Do you miss the Space Shuttle Program

[AmpsterMan]

I thought the Shuttles were supposed to have been retired a long time ago anyway. Retiring them now was a good idea now that construction of the ISS is complete. Still I gotta love me some space truck .

What I don't like about the SLS is that it looks like a bastardized version of everything . Honestly, the rocket looks like it was built using KSP. Furthermore, I don't like that they are continuing to use huge SRBs on manned vehicles.

Orion on the other hand is the bees knees I tell ya.

[bsalis]

Sure I miss it.

Having said that i'm glad it was retired. It was neither cheap or safe.

[Nibb31]

Yes.

Why do you say you miss the Shuttle and post a picture of a Russian spacecraft?

One of the things I don't understand is why all the astronauts nowadays travel to space by Russkiye Kosmicheskiye Korabli aka russian space vessels.

Because it's the only one available.

Americans had Apollo capsule in 60s, they now have tons of launch vehicles... Is it so hard to develop Soyuz-style capsule or remake Apollo pod to put on top of one of the existing rockets?

The reason is the Shuttle. It was so expensive that it used most of NASA human spaceflight budget, so they simply didn't have enough money to remake a modern Apollo capsule. Now that the Shuttle is finally gone, they can divert the money towards Orion.

I thought it "could" get higher than LEO but was rarely used like that.

No, it couldn't. The highest apogee of a shuttle orbit was around 500km. LEO is generally defined as below 2000km.

Definitely, it was a great way to sending people and stuff intro space.

No, it was an expensive and wasteful way of sending people into space. It makes much more sense to have separate spacecraft for people and equipment. It hardly had the payload capacity of a Delta-IV or Atlas V, for 10 times the cost.

I'd like to see another way of sending a Hubble space telescope and repairing it(or even retrieving it).

Nowadays, it doesn't make sense to repair stuff in space. It would have been cheaper to launch a Hubble II than to send multiple manned launches and dangerous EVAs to fix it.

So yeah, f*ck Obama

I don't think Obama has anything to do with it. George W. Bush scheduled the Shuttle's mandatory retirement for 2010 in the 2004 Vision for Space Exploration. But actually, everyone was eager to get rid of it. Everyone knew that it was dangerous, expensive, and that as long as the Shuttle was around, the US would never get out of LEO.

Obama cancelled Constellation, but that was actually easy, because although NASA had made lots of PowerPoint presentations and some studies, the Bush administration and Congress never really funded it.

Edited April 22, 2013 by Nibb31

[Frankiebolo]

Absolutely not missing it!

The Space Shuttle was an Expensive, Maintenance-dependant, Underpowered, Overmuscled and extremely unsafe way to get things to orbit. It's been used at his maximum volume-mass payload capability only on the Hubble and few others DoD-classified missions, otherwise his giganteous payload bay was always half empty. And principally I don't miss his lack of Crew survivability sistem in case of catastrophic failure during launch, even if NASA used this sistem since the Mercury age.

[Mishkin_007]

Not even a little. It was expensive, scope limiting, and expensive. Good riddance.

No space shuttle but no problem dishing out the cash for government subsidized cell phones for the poor.

Edited April 22, 2013 by Mishkin_007

[musicpenguin]

Do your anti Obama rants somewhere else. Stay away from politics.

[iDan122]

I am not anti-Obama. I just think that that decision was a very illogical one and I'll-thought. Obama did many good things like finally doing something about the US gun regulation, cuz every pensioner has at least one gun and 11 year olds got their first Glocks, then they ask why so many gun violence.

[iDan122]

Yes.

One of the things I don't understand is why all the astronauts nowadays travel to space by Russkiye Kosmicheskiye Korabli aka russian space vessels. Americans had Apollo capsule in 60s, they now have tons of launch vehicles... Is it so hard to develop Soyuz-style capsule or remake Apollo pod to put on top of one of the existing rockets?

First in your pic it is the soviet Buran(analog of the space shuttle, it only flew once unmanned). Secondly, why don't you try designing your capsule? That's right, you can't. NASA is currently working on the Orion and in the end of this year(or in the very beginning of 2014) Orion will perform its first orbital unmanned test flight. Although NASA is kind of working slowly because Chinese already made their Shenzhou craft pretty fast and DragonRider is coming up somewhere near 2016, 7 years before the planned Mars One mission. Also google the DreamChaser, it's a new type of space shuttle by Sierra Nevada, launched on top of a rocket.

