The Space Shuttle : A video

[Arizal]

Hi, fellow kerbonauts who are surely more knowledgeable than I am on this subject.

I saw this video a few days ago and found it convincing, if a bit extatic about the private sector in the end, but I wonder what you can tell me about its premisses and judgment about this iconic flight program. Was it indeed doomed from the beginning? Why? And how could it have been different?

[DerekL1963]

It's a... mixture of fact, fantasy, and outright repurposed bovine waste. 

[Bill Phil]

I wouldn't call a 40 year long program (started in the early 70s, actually earlier...) that did quite a bit of science, repaired Hubble, launched Galileo, built a space station, serviced two, and had a failure rate of 2 in 135, a failure. It didn't succeed in lowering costs, and it didn't get to do its job until the mid 90s (servicing space stations was its job), but it did some great stuff nonetheless.

They managed to get a turnaround time just short of two months for Atlantis. Had they built a larger fleet, and had a larger infrastructure to support high flight rates, we may have seen a very different space shuttle program.

[qzgy]

3 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

I wouldn't call a 40 year long program (started in the early 70s, actually earlier...) that did quite a bit of science, repaired Hubble, launched Galileo, built a space station, serviced two, and had a failure rate of 2 in 135, a failure. It didn't succeed in lowering costs, and it didn't get to do its job until the mid 90s (servicing space stations was its job), but it did some great stuff nonetheless.

They managed to get a turnaround time just short of two months for Atlantis. Had they built a larger fleet, and had a larger infrastructure to support high flight rates, we may have seen a very different space shuttle program.

Would it be appropriate to say had NASA/ The US Government sunk more into setting up said infrastructure and larger fleet that the promised claims would have eventually happened?

Also as a side note - how is station servicing going to be done in the future? I guess manned spacewalks, but the capability of the CanadaArm is quite useful on a craft isn't it? Which capsules cannot really have? (And yes, I do already know that there is a CanadaArm on the ISS already.)

[Nibb31]

1 hour ago, qzgy said:

Would it be appropriate to say had NASA/ The US Government sunk more into setting up said infrastructure and larger fleet that the promised claims would have eventually happened?

The support infrastructure was basically the two pads, the VAB (leftover from Apollo), the OPFs, and the production lines for the ETs and SRBs.

I wouldn't say that the infrastructure was too big, because none of those facilities were actually underutilized.

The biggest problem with the Shuttle, IMO, was that NASA never managed to field a replacement or a Block II. It was an experimental vehicle made operational. Of course, because of the cost of all that infrastructure, it couldn't have been used as an experimental vehicle for a couple of years and thrown away.

1 hour ago, qzgy said:

Also as a side note - how is station servicing going to be done in the future? I guess manned spacewalks, but the capability of the CanadaArm is quite useful on a craft isn't it? Which capsules cannot really have? (And yes, I do already know that there is a CanadaArm on the ISS already.)

Servicing is just carrying supplies. The various arms on the station are sufficient. Besides, the ISS is going away in 2024.

[Arizal]

I agree with you that the space shuttle did great things. The video says, however, that it narrowed our perspective by focusing on having many low orbit travels. During this time, the NASA didn't focus on returning to the Moon or going to Mars. This less ambitious turn is also explainable by a cut in the fundings, since the main objective (landing on the Moon) was already achieved. So it can be argued that NASA did the best with what it had.

That said, how do you answer to the video claims that :

- The concept of the external fuel tank was a mistake;

- The fact that the space shuttle wasn't at the top of the rocket exposed it to dangers previous models didn't have?