, were limited by not overstressing the airframe. The RTLS (return to launch site) abort in particular was like something right out of Kerbal. If the shuttle lost one or more engines while the boosters were lit, it would have to continue downrange until the boosters were dropped, then continue downrange some more, then turn around, flying backwards, and burn towards Florida. This was catefully planned so that when the orbiter finally separated from the ET, the tank was down to 2% fuel. Any more and a successful separation was unlikely. If the shuttle lost all three engines while the boosters were running, it might be able to continue on until separation, but would be Lost anyway as the airframe couldn’t take reentry from that.

Now, in theory, they could have made a big, ejecting crew module, but this is really, really hard when there’s so much structure surrounding the cabin. There was a proposal to put the crew in basically a big space capsule in the cargo bay, or some such, but would have been so heavy and complicated it was deemed “not worth it.”

As it turns out, aborting from the side of a rocket in General is really really hard. 

Yep. The Shuttle looks big and tough, like some super-hardy ginormous fighter jet, but in reality it was far more fragile than an airliner of comparable size. It had the glide ratio of a brick and the structural integrity of a kite.

Of course, this is because it was super cutting-edge. There is no way we should have been able to make a VTHL crew-and-cargo spaceplane with reusable engines back then. Every single part had to be custom-made, every single part had to be constructed from the most lightweight materials, and every single part had to work perfectly.

[sevenperforce]

2 hours ago, JEB'S DESTINY said:

They could've made it more safer with ejection seats (Challenger), better external tank (Columbia), and more careful engineering. Overall, the shuttle is one of my favorite spacecraft because it is very specially engineered, and is complicated because of it's moving center of mass. 

It's one of my favorites in that sense, too. Super challenging to reproduce in KSP because of that. 

Unfortunately, ejection seats probably wouldn't have helped Challenger. Or any other RUD at any other part of the ascent. For one thing, the orbiter wasn't designed with a simple canopy that could be blown off for ejection. But, more to the point, any ejection during the SRB burn would have likely placed the ejected astronauts inside a field of burning solid-fuel particulates. No chute would survive that, let alone the astronauts themselves. Ejection after SRB burnout was too late, as they'd hit the atmosphere far too fast. Like a Falcon 9 first stage without an entry burn.

The ET problem that destroyed Columbia was never actually fixed. They just basically hoped it wouldn't happen again.

[tater]

I watched Challenger right after it happened (the first replays, then all day long on the news). I was shaving when it happened, and my GF (now wife) told me the shuttle blew up.

My buddy and I were watching different places and on the phone, and we noticed the crew compartment was entirely intact immediately, even though at the time no one on the news was saying it (either dumb newsreaders were not keen observers, or they didn't want people to be appalled).

[sevenperforce]

8 hours ago, RCgothic said:

Manned launches have no business being on a rocket with no abort modes. This was entirely foreseeable and my big beef with the shuttle. At some point somewhere someone went "we don't need those" and that's unacceptable when an alternative design with capsule on top has no issues. Possibly rapid reusability wasn't possible without compromising on the abort modes, but in that case the goal shouldn't have been pursued until it could be done in a way that preserved the abort modes, and yes, In apply this reservation to BFR as well.

This is so obvious.

[tater]

Yeah, ejection seats on the test flights were far more to look like they had an abort mode than actually having one.

[sevenperforce]

3 minutes ago, tater said:

I watched Challenger right after it happened (the first replays, then all day long on the news). I was shaving when it happened, and my GF (now wife) told me the shuttle blew up.

My buddy and I were watching different places and on the phone, and we noticed the crew compartment was entirely intact immediately, even though at the time no one on the news was saying it (either dumb newsreaders were not keen observers, or they didn't want people to be appalled).

"He flew that ship without wings all the way down."

[tater]

Some of the Phil Bono SSTO (semi-SSTO, they had drop tanks) designs had a crew pod that could be ejected as a LES.

6 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

"He flew that ship without wings all the way down."

Seems like a chute on the crew compartment, and dumping the hypergolic RCS for cold gas might have resulted in a survivable crew compartment as an escape pod for failures outside of the glide home abort modes.

During SRB burn, any failure would result in orbiter disintegration, and it would certainly break at the interface with the cargo bay as a weak point. The entire crew compartment would function like a B-58 crew pod in a sense:

[tater]

It was 15 years ago today that Columbia lifted off.

 

[sevenperforce]

1 hour ago, tater said:

Some of the Phil Bono SSTO (semi-SSTO, they had drop tanks) designs had a crew pod that could be ejected as a LES.

Seems like a chute on the crew compartment, and dumping the hypergolic RCS for cold gas might have resulted in a survivable crew compartment as an escape pod for failures outside of the glide home abort modes.

During SRB burn, any failure would result in orbiter disintegration, and it would certainly break at the interface with the cargo bay as a weak point. The entire crew compartment would function like a B-58 crew pod in a sense:

Chutes would have likely been far larger than the gigantic ones already on the SRBs.

[PakledHostage]

On 14/01/2018 at 8:33 PM, Starman4308 said:

That's because I do scoff at including the orbiter in that number. 

Scoff away then... It says more about your anti-shuttle bias than it says about the shuttle.

[sevenperforce]

If you wanted to build a reusable crew-and-cargo shuttle, today, it would probably come out looking something like this:

Spoiler

 

 

[tater]

9 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Chutes would have likely been far larger than the gigantic ones already on the SRBs.

Yeah, they'd be huge. A little lost cargo bay payload, but the vehicle was a compromise anyway in that regard. The Shuttle system put well over 100 tons into LEO, it's just that most of the mass was Orbiter. Once the goal (make work) was to make a station, the problem was that you could eliminate 4 launches by making all the parts over 100 tons, and not bother with the orbiter. Something akin to Shuttle C, but where the entire SSME/OMS rear package is dumped, and the "cargo bay" part is replaced with a single, skylab-like station part. An earlied Shuttle C mission could have left a hub, and perhaps a tug part, so that the huge modules are rendezvoused to within X hundred meters, and the tug goes out and brings them in after the engines are gone (that package could deorbit itself).

2 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

If you wanted to build a reusable crew-and-cargo shuttle, today, it would probably come out looking something like this:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

The tanks are just fuel in this example (McDonnell-Douglas ILRV, 1966)

[RCgothic]

9 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

OK, so let's talk o-rings.

2) The most basic root problem was really much more fundamental. O-rings have been around a long, long time. They are used to create seals under *compression*. They are not designed to be used under tension. But the way the SRB joints worked, as pressure build inside the casing, the joint would flex to put the o-ring into tension. It was an inherently bad place to use o-rings at all. (The later fix redesigned the joint so that the o-rings would not be under tension.)

Do you mean shear/extrusion? An o-ring can't have tension in a cross-sectional plane unless it's glued to the sealing surfaces, it would simply lose contact (and not seal).

[PB666]

8 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

If you wanted to build a reusable crew-and-cargo shuttle, today, it would probably come out looking something like this:

  Hide contents

 

 

Thanks but no thanks, it does not meet any useful requirments.