What if the shuttle never existed?

Atlantic Ocean floor near Florida would be littered with about 125
Saturn-IB first stages, for one thing.

And further downrange, about 125 launch escape system towers.

Spent command modules would be standard display items in every podunk
aircraft museum in the country. Probably in every Six Flags "Right
Stuff" waiting line, too.

Most telecom satellites would be shaped to fit in a CSM shroud like
Pegasus.

Hubble would have been a lot smaller. So would TDRS satellites.

On 13 Jul 2003 18:45:12 -0700, (TVDad Jim) wrote:

Hubble would have been a lot smaller. So would TDRS satellites.

....I sort of doubt this, simply because the 1B would have been either
complemented or even replaced by a bigger intermediate-size booster.
An uprated S-II derived booster with a wider orbital insertion stage -
Non-NERVA S-III, anyone? - or even a downscaled three-engine Saturn V
would have been developed. As we had Atlas, Titan and Delta, so with
the larger boosters as well.

Of course, there's the notion of the reusable CM, which no doubt would
have been developed at least as far as a cargo pod concept...


OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

In article ,
Rusty Barton wrote:
Where would we be today?

Atlantic Ocean floor near Florida would be littered with about 125
Saturn-IB first stages, for one thing.

I doubt it. Well before that point, people would have started working on
incremental steps toward reusability. (Reusable S-IB stages *had* been
studied, in fact.) Arguably that was a more sensible approach in any
case; it just didn't look attractive to NASA in 1970.
--
MOST launched 1015 EDT 30 June, separated 1046, | Henry Spencer
first ground-station pass 1651, all nominal! |

OM om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org wrote in message . ..

Of course, there's the notion of the reusable CM, which no doubt would
have been developed at least as far as a cargo pod concept...

Do you think maybe the tiles concept would be applied to the CM? Or
would the original ablation cells be designed to be refillable?

Perhaps the money-saving technique would be to salvage the insides of
a CM, and just keep replacing the shells? I'm not sure what the
most-expensive parts of a CM were, but I would think that refurbished
couches, electronics, and parachutes would be a significant savings.

Thinking about this some more, I'd imagine that quite a few satellites
would have LM-sized configurations, and even docking probe receptacles
for maneuvering by the CSM.

(Hallerb) writes:

After the moon program ended Apollo spacecraft had been the workhorse
of NASA?

Skylab could of been continued and the second one flown

What science did the Shuttle do in all these years that was unlikely
onboard apollo craft?

Where would we be today?

By a grand stroke of luck this weekend I took a day trip to one
of the Series EWR universes, generally regarded [ on Earths One through
Nine, Three excluded ] to be in the class of timelines most probable
for a history in which Apollo continued. Let me dig through the copy
of Jenkins' "History of the National Orbital Transportation Service,
1973-1998" I picked up at the Basset Bookstore on Orchard Road.

The early 1970s saw great internal struggles at NASA, as despite
the decision to continue using expendable Apollo-grade capsules launched
by disposable boosters, the fact that new production lines needed to be
opened for both Saturn I-B and Saturn V rockets gave interested parties
the chance to redesign key elements -- a prospect anyone who's read his
Frederick Brooks would know is dangerous; but his book was still years
in the future when the key decisions were made -- and the limited number
of I-B's and V's still in stock presented a real yet indefinite deadline.

The first Skylab station saw four missions from 1973 to 1975,
with the final part of the Skylab/Soyuz and Salyut/Apollo Test Project.
Strong Congressional objections were raised to inviting Soviets onto
Skylab, apparently for fear of giving away technological secrets. With
the release of secret Soviet files in the 1990s these allegations were
finally disproven, but that did little to help NASA at the time. While
the Salyut/Apollo program did give NASA the chance to fly two missions
between the final Skylab A mission and the first manned Saturn II flight
in 1978, this moment of international cooperation was as much a footnote
as the rest of detente was.

Skylab B was finally launched on Saturn V number 515 -- number
514 was partly disassembled and reaseembled, not to flight condition,
to help retrain pad crews in Saturn V operations -- in September of
1979. It seems incredible to remember the station had been at one time
a twin of Skylab A, but the experiences of the first station and the
long time waiting for launch gave plenty of time for redesign. Gone
were the long, empty tunnels that gave such dramatic pictures for the
first four American and one Soviet crew of the first station; the new
orbital workshop was sufficiently crowded that Skylab B 2/1 commander
John Young claimed to have found the Minotaur over by the antisolar
airlock. Despite the wealth of solar and earth-observation data the
station could provide, it lasted only five missions before it reached
the end of its design life.