[wetmelon]

Voting no because i didn't care about it when it was around and don't care whether we're using US, Chinese, Russian, Ethiopian, or whatever shuttle... it is and should remain an international project. Nationalism is so 1960's

[jwenting]

By the time I really got into it, it was in the last few missions. I agree that USA should have had a Soyuz-style capsule strictly for sending people to space. No need to use up a risky shuttle mission just to send astronauts to the ISS.

Actually, it was an extraordinarily safe method of putting people in space.

It was ruined by cost cutting and bureaucracy, not by technical problems.

It was also made overly costly by design by those same bureaucrats, congresscritters voting themselves pieces of the construction contracts in order to enrich themselves and their sponsors.

This made the program the overly expensive monstrosity it became, and fueled the spiraling maintenance cycles that made the envisioned 1 week turnaround impossible that could eacily have been achieved with several of the original proposals.

Those same bureaucrats also, in order to prevent losing their little kingdoms, sabotaged every single effort that could have successfully replaced the SSTS with something cheaper, faster, and even safer.

Remember the original SSTS was designed to be in use until the mid-late 1980s by which time it was envisioned its replacement would have been designed and built, it was never intended to be in use for 40 years.

[metaphor]

Fun fact: Over the course of its lifetime, the Shuttle was about as safe as a normal car in terms of fatalities per distance traveled. 14 deaths/500 million miles is about the same as the motor vehicle fatality per miles driven in the 1980s.

That said, it was very expensive, and very inefficient for sending cargo into space. Of the 104 tons that went into space with each launch, the entire 70 ton orbiter had to come back to Earth, leaving just 24 tons of payload in orbit. Combined with the huge turn-around costs for a "reusable" vehicle, this meant the Space Shuttle was very cost-ineffective. It did look very cool, but I think that's partly a selection bias since it was the only manned spacecraft we saw (at least in the US) in the past 30 years. So I'm glad it was cancelled, as that freed up the significant funds needed to operate the Shuttle to fund a much cheaper way of getting stuff into orbit, which is the current commercial crew program and the SLS.

[spikeyhat09]

no way. not in the least. it was misguided and a huge waste of money, and most of all dangerous. let me explain (assuming someone else hasnt already)

it had that giant cargo bay, yet could carry people. what was its purpose? to deliver probes, etc.? it could fly autonomously, so why carry that huge extra weight (and therefore payload limiting) life support systems?

was its purpose to ferry people around in space? in that case what is that giant honkin playload bay doing there?

the idea behind the reusable shuttle was to save money of course. but in order for a landed shuttle to be renovated in order to be spaceworthy again, the cost is about the same of a conventional rocket, which would be a lot safer (as we unfortunately saw with the columbia and challenger disaster).

and that is why i will not be missing the shuttle.

[Nibb31]

I am not anti-Obama. I just think that that decision was a very illogical one and I'll-thought. Obama did many good things like finally doing something about the US gun regulation, cuz every pensioner has at least one gun and 11 year olds got their first Glocks, then they ask why so many gun violence.

But it wasn't Obama's decision.

[Van Disaster]

I was pretty sad when I watched the last landing, mostly because I thought "well now what?" but seeing what SpaceX are up to, how ambitious they are and most of all how they seem to be actually progressing like they planned for has really filled the gap - and in the long term I have some hopes for Skylon, although as it's British and I'm British I'm 99% sure it'll just get sold overseas because we're atrocious at funding projects like that, and turn up in some different format. Hats off to NASA for Apollo - I'm just about old enough to vaguely remember Apollo-Soyuz - but after that the Shuttle just sucked all their innovation away, it seems. Given the black hole of it's operating costs, not too surprising.

The shuttle might have done many things averagely well, but it did only need to be one proven launch system to do them all rather than having to design and maintain several.

[hugix]

the program no, the orbiters.. Yes

They where absolutely brilliant and photogenic

[buzzles]

No, it had far outlived its life span. Besides, I think it's probably a good idea to continue using the near enough bullet proof Russian Soyuz capsule for LEO along with all the developing commercial craft, and let NASA and the ESA focus on stuff further out.

Personally though, what I would like to see is for NASA to revisit the X33/Venture Star projects, not only because they've built the infrastructure to support it over at Edwards AFB and they have a nearly complete prototype + spares sitting in various hangers, but because the biggest technical hurdle was the hydrogen tank, which seems to have been solved thanks to the the rapid advances in carbon composite technology over the last 13 years.

