August 5, 2005
A Big Truck With Wings
Maciej's fantastic Rocket To Nowhere is a thorough, and throughly sad, look at the Space Shuttle. Even if there's never another mishap with the shuttle, it's doomed, as this article makes abundantly clear.
As a child of the eighties, as a geek, as someone who loves the idea of exploring space, I was completely uncritical of the Space Shuttle program. A big, beautiful plane that could fly into space and back seemed so cool, so obviously inherently necessary that I never questioned it.
In the years since the Challenger accident, and especially since the Columbia accident, though, I started reading more. I started thinking more about what I wanted space exploration to be. And I realized that the Shuttle wasn't designed to accomplish any of those things.
It's a big, unreliable truck, pushed into space by huge rockets, designed to look like a plane for no appreciable reason other than aesthetics, compromised by ludicrous requirements which seem like the equivalent of designing a plane that could land on train tracks.
I hope, for the sake of continued space exploration, that they find a good way to kill the shuttle off and replace it with something useful. But I'm not holding my breath.
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Anil Dash: "Even if there's never another mishap with the shuttle, it's doomed, as this article makes abundantly clear."... Read More
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- Earlier: Seeing the Light
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There are already plans for a replacement. It is a matter of time and money, but it will happen. If we could allocate more funds to NASA, it could come about sooner. I think there is still plenty of life left in the current fleet. Things are not as sad as the press likes to paint.
For what it's worth, during the late 80s there was a lot of conversation along similar lines... this was after Gerard O'Neill, and about the time the L5 Society became the NSA... the American Rocket Company and others were trying to find some way around the insurance roadblocks in order to be able to attempt this investment on their own.
The *goal* of NASA seemed desirable, but the *methods* they chose (and the methods otherwise prohibited) have been controversial in out-of-the-mainstream discussions for a good time.
I recently heard about some new work or study of the "space elevator" transport mechanism... that one still seems sort of spooky to me.... ;-)
jd/mm
Considering that we've got a product flying on that bird, I've thought about this exact topic a lot. In may different ways, as we have a connection to the people that put the shuttle into space. While the shuttle can be described, " “an increasingly creaky baby boomer who can still run a marathon,†there's lots of fans still cheering it on. NASA also deserves props for their openess, they've even got an RSS feed. I don't disagree that we need a new fleet, and it's 70s technology, but it's still amazing to watch.
What is sad to me is that we get so excited about a glorified bus. Space travel should be as common as transatlantic flight. A real economy of scale.
Space elevator, anyone?
Well, space elevators are still technologically out of reach, for many reasons. And certainly, a space elevator will only eliminate some risks, while introducing others.
Shuttle's worst enemy isn't really the fact that it's a rocket, but its sheer complexity, and the fact that it was designed as both a crew vehicle and an as-heavy-as-they-could-make-it cargo vehicle. The recognition in the space community at least since Challenger has been that those duties should be split. There were plans to make a "Shuttle-derived" cargo vehicle, but the costs were too high, and it wouldn't have changed the risks for the crew vehicle -- only reduced the launches it was needed for.
Some people want to go back to a capsule design, but NASA is well along on the CRV design, which is a glide-back vehicle like Shuttle, but in a flying wing shape. Either would launch on top of a stack, eliminating the flaking risks that Shuttle faces from its external tank.
I remember back in '86 asking my physics-major friend why we shouldn't just spend billions on a "mass driver" -- a magnetic railgun that would fling a capsule to space. Of course here we are 20 years on and it's still impractical.