Shuttle musings/rant.

My opinions about the shuttle change from day to day, depending on what I
see NASA using it for, and what their other non shuttle plans appear to be.
Over the years, I have grown pragmatic over the whole situation. When I look
at the other designs for the shuttle that was considered when it was built.
Ones presented by other manufacturers. It sometime leaves me wondering why
we are stuck with the current one to this day. It was marketed as a first
generation space plane. Something that would be easy and cheap to maintain.
It also had bragging rights over a low initial price tag. Even though it
would have a slightly more expensive "per launch" cost. So they ordered 5 of
them plus the enterprise for testing. Price tag was 30 and some odd billion
dollars.

Now, here comes the maintenance part. There is problem with space shuttle.
You don't have a manufacturers warranty. When one is destroyed, you can't
just turn in an insurance claim, and get a new one. Maintenance is a purely
"do it yourself" type of affair. There is no "Online space shuttle consumer
reviews website" to look at, to see which one is the best one to buy. So,
when you pick a design, you may end up with a totally unusable piece of
equipment. That is just a risk you accept from the beginning. If you are
unable to accept that risk, then you should not undertake the endeavor.

When they found out what a pain in the butt, it was going to be to operate
it. They should of learned from their mistakes, retired the fleet, and used
what they had learned to build a new fleet that avoided what they had
problems with in the original shuttle. But they was unwilling to admit they
had made a mistake, and they pressed ahead. To date, they have spent over a
100 billion for a little over 100 flights. With the most of the cost being
in the operation and maintenance of the craft. It would be like spending
$50,000 for a big car, and having to put $10,000 worth of maintenance and
gas into it, every time you drive it to town. I don't care how much you like
the car, after a little while, you are going to be looking for a new car.
The person that bought the car has to admit to his self, that he just made a
mistake, and live with that fact. Trying to keep the car running will cost
you more in the long run, than just driving it into the ditch, forgetting
about it, and buying a new little one that will get to town on just a $100 a
trip.

There was a couple single stage to orbit, and two stage to orbit spacecraft
that was contenders for the first generation spacecraft. But NASA said that
it had to have about 10 to 20% more payload capacity than those designs
allowed. That is why they went with the space shuttle. To me, that seemed
stupid. I will refer to the example above. A big car that takes $10,000 to
drive it to town. Yes, you can take everything you need in one trip. But I
think I will stick with the small one that takes $100 a trip and make two
trips.

Some people get mad when you say the shuttle should be retired. They say
"Look at it's reliability rating. It's as good as any out there." Yes, the
reliability ratting of it's systems is the bet out there, bar none. They
have tweaked it to extreme perfection. So, even with it's level of
complexity, it leads to a total flight record that is quite good. But that
misses the point. The inherent design of the shuttle has almost no
robustness against mechanical failure. You have to have quad redundancy, and
layer up on layer of safeties to prevent an electrical problem from causing
total loss of crew and craft. And when a major mechanical component breaks
then no amount of electrical and control redundancy will help. The matching
of solid rocket boosters to liquid rockets is a tentative situation at best.
One is impossible to shut off. Once you light it, you have to keep
everything running, or you will end up in a uncontrollable situation. The
other is a system that sometimes likes to quit on it's own. If you can not
shut off, or throttle back all the other boosters to maintain an even course
for aborting the mission, then you will end up in a bad situation.

The basic design of the shuttle leads to an "all or nothing" situation. A
system like that is not a viable platform for day to day operations. A
platform for day to day operations has to be a robust failure tolerant
system. Failure in any part of the system, excluding heat shield, manual
control, and total power buss failure, should be a recoverable situation,
that will lead to the safe return of craft and crew. Or at bare minimum, the
survival of the crew, excluding a few broken bones.

