Apollo astronauts to Congress: Bring back the space shuttles

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The final mission to the HST would have been to bring it back to Earth actually, it was planned right up until Bush canceled the shuttle program.

That\'s implying that both programs had the money to fund such vehicles

Protip: They didn\'t.

I know that, what I am saying is the flight plan lay down AFTER Bush cancellation.

And TBH, just like old war planes, I really hope these machine would be able to keep flying till their last day instead of hang dead at the ceiling of a museum.

[Alchemist]

The Buran had a Higher payload to and from LEO and a higher crew capacity. And they could have built the ISS in 3 or 4 launches with the Saturn V and Buran working in Tandem

And Buran was not only 'Shuttle thad doesn\'t have to carry dead weight of launching engines in the orbit'. Its launcher Energiya was a complete spacecraft that could bring to orbit (or at least almost to orbit where you need just some basic OMS to circularize and aproach the station) anything not just Buran with a station module. Maybe several station modules with the necessary OMS (that is anyway more efective for just getting the part to orbit than using a Shuttle type craft)

And there were even plans to make the Energiya rocket recoverable...

[sparkmaster]

The final mission to the HST would have been to bring it back to Earth actually, it was planned right up until Bush canceled the shuttle program.

That\'s implying that both programs had the money to fund such vehicles

Protip: They didn\'t.

Asif Siddiqi makes the astute point that Buran was probably the most expensive military project by share of GDP in the history of man.

[DoctorEvo]

And though plenty of people will try to argue that the Shuttle borders on insanity for lacking an escape mechanism, they fail to take note that in both accidents such a system would have proven useless given the situation anyway.

Gonna have to disagree with you there - ejection seats or escape capsules could\'ve saved the crew of Challenger. Not Challenger herself, but the crew could quite possibly have been saved. Keep in mind that they were still alive (and at least two of them conscious) after the disintegration, and the crew compartment was structurally intact.

IMO, it is the lack of this one feature that is the greatest threat safety-wise of the Shuttle. NOT the SRBs, NOT the reusable TPS (though light ablative heat shields on some ejection capsules - a la Paracone or MOOSE - might be worth considering), NOT the cavalier attitude of the program managers during pre-launch decisions. Expecting nothing to ever go wrong in the realm of spaceflight is absurd - the key is to maintain as much damage control as is reasonable for when things DO go wrong, and to learn as much as you can from these mishaps so they can be prevented in the future.

[rdfox]

Gonna have to disagree with you there - ejection seats or escape capsules could\'ve saved the crew of Challenger. Not Challenger herself, but the crew could quite possibly have been saved. Keep in mind that they were still alive (and at least two of them conscious) after the disintegration, and the crew compartment was structurally intact.

IMO, it is the lack of this one feature that is the greatest threat safety-wise of the Shuttle. NOT the SRBs, NOT the reusable TPS (though light ablative heat shields on some ejection capsules - a la Paracone or MOOSE - might be worth considering), NOT the cavalier attitude of the program managers during pre-launch decisions. Expecting nothing to ever go wrong in the realm of spaceflight is absurd - the key is to maintain as much damage control as is reasonable for when things DO go wrong, and to learn as much as you can from these mishaps so they can be prevented in the future.

To quote the Haynes Manual for the shuttle ('NASA Space Shuttle, 1981 onwards (all models), Owner\'s Workshop Manual,' by Dr. David Baker, published just this year):

The critical part of the launch process was the two minutes that the SRBs were firing. If something went awry with the boosters during this time engineers predicted that the forces on the Orbiter could be catastrophic. They were.... The initial design requirement back in 1972 had been to have blow-out ports at the forward end of each booster so that the flow of hot gases could be diverted through the front ports, slowing the entire assembly, known as 'the stack,' allowing the Orbiter to separate and fly back down to a controlled landing. This too was removed to save weight.

Crew escape from a catastrophic failure during launch occupied the minds of engineers for months and a wide range of possibilities were studied, including the entire crew cabin being a jettisonable escape pod. Teh complexities and excess weight of such a design were deemed prohibitive. But to get the Orbiter off the big SRBs if they ran amok, engineers proposed the use of Abort Solid Rocket Motors, ASRMs. Attached to each side of the rear fuselage adjacent to the vertical tail, the two ASRMs would fire to carry the Orbiter away from the External Tank. If they were not needed during ascent, the weight penalty they incurred could be compensated by firing them to add thrust to the Orbiter\'s SSMEs after the SRBs stopped firing and separated. But these too were dropped for a simpler system--a belief that the Shuttle could be made so safe that its reliability would be as high as that of a commercial airliner.

The naive assumption that the shuttle would be a fully-operational vehicle after only a few test flights was all pervading and brought about a belief that space systems were sufficiently advanced that these multiple safety systems were unnecessary.... And that over-simplistic view, that the Shuttle could be made super-safe, wrote a new mathematical logic: fail-operational/fail-operational/fail-safe. Meaning, it would be designed so that no one system would fail the mission for which it had been launched, that no multiple of such failures could threaten the ability of the Orbiter to return at will, and that no systems or structural failure would threaten the lives of the crew. The mathematics forecast a reliability level such that NASA expected to fly more than 1000 missions before losing a crew. In reality, it lost two crews in little more than 100 flights.

So really, the most fundamental flaw in the Shuttle system was the very belief system it was based on, the belief that space travel was now 'safe' and thus you didn\'t have to worry about certain contingencies because 'oh, that can\'t possibly happen if it doesn\'t happen on the first four flights!'...

[DoctorEvo]

I\'ve already stated that blowout ports alone couldn\'t have saved Challenger or her crew. I\'m not sure if ASRMs could have.

But yes, that mentality was harmful to the program. And the mentality they later adopted, consisting of 'we can\'t LET anything go wrong,' was harmful as well. Things WILL go wrong, and you have to be prepared to handle it when it happens.

[sparkmaster]

NASA\'s culture was much more to blame for Challenger than anything else. Recall that:

[list type=decimal]

[li]They knew about o-ring blow by even before STS-1

[/li]

[li]Blow by was experienced by multiple missions before Challenger.[/li]

[li]If Challenger didn\'t launch on an absurdly cold day (for Florida, at least), the o-rings would have moved to seal the joint, just as they had in other missions.[/li]

[li]Had there not been really really strong windshear, the chunk of fuel would have probably stayed in place until burnout, and would not have catastrophically failed.[/li]

More then that, though, it was the design. Simply, the Shuttle was ahead of its time. It stretched materials science and astronautical engineering to its limit. And it ended up not delivering on its promises. Shuttle I should have, IMHO, remained a one or two article engineering program, and not have evolved into a 5 orbiter space moving van program.

But what do I know? I\'m just a humble, silly man, posting on a forum about computer rockets and spaceships.

[rdfox]

I\'ve already stated that blowout ports alone couldn\'t have saved Challenger or her crew. I\'m not sure if ASRMs could have.

But yes, that mentality was harmful to the program. And the mentality they later adopted, consisting of 'we can\'t LET anything go wrong,' was harmful as well. Things WILL go wrong, and you have to be prepared to handle it when it happens.

Sorry, I wasn\'t trying to rebut your post--just trying to amplify it, in that NASA could have had an abort option in all phases of boost at no performance hit, but went el-cheapo instead. ASRMs probably wouldn\'t have saved Challenger, but it would have at least meant that if guidance had gone apeshit, they could abort BEFORE SRB burnout instead of just having to have the RSO send the 'destruct' command with the crew still on board...