The Excellence of the Shuttle System

The shuttle is an excellent and reliable system. Two failures of about
100 flights is pretty good reliability.==

The hell it is!!! Thats good for a X plane (well almost - the X-15 I know had
twice that rate) but for a frieghter its rediculas!!
Shuttle was to be a safe relyable low cost system to get poeople and cargo to
and from space. Its none of the above, even compared to expendables of the
day.


Kelly Starks


"Humans are a race of compassionate predators."

BTW, when was the last time you saw either an ejection system
or an escape capsule on _any_ type of cargo aircraft ???

To be fair, I think C-130s have some sort of escape system. :-)

not that I ever saw or heard of?
Kelly Starks


"Humans are a race of compassionate predators."

The shuttle is an excellent and reliable system. Two failures of about
100 flights is pretty good reliability. There are two problems with
the shuttle.

Don't you ever consider designing commercial/military aircraft,
please!

I think airliners are designed to have a crash per few million flights, not
every few dozen.

After all their are thousands of flights per day, and few crashes per year.




And the argument that 'it's a spaceship' doesn't change mine.

1. The lack of plan B in case of failure. During launch there should
be an apollo style LET system to remove the cabin from the fireball.

So you now need to redesign the cabin to come away by design...how
much does this weigh? Are parachutes pratical? And you also must now be
able to survive coming down on land or water...

At least a few tons I imagin.


=====

2. The utter stupidity of shuttling a heavy vehicle up and down when
the cost of launch is so high.

It's not the weight of the vehicle that causes that. What does a
fully fueled 747 weigh?

True. Shuttle costs are largely due to the high labor costs needed to prep the
shuttle for launch. These are due to design shortcomings, not weight.



The only thing the shuttle is good for
is bringing something back from orbit. This is not something we need.

We should use the existing shuttles to continue launching payloads
while we develop a vehicle like Buran where we could replace the
orbiter with some other payload.

The idea's not new, we call it Shuttle-C. Some like it, some don't.
and it isn't necessairily cheap, either.

It could be if It eliminates the bulk of the systems that require the high
labor hours per flight.



After all we do have a heavy launch
vehicle. The shuttle system without the shuttle.

Zoltan


Kelly Starks


"Humans are a race of compassionate predators."