Systems like that are already in existence in plane and rocket form. Some go
after the Soyuz for it's close calls. Those people just make me shake my
head in disbelief. The just don't get it. Even with the horrible quality
control, and bad leadership that has been forced on that poor craft, it's
safety record is only exceeded by the space shuttle. It has withstood
failures that would have caused the complete loss of the space shuttle. With
the only damage to the crew being a few frayed nerves and a sore back. If
you subjected the level of quality control to the space shuttle, that has
been bestowed to the Soyuz crafts, you would have no shuttles left to fly.
If you applied the level of care to a Soyuz class fleet, that has been spent
of the shuttle, then you may have had a few accidents, but I am pretty sure
that the operational death toll figure would resemble a good old ZERO right
now. The only critical systems is the manual thruster/system control,
integrity of the control/decent sphere, the heat shield on that sphere, and
parachute. All of the rest can literally blow up and the crew will survive.
That isn't just a guess, it's proven fact.

Another style of ship would also fit the realm of robust, failure tolerant
design is a horizontal takeoff space plane design. Especially a SSTO design.
Lets look at that field of operation. Avionics controls have already been
built to very reliable standards. If it uses jet/ramjet/scramjet engines,
and one fails at any point in it's operation, then it can still operate on
the others to return to the landing site. If all of the fails, then it can
still glide back to the landing site, or make a crash landing in a field or
highway if needed. It one or all the liquid rocket engines fail to start
when it starts it's rocket phase, then it can just shut all them off, go
back to jet power, and return to base. If one or both fails in mid burn,
then it can just make a soft reentry and return to base. The only critical
portions of the craft would be heat shield integrity, Flight control
operation, structural integrity of the flight surfaces, and fuel tank
integrity. You would have no external threats to the aircraft during launch.
Since the total size of the returning spaceship will be it's original
starting size, but just empty of fuel. Density of the returning aircraft
will be less, so external heating will be a lot lower. You will have no need
for fragile ceramic tiles like the shuttle has. There is no failure of any
engine system that could lead to an unrecoverable situation. Even if and
engine failed in the operating condition, you could just make circles until
you burnt off the fuel, and then you could come back home.

The X33 looked promising. All though, it wasn't as failure tolerant as a
horizontal takeoff aircraft, it was still a lot better than the space
shuttle. To this day, I don't know why they dropped it. The promise that it
displayed was far beyond any problems that I seen listed. Yes, they where
going to have to switch to aluminum fuel takes, and that would cut down on
it's payload a bit. That would mean that it would not be an "exact"
replacement for the shuttle, but that would have been perfectly acceptable.
I guess that they thought that if it was built, and proven far cheaper to
fly, they would have no arguable reason to use the space shuttle any more,
except for the extreme conditions where they needed that extra 10% payload
capacity. And they knew that the rarity of that was so little that they
would have no excuse to continue supporting the shuttle fleet. Yes they
wouldn't have a spacecraft that could transport as large of a piece as they
can now, but the fact that you could make two or three, or more trips for
every one that you made now, would make up for that plus some. That's NASA,
shooting themselves in the foot, in spite of themselves.

When I heard bush lay out his new policy for space exploration, I said
"finally, they will get a chance to do things right. Both proposals look
promising. But when I seen the plan that they accepted, I generally got the
idea that the NASA is a all around masochistic organization. To purposefully
inflict that much harm on yourself, you have to enjoy it.

The shuttle derived design. Lets look at it. All right, we take a horrible
design and build on it. It can't be that bad right?... Wrong!!!!!! Lets take
the worst part of the worst design and use that for the primary part of the
rocket. That being the SRB. Lets take and stick a little second stage, and
capsule on top of that. Man that would be a hell of a ride. Two boosters
shake the shuttle stack so bad that it feels like a continuous car crash.
Think of how bad it would shake when you don't have the mass of the shuttle
and external tank to restrain it. Please, a kerosene/LOX stage, or
something, but not solid!!!!!! Once it's lit, you can't shut it off. The
jettison rocket on the top of the capsule will have to be able to exceed the
acceleration of the booster before it will be able to pull away from the
lower stage, in an abort maneuver. The image of the booster doing a flip,
and heading straight for the ground comes into mind. The capsule jettison
rocket would launch the capsule right at the ground, followed up by an out
of control booster. It brings new meaning to the term "Getting the shaft."