[tommygunyeah]

I think the money could of been spent better but I think the US should defiantly have a huge space program with their technology and money.

[Canopus]

Actually, it was an extraordinarily safe method of putting people in space.

Yeah it was so safe that they didn't even needed to include an abort mechanism of any kind:P

[RuBisCO]

The space shuttle program was a unmitigated failure and huge waste ot time and energy. Had we simply keep the Saturn V in production we would have a family of dirivative boosters that could lift 1-10 times a much (with Saturn V upgrades/downgrades) as the shuttle for as low as HALF the price per lbs to orbit as well as the ability to send manned missions to the moon and beyond. It was in fact within NASA budget to keep the Saturn V in production had they not had the space shuttle program. In short the space shuttle has held back manned space travel by 50+ years.

And this is not some digbat on the internet opinion: Mike Griffin, former head of NASA laid is all out here: http://aviationweek.typepad.com/space/2007/03/human_space_exp.html

"Further, let us assume that we had established a continuing program of space station activities in Earth orbit, built on the Apollo CSM, Saturn I-B, and Skylab systems. Four crew rotation launches per year, plus a new Skylab cluster every five years to augment or replace existing modules, would have cost about $1.5 billion/year. This entire program of six manned flights per year, two of them to the Moon, would have cost about $6.3 billion annually in Fiscal 2000 dollars. The average annual NASA budget in the 15 difficult years from 1974-88 was $10.5 billion; with 60% of it allocated to human spaceflight, there would have been sufficient funding to continue a stable program of lunar exploration as well as the development of Earth orbital infrastructure. I suggest that this would have been a better strategic alternative than the choices that were in fact made, almost 40 years ago."

[Budgie]

Financially and in other regards, we could probably do better, yup. But it was a stunning piece of technology and engineering. It certainly had its place for the time, and I dont think it overstayed its welcome.

Shame I never got to go see a launch, and I live in Florida... *grumble grumble*

[PaperLemon]

I'll give credit where credit is due. The STS was visionary that incorporated a lot of forward thinking engineering and scientific goals which in turn advanced the breadth and depth of our knowledge about space and space travel. You could argue that it inspired generations of boys and girls to take up an interest in STEM fields.

That said I have a hard time justifying it's existence in retrospect. They promised a space truck which was massively oversold on capabilities that never quite materialized for a market that wasn't even there. It wasn't very cost efficient and it wasn't so much reusable as it was refurbishable. To be fair a lot of overhead was added due to the dozens of groups with conflicting goals trying to get a piece of the action. There were a lot of requirements from different factions, such as the Air Force's insistence that it be able to launch spy satellites into a polar orbit from Vandenberg AFB. Because of this it ended up really having to pack a lot of complexity and capability into one machine on a budget and certain safety considerations ended up being thrown out.

For what it's worth, I think we would have been better off sticking to a Soyuz-like craft for carrying people to and from LEO. Existing Titan and Delta launchers could have been used to send up the big space station bits like the Russian Protons. This way we have a clear separation of mission roles and less complexity allowing for things to go wrong. After all there's no sense in taking a multi-tool to do a specific job when all we needed was a screwdriver.

I'm also a big fan of Big Gemini and think that it might have been a good choice for crew and resupply missions to stations and even orbital construction yards, serving in a similar capacity as TKS for Salyut. It would have had that capability to carry 9 or 12 people depending on configuration and would be roughly the same mass as an Apollo capsule, but would carry twice the cargo to LEO. And this was without the proposed cylindrical cargo module, which would've increased cargo capacity even further.

[RogueMason]

In all technicality, the program may not have lived up to what it was originally intended, and it may have been costly, but it was the space program I grew up with, and the Shuttles hold a special place with me. When I first heard about the coming end of the program, I was a bit disheartened, really. So yeah, I miss the Shuttles. I just hope the Orion CSM that's in development achieves everything set out before it; more Moon landings (potentially), asteroid missions, and ultimately the Mars missions.

[SargeRho]

Hell no. It was about time it was retired. It was overly expensive and overcomplicated, and killed more people than all other spacecraft in history combined.

[Fel]

Hey, that was my favorite game as a kid!

http://www.xjehl.com/nasa/shuttle_usa.htm

Long live the shuttle!

[GalaxiesFinestToday]

The space shuttle program ending was very sad to me. Considering that it was expensive to fund, i was sad that our exploration ended. R.I.P. space shuttle program