Get that dang space shuttle of my lawn.

[Maltman]

So I just watched this: 

 

Video bashing the space shuttle. I never knew it was such a poor design. I was wondering what y'all think. 

Also how does the space shuttle design fair in KSP? it seems like it would be ridiculously difficult to design one. I used the Dynawing stock craft a few times. It was fun but really hard just to get into the lowest orbit. Required pretty efficient profile. 

I think the ease of SSTO'S in stock make the space shuttle design pretty much null and void outside of for the heck of it. 

[regex]

14 minutes ago, Maltman said:

Video bashing the space shuttle. I never knew it was such a poor design. I was wondering what y'all think.

75 tons of wasted mass. I mean, yeah, it served as a decent crew carrier but I feel like we could have stuck with Saturn Ib/Apollo and been pretty set for LEO ops, Soyuz-style. Upgrading the Apollo hardware would have been boss. Saturn V for super-heavy lifting or something like the SLS if we needed to go for the cryogenics (no arguments there, really).

14 minutes ago, Maltman said:

Also how does the space shuttle design fair in KSP?

Terrible.

Quote

it seems like it would be ridiculously difficult to design one.

Nah, they're pretty easy if you've been playing the game long enough.  I banged one out hung over on a Saturday morning in less than an hour, built a station while drinking my coffee, landed every launch.

Quote

I think the ease of SSTO'S in stock make the space shuttle design pretty much null and void outside of for the heck of it. 

Rockets make it useless...

Geeezzz, I should never comment on a Friday night, forgot my cardinal rule: If you're thinking about making one, just do it.  Enjoy it.  They're kind of fun.

Edited August 27, 2016 by regex

[White Owl]

Without watching the video, and speaking as a long-time fan of STS-like designs...

It's fashionable in certain circles to lambast the poor shuttle for all its many failings, while giving very little attention to the vehicle's very impressive capabilities. The shuttle may not have been anywhere near as good as the original concept and early designs, but even the emasculated, fragile, and overpriced version that finally became reality was a powerful and hugely flexible machine.

Just take a quick glance at the list of STS missions, and notice how often various payloads malfunctioned, and how often it turned out to be very useful to have a crew with a toolbox right there, ready to fix the problem. Or even decide to bring the payload back home for repair. Not a factor in KSP or other various fictional space programs, but it definitely turned into a majorly important capability in real-life.

[Alshain]

Doomed?  133 successful missions over 30 years is what they call 'doomed' these days?

Realistically, yes it cost more than it should have and originally it was only supposed to be one part of an entire program, the remaining components never saw fruition.

The truth that he glosses over in the video is that our goals changed.  It was determined that the moon served no value beyond scientific research and was limited on that as well considering what we had obtained from Apollo was most of what we were going to get.  The parameters changed and so the shuttle was re-purposed.

However it did give us abilities that we would likely never have been able to do without it.  The most notable is the Hubble.  Yes we could have launched it on a rocket, but it was a massive failure and it would have remained a massive failure without the Shuttle to aid in repairing it.  Without the shuttle it would have been a total loss.  The Shuttle was instrumental in construction of the international space station as well.

So was it 'doomed', no it was quite successful.  It just wasn't what was originally planned.

 

 

Edited August 27, 2016 by Alshain

[regex]

Quote

The Shuttle was instrumental in construction of the international space station as well.

Probably could have been done without it. The Russians did wonders with only a  Протон.

Edited August 27, 2016 by regex
Too much certainty

[Alshain]

Watching this video his facts are very skewed.  "The Deadliest Vehicle"... well that is only because it's got the highest crew capacity.  In fact we have lost cosmonauts to two Soyuz craft as well.  It's just not that black and white.  Also he blames the design for both shuttle incidents.  While that may have been true for Columbia, the Challenger exploded due to the weather and an extreme lapse in good judgement on the part of Mission Control.  He goes on to make assumptions that another design (which never existed) would never have failed, as if there is a way he could know that.

Edited August 27, 2016 by Alshain

[White Owl]

Still haven't watched the video...

If anybody is genuinely interested in understanding how the shuttle was designed, built, and operated, I heartily recommend reading Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space Transportation System, The First 100 Missions, by Dennis Jenkins. Very detailed book, that I found especially fascinating after designing several shuttles in the game; it's a slightly bizarre experience to read about real aerospace engineers struggling with exactly the same issues that I've struggled with in KSP, and frequently settling on the same solutions! The book documents what compromises were made in the shuttle design, when they were made, and why. Good read.

Although I've heard rumors that an expanded and completely rewritten version is supposed to be published in the next year or so...

edit: Gaaakk, just watched the first few minutes of that video. Dude doesn't even have his facts straight, let alone sensible conclusions drawn from facts. Thumbs down.