Then we have the heavy lift design with the two SRB's and the ET. All right,
lets leave out the only part that has never been the primary cause of total
shuttle destruction, and lets build upon the only two parts that has been
the cause of total shuttle destruction. That sounds logical doesn't it?

The president is giving them the funding they need, but the people running
the place is just a collective group of morons with masochistic tendencies.

The should retire the shuttle fleet, and make this last flight, the last one
ever. Then take all the money that they spend on operating the shuttle and
put it into building a new spacecraft. $5 billion a year for two years
should be able to turn out one or two small fully reusable spacecraft by the
end of the second year. Heck, if they would have taken that action when the
last shuttle exploded, we probably would already have a couple replacement
spacecraft to put into service. Yes, they would probably only be able to
carry 10,000 to 20,000 pounds, but they would be able to supply the space
station for basic requirement, and have a turnaround time of less than 24
hours. That equipment would give you the information and experience needed
to build bigger spacecraft. All the money that they save would could be used
to build bigger craft that could haul the larger equipment up to the station
to complete it a couple years later. Sticking with the space shuttle is
costing everyone more money, and producing less results than if they just
parked them in a hanger and forgot about them.

If you terminate the shuttle program, all those companies that depend upon
supplying overpriced services and parts to the shuttle will cease to exist,
but it's better for the future of the space program. The only thing that the
designers incorporated into the space shuttle was job security.

Some would say that there is no way that you could build a space plane in
two to three years. They built the Apollo stack in 4 years. Surly, with all
this modern stuff, we should be able to build a little plane that is smaller
than the first stage booster on the Apollo missions, in two years.

Just make a design, and build it full size. Flight test it in it's
atmospheric envelop first. Outfit it with it's rocket system, and bring it
up to the edge of space and start doing puddle jumps. Work your way up until
you are doing full orbits. Work the design bugs out, and then build more of
them.

You don't have to look very far for design ideas. There was plenty that
predated the space shuttle. Research indicated they were feasible with 1960
technology. The only reason they picked the current space shuttle over them
was the fact that they did not offer the exact payload capacity that they
wanted. With modern technology they should be a piece of cake to build. And
cost far less to operate than the space shuttle. Heck, look at the SR71. 5X
the speed of sound, on the edge of space. Just strap a rocket engine on it,
and replace a little bit of it's fuel tanks with LOX tanks, and it would
easily reach sub orbital or even orbital velocity. You would have to work on
a heat shield though.

I wouldn't want NASA to run a war. When they moved the troops over to the
battle field, they would say, "The C5 galaxy design does not meet
requirements. We want a plane that will carry all 100,000 troops, plus all
support equipment, and all supplies to last them two years, at the same
time." Yes that size of plane could be built, but it would be the size of
New York, and it will cost 100 X the amount to deliver the troops than it
will using a C5 galaxy making hundreds of trips.

I still had a little bit of hope in NASA. But after I seen the shuttle
derived design, I lost that last little bit of hope.

On Wed, 10 Aug 2005 07:56:16 GMT, in sci.space.shuttle you wrote:

My opinions about the shuttle change from day to day, depending on what I
see NASA using it for, and what their other non shuttle plans appear to be.
Over the years, I have grown pragmatic over the whole situation. When I look
at the other designs for the shuttle that was considered when it was built.
Ones presented by other manufacturers. It sometime leaves me wondering why
we are stuck with the current one to this day. It was marketed as a first
generation space plane. Something that would be easy and cheap to maintain.
It also had bragging rights over a low initial price tag. Even though it
would have a slightly more expensive "per launch" cost. So they ordered 5 of
them plus the enterprise for testing. Price tag was 30 and some odd billion
dollars.

Now, here comes the maintenance part. There is problem with space shuttle.
You don't have a manufacturers warranty. When one is destroyed, you can't
just turn in an insurance claim, and get a new one. Maintenance is a purely
"do it yourself" type of affair. There is no "Online space shuttle consumer
reviews website" to look at, to see which one is the best one to buy. So,
when you pick a design, you may end up with a totally unusable piece of
equipment. That is just a risk you accept from the beginning. If you are
unable to accept that risk, then you should not undertake the endeavor.

