STS-xxR?

On Wed, 03 Sep 2003 23:54:55 GMT, LooseChanj
wrote:

On or about Wed, 03 Sep 2003 01:22:33 GMT, Brian Thorn
made the sensational claim that:
The "4" in "41-A" was the Shuttle Program Year. The first Program Year
was 1981. It is coincidence that the early Program Years and the
Fiscal Years were the same, and that coincidence has led to
considerable confusion over what the "4" actually stood for. Most
sources simply call it the Fiscal Year. It wasn't.

Would this be better stated as the Shuttle Program US Fiscal Year?

Probably "Shuttle Program Flight Fiscal Year". It wasn't the first
year of the program (which was 1973, I think) but the first year of
orbital flights.

1984 was the fourth Program Year of Shuttle Flight Operations. 1990
was the tenth Program Year and flights that year would have been
designated 10n-x. 2000 was the twentieth Program Year and flights that
year would have been designated 20n-x.

Bzzt. You're forgetting about what the "1" in STS-61A signified. So flights
scheduled in 1990 would have been 101-x or 102-x.

Um, no.

n= number (launch site)
x = letter (seq. through year)

Brian

On or about Thu, 04 Sep 2003 22:42:36 GMT, Brian Thorn
made the sensational claim that:
n= number (launch site)
x = letter (seq. through year)

Using a variable there, when it can only be 1 or 2, could be misleading.
Specifically, one might wonder whether an STS-127-C could have been possible.
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On Tue, 26 Aug 2003 22:34:33 +0000, Andrew Gray wrote:

Mercury had the twin delights that, not only did they include unmanned
missions, they also changed the designation based on the booster
involved - so we went MR-3, MR-4, MA-6...

(and they missed out some of the unmanned missions - we had an
unnumbered flight between MR-2 and MR-3...)

Actually mercury used separate numbers for the mission, spacecraft, and
launcher.

Here's a list of all Mercury Redstone and Atlas flights in chronological
order.

Date Mission Spacecraft Launcher
7/29/60 MA-1 4 Atlas 50-D - Note Merc. Atlas flew first
11/21/60 MR-1 2 MR 1 - The famous pad abort
12/19/60 MR-1A 2A MR 3
1/31/61 MR-2 5 MR 2 - Ham's flight
2/21/61 MA-2 6 Atlas 67-D
3/24/61 MR-BD BP MR 5 - Boilerplate capsule reused from
an earlier Little Joe flight
4/25/61 MA-3 8 Atlas 100-D - Blew up capsule recovered.
5/ 5/61 MR-3 7 MR 7 - Shepard
7/21/61 MR-4 11 MR 8 - Grissom
9/13/61 MA-4 8A Atlas 88-D - Reused SC 8
11/29/61 MA-5 9 Atlas 93-D - Enos
2/20/62 MA-6 13 Atlas 109-D - Glenn
5/24/62 MA-7 18 Atlas 107-D - Carpenter
10/ 3/62 MA-8 16 Atlas 113-D - Schirra
5/15/63 MA-9 20 Atlas 130-D - Cooper

A few interesting notes about this.

1) Despite popular "history" the 7 in Shepards name of "Freedom 7" for
his capsule came from the Spacecraft number, not from the number of
astronauts. It was only after some journalist claimed that the 7 stood
for the Mercury 7 that the rule that all of the Mercury capsule names
ended in 7 was established.

2) NASA's lack of triskadecaphobia was apparent even in Project Mercury.
Had it not been for point 1 Glenn's capsule might have been named
"Friendship 13"

3) The shuttle wasn't the first spacecraft to be flown twice Mercury
spacecraft 8 was, unless you counted boilerplate capsules, in which case
the boilerplate first used on LJ-1B and reused on MR-BD was.