Edited August 27, 2016 by White Owl

[W. Kerman]

1 hour ago, Alshain said:

Watching this video his facts are very skewed.  "The Deadliest Vehicle"... well that is only because it's got the highest crew capacity.  In fact we have lost cosmonauts to two Soyuz craft as well.  It's just not that black and white.  Also he blames the design for both shuttle incidents.  While that may have been true for Columbia, the Challenger exploded due to the weather and an extreme lapse in good judgement on the part of Mission Control.  He goes on to make assumptions that another design (which never existed) would never have failed, as if there is a way he could know that.

Don't beat up on Soyuz, it works and the Russians keep making them.

[Wallygator]

Over yet under designed, underutilized, budget devouring, no escape, more weather susceptible, heavy and exploration inhibiting. And yes, the most deadly of launch platforms regardless of anyone's math   

On the plus side it moved money around the country, kept politicians ingratiated with local industry, and nearly destroyed nasa at least twice over to the grins of all small government subscribers. 

Rockets please. Thank you. 

[steve_v]

30 minutes ago, Wallygator said:

Over yet under designed, underutilized, budget devouring, no escape, more weather susceptible, heavy and exploration inhibiting. And yes, the most deadly of launch platforms regardless of anyone's math

All symtoms of trying to do too many things with one vehicle. It's an engineering triumph that it actually flew, but I can't help thinking it would have been better with clearer (and simpler) design goals.
IMO the shuttle program was doomed to be over-complicated and expensive from the start, by trying to be all-things to all people (or government departments).

A traditional rocket will win on cost any day, even if it's not re-usable - because rockets are modular. Doing a cargo-only run to LEO? Put only a (cheap, expendable) cargo module on top of the rocket. Can't do that with a shuttle, you have to carry all that multi-role complexity whether you need it for the mission or not. Complexity adds mass and points-of-failure.

Don't get me wrong, the shuttle is very cool... it's just not a very efficient way to get into orbit.

[Sharpy]

Its only unique capability was retrieval of satellites from the orbit and landing them. Over the countless missions it was used four times. Everything else it did, would be done better and MUCH cheaper by vehicles designed singularly for these tasks, disposable or reusable.

Compare the cost of ton of payload to orbit, launching Falcon 9 in "destructive" mode (no recovery, stage 1 burns forward until it runs out of fuel), versus the same with the shuttle... or cost per person to ISS in Soyuz vs the shuttle.

The only reason it flew for so long, is that scrapping the project when it should have been scrapped would be admitting the failure, and in the cold war atmosphere it was not an option.

 

Also, Soyuz had some failures, some malfunctions, some of them critical, but all of them were one-off and fixable quite easily. The shuttle was inherently dangerous - it had a fault that was not fixable. It was relatively low-risk one, took until Columbia for it to strike, but it was there to stay.

Edited August 27, 2016 by Sharpy

[GoSlash27]

Yeah, I agree with most of the points in the video. It doesn't mention the fact that recovering and refurbishing the SRBs was *much* more expensive than building new ones, but they continued doing it for purely political reasons.

The STS system could've worked out, but when it got axed, NASA came up with a compromise design that wasn't particularly good at anything it did. IMO they should've trashed the proposal and gone with disposables.

6 hours ago, Maltman said:

Also how does the space shuttle design fair in KSP?

Not well. I've built replica shuttles for every KSP version since .24 or so, and they're not competitive with space planes and struggle to keep up with disposables. They also take more time and effort to develop and are more difficult to fly.

Nevertheless... they *are* fun.

Best,
-Slashy

[solarbearman]

I actually use shuttles in my career mode. Engines are very expensive.

My shuttle can lift 40+ ton into LKO. Still better than my expendable launchers.

Also, it only costs ~40,000 bucks per flight

Edited August 27, 2016 by solarbearman

[GoSlash27]

17 minutes ago, solarbearman said:

I actually use shuttles in my career mode. Engines are very expensive.

My shuttle can lift 40+ ton into LKO. Still better than my expendable launchers.

Also, it only costs ~40,000 bucks per flight

solarbearman,

You should check out the cheap 'n cheerful rocket challenge.

 

Lots of good ideas on how to make more economical disposables.

Best,
-Slashy

[Jovus]

The Shuttle was very good at its job.

It's job wasn't delivering payloads to space on the cheap; it's job was pretending to deliver payloads to space on the cheap while actually being a jobs retention program for people with aerospace-related degrees.

You can tell this, for example, by the fact that the staffing and support requirements were way overstuffed. (Which, incidentally, is actually where most of the expense came in.)