When they found out what a pain in the butt, it was going to be to operate
it. They should of learned from their mistakes, retired the fleet, and used
what they had learned to build a new fleet that avoided what they had
problems with in the original shuttle. But they was unwilling to admit they
had made a mistake, and they pressed ahead. To date, they have spent over a
100 billion for a little over 100 flights. With the most of the cost being
in the operation and maintenance of the craft. It would be like spending
$50,000 for a big car, and having to put $10,000 worth of maintenance and
gas into it, every time you drive it to town. I don't care how much you like
the car, after a little while, you are going to be looking for a new car.
The person that bought the car has to admit to his self, that he just made a
mistake, and live with that fact. Trying to keep the car running will cost
you more in the long run, than just driving it into the ditch, forgetting
about it, and buying a new little one that will get to town on just a $100 a
trip.

There was a couple single stage to orbit, and two stage to orbit spacecraft
that was contenders for the first generation spacecraft. But NASA said that
it had to have about 10 to 20% more payload capacity than those designs
allowed. That is why they went with the space shuttle. To me, that seemed
stupid. I will refer to the example above. A big car that takes $10,000 to
drive it to town. Yes, you can take everything you need in one trip. But I
think I will stick with the small one that takes $100 a trip and make two
trips.

Some people get mad when you say the shuttle should be retired. They say
"Look at it's reliability rating. It's as good as any out there." Yes, the
reliability ratting of it's systems is the bet out there, bar none. They
have tweaked it to extreme perfection. So, even with it's level of
complexity, it leads to a total flight record that is quite good. But that
misses the point. The inherent design of the shuttle has almost no
robustness against mechanical failure. You have to have quad redundancy, and
layer up on layer of safeties to prevent an electrical problem from causing
total loss of crew and craft. And when a major mechanical component breaks
then no amount of electrical and control redundancy will help. The matching
of solid rocket boosters to liquid rockets is a tentative situation at best.
One is impossible to shut off. Once you light it, you have to keep
everything running, or you will end up in a uncontrollable situation. The
other is a system that sometimes likes to quit on it's own. If you can not
shut off, or throttle back all the other boosters to maintain an even course
for aborting the mission, then you will end up in a bad situation.

The basic design of the shuttle leads to an "all or nothing" situation. A
system like that is not a viable platform for day to day operations. A
platform for day to day operations has to be a robust failure tolerant
system. Failure in any part of the system, excluding heat shield, manual
control, and total power buss failure, should be a recoverable situation,
that will lead to the safe return of craft and crew. Or at bare minimum, the
survival of the crew, excluding a few broken bones.

Systems like that are already in existence in plane and rocket form. Some go
after the Soyuz for it's close calls. Those people just make me shake my
head in disbelief. The just don't get it. Even with the horrible quality
control, and bad leadership that has been forced on that poor craft, it's
safety record is only exceeded by the space shuttle. It has withstood
failures that would have caused the complete loss of the space shuttle. With
the only damage to the crew being a few frayed nerves and a sore back. If
you subjected the level of quality control to the space shuttle, that has
been bestowed to the Soyuz crafts, you would have no shuttles left to fly.
If you applied the level of care to a Soyuz class fleet, that has been spent
of the shuttle, then you may have had a few accidents, but I am pretty sure
that the operational death toll figure would resemble a good old ZERO right
now. The only critical systems is the manual thruster/system control,
integrity of the control/decent sphere, the heat shield on that sphere, and
parachute. All of the rest can literally blow up and the crew will survive.
That isn't just a guess, it's proven fact.

