On Sat, 16 Feb 2008 11:47:40 -0600, in a place far, far away, "Jorge
R. Frank" made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

wrote:
On Feb 16, 10:50 am, (Rand Simberg)
wrote:
On Sat, 16 Feb 2008 09:39:48 -0600, in a place far, far away, "Joseph
S. Powell, III" made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

With all the excitement experienced during the past few days with the
attachment of the Columbus module to the ISS, I was reminded of the types of
Space Station modules proposed back in the 1980's....
These tended to have a longer design, filling up the entire payload bay of
the Shuttle.
Does anyone know why these longer modules were rejected in favor of the
shorter ones now used on the ISS?
The older designs certainly had much more room.
Probably at least partly because longer ones would have been too heavy
for the Shuttle to get to the high-inclination ISS orbit. In the
eighties, the station was planned to be put at 28 degrees. But that's
just a guess.

Rand is right. Also $ was factor

Actually, you're both wrong. The modules were shortened as part of
the infamous "Fred" redesign of Space Station Freedom in 1991, two years
before the Russians were brought into the project and the station's
planned orbit moved from 28.8 to 51.6 degrees.

Astronautix is normally suspect as a source, but their Fred article was
guest-written by Marcus Lindroos and is fairly well researched:

http://www.astronautix.com/craft/spanfred.htm

"The length of the crew modules was reduced to 8.2 meters to reduce the
weight while allowing them to be tested, integrated and outfitted on the
ground rather than in space."

Well, as I said, just a guess. I didn't follow the program that
closely.