[Sharpy]

1 hour ago, GoSlash27 said:

Yeah, I agree with most of the points in the video. It doesn't mention the fact that recovering and refurbishing the SRBs was *much* more expensive than building new ones, but they continued doing it for purely political reasons.

AFAIK, not exactly; it was *marginally* cheaper than building new ones.

We won't know if it would be more expensive than building new ones not intended for recovery from moment one as nothing else used SRBs this mighty.

[CobraA1]

One thing it could do well was to return large payloads from space back to Earth. I don't know of any other system that can currently do that.

6 hours ago, White Owl said:

edit: Gaaakk, just watched the first few minutes of that video. Dude doesn't even have his facts straight, let alone sensible conclusions drawn from facts. Thumbs down.

Interesting. What did the video get wrong?

And one more note - that system at 1:20 looks very interesting! I'll have to try to replicate that.

[GoSlash27]

24 minutes ago, Jovus said:

The Shuttle was very good at its job.

It's job wasn't delivering payloads to space on the cheap; it's job was pretending to deliver payloads to space on the cheap while actually being a jobs retention program for people with aerospace-related degrees.

You can tell this, for example, by the fact that the staffing and support requirements were way overstuffed. (Which, incidentally, is actually where most of the expense came in.)

Cynical, and absolutely true!

It was also very good at convincing the Soviets that they "needed" a shuttle when they couldn't afford one.

-Slashy

Edited August 27, 2016 by GoSlash27

[Red Iron Crown]

I think it was an OK concept that didn't pan out as planned. If reusability/turnaround time had been anything remotely close to the projections when it was being designed it would have greatly reduced cost to orbit (mission rate is a another factor here, too). Unfortunately the refurbishing time and costs after each flight killed any benefit that reusability offered, so it became an overweight launcher with a large return capacity (which is of questionable utility). 

In KSP Shuttles are a bit better as refurbishment costs aren't a thing. They're still tricky to build if you try to duplicate STS precisely, the thrust offset is a complication and we don't have sophisticated avionics like the shuttle to help control it. You can rearrange the major parts to make thrust easier to balance, though.

[Sharpy]

3 minutes ago, CobraA1 said:

One thing it could do well was to return large payloads from space back to Earth. I don't know of any other system that can currently do that.

Yeah, the idea of stealing russian satellites. Never realized. Three recoveries of long-term space-exposure experiments, plus one recovery of a broken commercial satellite that had a ridiculous insurance contract clause (had to be retrieved in order for the insurance to be paid.)

[Dman979]

8 minutes ago, Sharpy said:

... plus one recovery of a broken commercial satellite that had a ridiculous insurance contract clause (had to be retrieved in order for the insurance to be paid.)

Who let the KSP designers write NASA contracts?!?

[Jovus]

11 minutes ago, GoSlash27 said:

Cynical, and absolutely true!

It was also very good at convincing the Soviets that they "needed" a shuttle when they couldn't afford one.

-Slashy

I actually wouldn't call it cynical, exactly. There are very good reasons to want to retain jobs for aerospace-related fields in your own country rather than letting them drift off and, say, work for the Soviets. But we're skirting the line of the political here.

One statistic I've heard from a guy who worked on the STS program, though I can't find his source right at the moment, was that for each Shuttle launch, there were enough people with PhDs working on it that they took up enough floor area to support three Shuttles, and you could have piled them four high. That might be a little off, or even a fair bit off, but the fact that we're even in the same ballpark of magnitude illustrates my point.

[Brainlord Mesomorph]

Hindsight is always 20/20. (watched the first 20 sec of the video) I know all about the STS.

To critically examine ANY experimental cutting edge science project in retrospect is just stupid. the ones that worked were obviously the best ideas ever, the ones that didn't were obviously doomed to fail from the beginning. (and I'm not saying the STS was a failure at all) 

NASA had no idea what the problems were going to be. That was part of the project: to find out what the troubles were going to be.

But wait:

YOU ALL PLAY KSP!

You people of all, should understand having the BEST idea for a spaceship and by the time you make all the comprises you need to to get to orbit.... its kinda meh.

Indeed that's the lesson of KSP!

 

[Red Iron Crown]

8 minutes ago, Brainlord Mesomorph said:

To critically examine ANY experimental cutting edge science project in retrospect is just stupid.

I would say that critically examining any experimental cutting edge science project in retrospect is just essential.

[Brainlord Mesomorph]

Just now, Red Iron Crown said:

I would say that critically examining any experimental cutting edge science project in retrospect is just essential.

It depends on you definition of "critically".

I'm not talking about scientifically evaluating the results and learning, I'm saying the question "Should the taxpayer have paid for this? It was doomed!" is silly, because there is no way of knowing. (except in retrospect)