Another style of ship would also fit the realm of robust, failure tolerant
design is a horizontal takeoff space plane design. Especially a SSTO design.
Lets look at that field of operation. Avionics controls have already been
built to very reliable standards. If it uses jet/ramjet/scramjet engines,
and one fails at any point in it's operation, then it can still operate on
the others to return to the landing site. If all of the fails, then it can
still glide back to the landing site, or make a crash landing in a field or
highway if needed. It one or all the liquid rocket engines fail to start
when it starts it's rocket phase, then it can just shut all them off, go
back to jet power, and return to base. If one or both fails in mid burn,
then it can just make a soft reentry and return to base. The only critical
portions of the craft would be heat shield integrity, Flight control
operation, structural integrity of the flight surfaces, and fuel tank
integrity. You would have no external threats to the aircraft during launch.
Since the total size of the returning spaceship will be it's original
starting size, but just empty of fuel. Density of the returning aircraft
will be less, so external heating will be a lot lower. You will have no need
for fragile ceramic tiles like the shuttle has. There is no failure of any
engine system that could lead to an unrecoverable situation. Even if and
engine failed in the operating condition, you could just make circles until
you burnt off the fuel, and then you could come back home.

The X33 looked promising. All though, it wasn't as failure tolerant as a
horizontal takeoff aircraft, it was still a lot better than the space
shuttle. To this day, I don't know why they dropped it. The promise that it
displayed was far beyond any problems that I seen listed. Yes, they where
going to have to switch to aluminum fuel takes, and that would cut down on
it's payload a bit. That would mean that it would not be an "exact"
replacement for the shuttle, but that would have been perfectly acceptable.
I guess that they thought that if it was built, and proven far cheaper to
fly, they would have no arguable reason to use the space shuttle any more,
except for the extreme conditions where they needed that extra 10% payload
capacity. And they knew that the rarity of that was so little that they
would have no excuse to continue supporting the shuttle fleet. Yes they
wouldn't have a spacecraft that could transport as large of a piece as they
can now, but the fact that you could make two or three, or more trips for
every one that you made now, would make up for that plus some. That's NASA,
shooting themselves in the foot, in spite of themselves.

When I heard bush lay out his new policy for space exploration, I said
"finally, they will get a chance to do things right. Both proposals look
promising. But when I seen the plan that they accepted, I generally got the
idea that the NASA is a all around masochistic organization. To purposefully
inflict that much harm on yourself, you have to enjoy it.

The shuttle derived design. Lets look at it. All right, we take a horrible
design and build on it. It can't be that bad right?... Wrong!!!!!! Lets take
the worst part of the worst design and use that for the primary part of the
rocket. That being the SRB. Lets take and stick a little second stage, and
capsule on top of that. Man that would be a hell of a ride. Two boosters
shake the shuttle stack so bad that it feels like a continuous car crash.
Think of how bad it would shake when you don't have the mass of the shuttle
and external tank to restrain it. Please, a kerosene/LOX stage, or
something, but not solid!!!!!! Once it's lit, you can't shut it off. The
jettison rocket on the top of the capsule will have to be able to exceed the
acceleration of the booster before it will be able to pull away from the
lower stage, in an abort maneuver. The image of the booster doing a flip,
and heading straight for the ground comes into mind. The capsule jettison
rocket would launch the capsule right at the ground, followed up by an out
of control booster. It brings new meaning to the term "Getting the shaft."

Then we have the heavy lift design with the two SRB's and the ET. All right,
lets leave out the only part that has never been the primary cause of total
shuttle destruction, and lets build upon the only two parts that has been
the cause of total shuttle destruction. That sounds logical doesn't it?

The president is giving them the funding they need, but the people running
the place is just a collective group of morons with masochistic tendencies.

The should retire the shuttle fleet, and make this last flight, the last one
ever. Then take all the money that they spend on operating the shuttle and
put it into building a new spacecraft. $5 billion a year for two years
should be able to turn out one or two small fully reusable spacecraft by the
end of the second year. Heck, if they would have taken that action when the
last shuttle exploded, we probably would already have a couple replacement
spacecraft to put into service. Yes, they would probably only be able to
carry 10,000 to 20,000 pounds, but they would be able to supply the space
station for basic requirement, and have a turnaround time of less than 24
hours. That equipment would give you the information and experience needed
to build bigger spacecraft. All the money that they save would could be used
to build bigger craft that could haul the larger equipment up to the station
to complete it a couple years later. Sticking with the space shuttle is
costing everyone more money, and producing less results than if they just
parked them in a hanger and forgot about them.