The troubled Skylab III station -- the adjective was almost
welded in place -- launched in March of 1982 on the fourth flight of
what has been called the best uselesss booster of all time, the Saturn
V-B -- which despite a decade of development flew only five times, and
never with a crew on board, before being shut down with a perfect
launch record.

Intermittent electrical system failures were noticed onboard the
workshop during ascent and on the first day, but whiile the Skylab III 2
crew waited through a weeklong delay they appeared to clear up, and the
launch progressed. This resulted in the most terrifying day of NASA
space flight since Apollo 13, when in the half-hour before docking all
radio contact with Hartsfield, Coats, and Brandenstein was lost. They
were fine, of course, but found themselves struggling against random and
intermittent system failures. Despite the loss of contact with Mission
Control Hartsfield and Coats docked with the station in what Harsfield
later called "the smartest and the stupidest thing I could have done."
Though they were able more reliably to contact NASA though Skylab's
stations, they found Skylab III in a similarly dangerous state.

Skylab III 3 was quickly shelved for the often-discussed Rescue
Apollo option, and Skylab III 2-R was just fifteen minutes from launch
when a two-second AGS failure made NASA scrub the flight. Whatever the
bad mojo was, was contagious. An investigative board tentatively ruled
the 2-R problems to be due to a badly wired connection unique to that
capsule's systems and not indicative of a systematic problem, and the
newly renamed III 3 flight countdown was begun. In light of the later
revelations it has been alleged that President Carter pressured NASA to
find a "simple" fix and fly anyway, in the hopes of repeating something
like the daring success of the Desert One rescue that saved 52 hostages
in Iran -- and his presidency -- in 1980.

But the new flight 3/2-R succeeded, and the III 2 crew was
returned safely to Earth with a remarkable trove of scientific data
given the malfunctioning equipment and moments of terror experienced.
Investigations over the course of 1983 and 1984 determined that the
proximate cause was a minor change in the resin-core solder used on
certain electronic connections which slightly increased its acidity.
Though almost imperceptible, this change caused the solder to slowly
begin eating away at the spacecraft wiring -- and in the months to
years some equipment sat on the ground, formerly perfect equipment
was "filled with holes," in Brewster Shaw's famous phrase.

The ultimate cause, of course, was a sense of institutional
security at NASA, the feeling that they had Apollo capsules and
Saturn II boosters perfectly understood and that there should not be
further big problems.

For the November 1984 return-to-flight -- which was also
claimed to be politically timed -- the new Apollo Mark IV capsules
(with only two men able to fit the new design) had a simple mission,
repairing and upgrading optics on the Massive Orbital Space Telescope
(one of the Saturn V-B's other triumphs); when Bobko and Gregory had
the most perfect flight since Skylab B 4 great confidence was restored
to the space program, and they became David Letterman's first guests
in orbit.

The troubled Skylab III had been designed to be resupplied, but
after the systemic defects were discovered NASA decided to use it only
as a long-duration experiment facility. Three short flights between
1985 and 1990 brought test gear up to the laboratory, and were brought
in and taken out in cautious spacewalks by fully-suited crewment relying
on the Mark IV Apollos for all life support.

Meanwhile the Skylab IV station grew from the long-discussed
"wet" workshop concept from S-IVD upper stages, with the first element
launch an exciting twilight unmanned liftoff in November 1985. While
the station never reached its original design, it was ultimately able
to host as many as four people in space at one time for up to 21 days
at a stretch, and to hold two astronauts for eight months every year.

The Skylab IV 18 mission became the program's first abort in
years, when the S-IVD stage failed to ignite and Nagel and Creighton
spent a night floating in the Atlantic before being rescued. Its most
likely cause was a dust cover within the engine not removed, and so
did not seem to require the yearlong standdown which was ordered.

In the meantime the outgoing Bush administration tasked the
agency with hard questions like: why are we still using 1964's idea of
rocketry, and why are we still launching people on guided missiles, and
why have no moves been made to make the Apollo Command Modules something
reusable?

