The Excellence of the Shuttle System

(Ken S. Tucker) wrote in message . com...
The excellence of the shuttle system.

The orbiter part of the shuttle is a great machine
and has never failed (big time). The two catastophes
are from the SRB and the HO tank, and these appear
....
Regards
Ken S. Tucker

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.

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.
During reentry there should be ejection seats as a safety backup.
These are not hard to implement.

2. The utter stupidity of shuttling a heavy vehicle up and down when
the cost of launch is so high. 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. After all we do have a heavy launch
vehicle. The shuttle system without the shuttle.

Zoltan

(Ken S. Tucker) wrote:

[...]
Suppose this system was scaled down to
one third size
[...]

Some of the OSP ideas were broadly similar, but OSP was to take
advantage of a "mass-produced" booster (D4, A5 -- or more properly,
DIV, A5 -- the ultimate Delta machine and the Ultimate Atlas machine).

I expect CEV will also do this.

One disadvantage to a smaller winged orbiter, btw, is one that Henry
and others have pointed out: the larger orbiter has a better
energy/surface figure because you're supporting the mass with more
area (scaling laws), and this means the smaller vehicle has tougher
TPS requirements for vulnerable areas like leading edges.

Capsules dodge the leading edge thing, so the scaling laws don't hurt
as much for them.

/dps

(Zoltan Szakaly) writes:

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

Would you tolerate a car or a computer system that failed catastrophically
and killed you after an average of 100 trips or 100 reboots ???

There are two problems with the shuttle.

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.
During reentry there should be ejection seats as a safety backup.
These are not hard to implement.

....However, the additional mass will cut into your payload, and the
additional expense will cut into your budget. You pays your money,
and you takes your engineering trade-offs.

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


-- Gordon D. Pusch

perl -e '$_ = \n"; s/NO\.//; s/SPAM\.//; print;'

"Gordon D. Pusch" wrote in message
...

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. :-)




-- Gordon D. Pusch

perl -e '$_ = \n"; s/NO\.//; s/SPAM\.//; print;'

(dave schneider) wrote in message om...
(Ken S. Tucker) wrote:

[...]
Suppose this system was scaled down to
one third size
[...]

Some of the OSP ideas were broadly similar, but OSP was to take
advantage of a "mass-produced" booster (D4, A5 -- or more properly,
DIV, A5 -- the ultimate Delta machine and the Ultimate Atlas machine).

I expect CEV will also do this.

One disadvantage to a smaller winged orbiter, btw, is one that Henry
and others have pointed out: the larger orbiter has a better
energy/surface figure because you're supporting the mass with more
area (scaling laws), and this means the smaller vehicle has tougher
TPS requirements for vulnerable areas like leading edges.

Capsules dodge the leading edge thing, so the scaling laws don't hurt
as much for them.

If I understand the original poster, he suggests scaling the entire
orbiter down rather than just the wings. In that case, the surface
area per mass should increase. And if I understand you, that means the
energy (dissipation?) per surface area should decrease.


Karl Hallowell

Zoltan Szakaly wrote:

(Ken S. Tucker) wrote in message . com...
The excellence of the shuttle system.

The orbiter part of the shuttle is a great machine
and has never failed (big time). The two catastophes
are from the SRB and the HO tank, and these appear
...
Regards
Ken S. Tucker

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!

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...

During reentry there should be ejection seats as a safety backup.

Unless you have re-entry worthy enclosures similar to the bailout
system of the B-70, what does ejection get you during re-entry? You just
toast seperately from the ship.

These are not hard to implement.

That's very easy to say...

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?

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.

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

Zoltan


--

You know what to remove, to reply....

"Greg D. Moore (Strider)" wrote:

"Gordon D. Pusch" wrote in message
...

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. :-)


But military C-130 crews also have to consider that someone may be
out to actively shoot them down one day.

Even with recent events, except for possibly adding some
countermeasures for shoulder-fired terrorist weapons, this isn't a
normal concern for most cargo aircraft...or even the shuttle.


--

You know what to remove, to reply....

(Ken S. Tucker) wrote in message . com...
The excellence of the shuttle system.

The orbiter part of the shuttle is a great machine
and has never failed (big time). The two catastophes
are from the SRB and the HO tank, and these appear
to be because of mismanaging risk, and ignoring
problems that are bound to show up in high
performance vehicles rather than any major flaw.


The shuttle design, including the design of the
orbiter itself, has a fundamental flaw. There is
no escape option for the crew in the event of a
catastrophic failure during the first couple of
minutes of flight (the SRB phase). This design
was anything but excellent. Arrogant, foolish,
or stupid are better descriptive terms. The
shuttle designers had access to years of solid
and liquid propulsion system flight history.
They should have full well known that even the
most successful launch systems (like Minuteman)
failed 1-2% of the time - and that the failures
often occurred during the first few minutes of
flight.

- Ed Kyle

Joann Evans wrote:

During reentry there should be ejection seats as a safety backup.

Unless you have re-entry worthy enclosures similar to the bailout
system of the B-70, what does ejection get you during re-entry? You just
toast seperately from the ship.

That's pretty much the problem. You're way up high, going way too fast,
for any effective bailout system.

You'd have to design a completely separate re-entry system.

In case you haven't seen it yet, Newsday had a gripping account of the
final few minutes of Columbia:

http://www.newsday.com/news/health/n...0,442476.story

[... deleted ...]

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

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

There are many routes to cheaper and safer access to LEO. None of those
paths, however, start with the Shuttle program.

James Graves

Joann Evans wrote:

But military C-130 crews also have to consider that someone may be
out to actively shoot them down one day.

space debris does that for space vehicles - esp ones with wings.


Even with recent events, except for possibly adding some
countermeasures for shoulder-fired terrorist weapons, this isn't a
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The weapons are not in any particular way exclusive or specific to
terrorists so its dishonest to call them "shoulder-fired terrorist
weapons". How do you classify stringers, btw? They have used by
terrorists to down far more aircarft than the ones in use in Iraq.

normal concern for most cargo aircraft...or even the shuttle.

It appears to be a concern for normal passenger aircraft occasionaly.

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++