If you terminate the shuttle program, all those companies that depend upon
supplying overpriced services and parts to the shuttle will cease to exist,
but it's better for the future of the space program. The only thing that the
designers incorporated into the space shuttle was job security.

Some would say that there is no way that you could build a space plane in
two to three years. They built the Apollo stack in 4 years. Surly, with all
this modern stuff, we should be able to build a little plane that is smaller
than the first stage booster on the Apollo missions, in two years.

Just make a design, and build it full size. Flight test it in it's
atmospheric envelop first. Outfit it with it's rocket system, and bring it
up to the edge of space and start doing puddle jumps. Work your way up until
you are doing full orbits. Work the design bugs out, and then build more of
them.

You don't have to look very far for design ideas. There was plenty that
predated the space shuttle. Research indicated they were feasible with 1960
technology. The only reason they picked the current space shuttle over them
was the fact that they did not offer the exact payload capacity that they
wanted. With modern technology they should be a piece of cake to build. And
cost far less to operate than the space shuttle. Heck, look at the SR71. 5X
the speed of sound, on the edge of space. Just strap a rocket engine on it,
and replace a little bit of it's fuel tanks with LOX tanks, and it would
easily reach sub orbital or even orbital velocity. You would have to work on
a heat shield though.

I wouldn't want NASA to run a war. When they moved the troops over to the
battle field, they would say, "The C5 galaxy design does not meet
requirements. We want a plane that will carry all 100,000 troops, plus all
support equipment, and all supplies to last them two years, at the same
time." Yes that size of plane could be built, but it would be the size of
New York, and it will cost 100 X the amount to deliver the troops than it
will using a C5 galaxy making hundreds of trips.

I still had a little bit of hope in NASA. But after I seen the shuttle
derived design, I lost that last little bit of hope.


I sympathise, but the shuttle was a start at least, and came about for
various reasons at the time in the prevailing circumstances with knowledge
at hand. Seems to be a miracle that anything emerged from the back of a cig
packet to production.

The Shuttle is cute, at least.. but with incredible advancements in CAD
and fluid dynamics modelling, Shuttle II could be made in a much shorter
timescale, but in parallel. The station must still be completed, be able to
be serviced, and prepared to act as a spaceport and fuel depot for Moon and
Mars and other missions.

However, the budget money is meaningless... it goes into the economy, gives
a lot of people a lot to do with their time, gives them money to spend on
things that give others jobs and it all goes back to the government in taxes
to be spent again anyway, and so on...

They all do something very worthwhile in the process... Knowledge and
technology progresses, lessons get learnt, lives get fulfilled, we get
something exciting to follow and discuss and we all get a little wiser...

Considering that 100 billion a year is spent on unnecessary food by fat
Americans and 30 billion a year spent on dieting, 16 billion a year on NASA
is peanuts, so it should be possible to advance Shuttle's replacement with a
more capable and safer craft.

Put the orbiter on top of the EFT, and the SSMEs on the EFT instead and more
payload can be carried... just the ground hardware will have to be taller...
Also, 4 or 6 SRBs could be used and jettisoned in sequence for greater lift.
The replacement orbiter might not need to be so radically different.

Andy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Haveland-Robinson Associates Tel. +36 30 223 2158
Budapest, Hungary Web: http://www.haveland.com

On Fri, 12 Aug 2005 13:28:16 +0200, Andy wrote:

Considering that 100 billion a year is spent on unnecessary food by fat
Americans and 30 billion a year spent on dieting, 16 billion a year on NASA
is peanuts, so it should be possible to advance Shuttle's replacement with a
more capable and safer craft.

Maybe we should all be required to be weighed as we file our income tax
returns. Really fat and really skinny people are forced to pay a surcharge. It
could become the "beyond" part of "to the Moon, Mars and beyond".

Well, it's better than Mondale's "I'm gonna raise your taxes!" idea

Dale