In 1993 President Clinton ordered a design review on the still
incomplete Skylab IV, and after deteiled discussions with Russian
president Boris Yeltsin the two agreed to merge the remaining Skylab
and Mir II elements into the new International Space Station. By 1997
details of the station were still being debated, with both Mir I and
Skylab IV frozen into their increasingly antiquated 1993 states with
ever-more heroic efforts by visiting Apollo and Soyuz capsules (both,
by this time, redesigned to carry three in one flight) to keep both
stations running. Both the U.S. Congress and the Russian Duma agree
this is an inefficient state of affairs that can only be temporary,
but what exactly the shape of the permanent arrangement will be is yet
to be seen.

Anyway, sorry I don't have a good reference for 1998-2003, but
I was busy snagging the Clarke-Baxter sequels to Rendezvous with Rama,
Asimov's Annotated Guide to the U.S. Constitution, and some of the early
90s Bloom County collections. Maybe next time. I hope that helps answer
your questions, though.

Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In article ,
TVDad Jim wrote:
Of course, there's the notion of the reusable CM...

Do you think maybe the tiles concept would be applied to the CM? Or
would the original ablation cells be designed to be refillable?

The obvious thing to do is to automate production of CM heatshields, and
treat them as disposable. They are probably more work to refurbish than
it's worth. Minor redesign would probably be wanted to make them easier
to pull off and replace.
--
MOST launched 1015 EDT 30 June, separated 1046, | Henry Spencer
first ground-station pass 1651, all nominal! |

On 14 Jul 2003 14:41:09 -0400, (Joseph Nebus) wrote:

In light of the later
revelations it has been alleged that President Carter pressured NASA to
find a "simple" fix and fly anyway, in the hopes of repeating something
like the daring success of the Desert One rescue that saved 52 hostages
in Iran -- and his presidency -- in 1980.

....Ah-HA! This *must* have been pre-Crisis Earth-3, where every major
historical event is reversed, such as Englandland having successfully
rebelled against the US so they could form a monarchy, and Columbus
having discovered the Old World. Obviously, only on a parallel Earth
like this could an inept peanut farmer and backstabber of the Navy
such as Carter could have pulled off Desert One, or have had a VEEP
who would have given enough support and guidance to NASA to have kept
the agency going in the right directions with proper funding.

The Bizarro Walter Mondale, anyone?


OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

On Mon, 14 Jul 2003 16:31:56 GMT, (Henry Spencer)
wrote:

In article ,
Rusty Barton wrote:
Where would we be today?

Atlantic Ocean floor near Florida would be littered with about 125
Saturn-IB first stages, for one thing.

I doubt it. Well before that point, people would have started working on
incremental steps toward reusability. (Reusable S-IB stages *had* been
studied, in fact.) Arguably that was a more sensible approach in any
case; it just didn't look attractive to NASA in 1970.

....But could the concept have been extended to BPC's & their boosters?
:-)


OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

On 14 Jul 2003 11:19:46 -0700, (TVDad Jim) wrote:

OM om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org wrote in message . ..

Of course, there's the notion of the reusable CM, which no doubt would
have been developed at least as far as a cargo pod concept...

Do you think maybe the tiles concept would be applied to the CM? Or
would the original ablation cells be designed to be refillable?

....My take on it would be that the entire heat shield would be a
"bolt-on" apparatus, where it would be totally replaced after each
mission. Eventually, they might have considered tiles, but when you
compare the reentry dynamics of the CM to that we see on the Shuttles,
a solid one-piece shield would have been preferable.

I'm not sure what the most-expensive parts of a CM were, but I would think that refurbished
couches, electronics, and parachutes would be a significant savings.

....We would have most likely seen a more modular approach to the CM
cabin to allow base capsule resuability with minimum amounts of
"handcraft tweaking" required. At the same time, with electronics
becoming more compact as mission requirements would have spurred
development of space-hardened electronics that required far less
cooling, most if not all of the water cooling systems would have been
eliminated from the design, thus making the modular approach more
feasible.

Thinking about this some more, I'd imagine that quite a few satellites
would have LM-sized configurations, and even docking probe receptacles
for maneuvering by the CSM.

....Some of this was already in the works for AAP, such as the I
mission concepts involving an "LM Observatory". Mark Wade's site has
some of these online.


OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

On or about Mon, 14 Jul 2003 14:22:18 -0600, OM om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org made the sensational claim that:
The Bizarro Walter Mondale, anyone?

That'd be the guy who insisted on giving NASA everything it could ever want
and more?
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