How do you go from this

the space shuttle was an overdesigned expensive disaster and it shouldn't have existed

It's only slightly less NASA than the other two. They're all products of NASA contracts. The SpaceX one is just a product of a different kind of contract.

>moving goal posts

fuck off, kid

>>moving goal posts
What sense does that even make?

you forgot the last "...to this": Falcon 9 first stage landing back at the pad on a pillar of fire.

Well obviously because that one blew up on re-entry [spoiler]:^)[/spoiler]

>landing back at the pad

>made in 2017 means better technology
falcon has the least efficient engines of the bunch and has yet to do anything useful

...

The landing pad is located back at the launch facility. So yes, it lands "back at the pad".

>efficient
LOL

It's more than 7 miles away.

>How do you go from this to this to this?

Different missions, with a desperate but flawed attempt to create interest (and funding) in the absence of a compelling mission in the middle, and a dash of privatization towards the end.

>least efficient engines
Highest thrust-to-weight. Not everything's about specific impulse. More thrust means you can have a bigger tank with more propellant.

That's why the Falcon 9 maximum performance leapt up from 10.5 tonnes to LEO to 22.8 (enough for every payload ever carried by the shuttle) as they upgraded the engines to higher thrust, without making them larger or more costly. They've got another performance upgrade on the way, too, with Block 5.

From the launch pad. Still at the launch facility.

>Highest thrust-to-weight.
shuttle easily has the highest twr of the three

>Still at the launch facility.
Wrong.
KSC =/= CCAFS

>nothing to do with budget or lack thereof

You're kinda wrong there. Budget slashes towards the end of project Apollo killed off future missions using a Saturn 5 and Apollo CSM/LM. NASA knew that the last time they had an exciting new mission, they got funding and the go ahead to do shit. They made a bad decision that selling a "truck to space" that made space flight normal and uninteresting was the way to get the monies flowing again. When that failed, tightening budgets for STS forced design decisions that were-- to be kind -- unwise. And of course, while this is going on, the generation that built NASA as a nimble, decisive agency retired or died, and the bureaucratization of NASA, with turf wars and more efforts going into internal politics built up more and more. And eventually, STS retires and we have nothing ready to fly -- and in comes privatization of development.

>has to do with retarded design decisions by NASA,

Forced by budget constraints, though, beyond the bad decision that a reusable vehicle was an idea whose time had come.

>coulda just kept launching Saturn V's and "evolve" a partially/fully reusable version of it

Wasn't really a mission for that big a booster unless you are going far out with a crew. Which public apathy ruled out.

Saturn V is a pretty fucking impressive rocket, especially given the tech they had to work with.

And, as a back-handed complement, the fact that something as Rube Goldberg as the STS system only failed twice is pretty remarkable.

Nothing against Falcon, but don't dis Saturn V

Would be interesting to see what would have happened if it were designed, say, 20 years from now. NASA tried to do something that was not then possible with STS. It was a bad decision, but the effort to pull it off was impressive.

Falcon 9 has failed 3 times in 1/4 the flights as the shuttle.

Look, Musk is a borderline conman and all that, fair enough. But a vehicle in development is going to have developmental problems. Mercury/Atlas had a bunch of early failures, as thy got the damned thing to work -- the Mercury Atlas series of flights was very successful. If STS had undergone a similar regimen of flight testing for development, they might have been able to handle some of the (in retrospect) obvious problems that came back to kill some folks later.

>>Highest thrust-to-weight.
>shuttle easily has the highest twr of the three
Now you're equivocating. The vehicle thrust-to-weight is different from the engine thrust-to-weight, and vehicle thrust-to-weight is not a useful figure of merit (all-liquid-fueled rockets generally have close to 1:1 twr because it gives better performance to put more fuel in, while solid boosters typically kick the twr up because it's good to burn them up quickly and drop their heavy casings at relatively low altitude).

Solid boosters don't have an "engine thrust to weight" because they don't have an engine, just a rocket motor, which is most of the mass of the booster.

>KSC =/= CCAFS
Nitpicking over an arbitrary line between the NASA area and the Air Force area.

>Wasn't really a mission for that big a booster unless you are going far out with a crew.
The shuttle was not any smaller of a booster/rocket than the Saturn V
It's just that they wasted most of the payload on a silly orbiter

You can talk about budget forcing them into unwise designs, but we're still talking billions in annual funding, they could have done any sort of space vehicle.

But yea I understand NASA is not an autonomous agency and doesn't get to decide what it wants to do.

>the bad decision that a reusable vehicle was an idea whose time had come.
No, that was absolutely the right idea. After Apollo had demonstrated that landing on the moon was possible, but far too damn expensive, it was time to develop reusability.

The wrong idea was that they could skip from the Wright Flyer (X-15) straight to a 747 (space shuttle) without bothering with steps in between. They needed to build a small, low-cost reusable and work their way up.

Early shuttle concepts had it as a vehicle with just enough room for two seated astronauts and one or two hundred pounds of cargo in the trunk, and this was exactly what they should have built first, and used to visit Skylab. This could have been scaled up in stages, based on experience. The first one didn't even have to integrate the upper stage propulsion, there would have been a substantial benefit just from an efficiently reusable spacecraft capable of controlled landing. The two components (a large suborbital spaceplane, and a small orbital one) could have been developed separately, paired with expendable components, and then combined if both worked well.

Other good concepts to pursue were the big, dumb booster, a rugged pressure-fed splashdown reusable, and a capsule-like propulsive-landing upper stage, with the engine and heat shield one and the same structure. Both were very scalable.

There was lots of stuff they could have worked on in reusability. They were just trying to accomplish too much in one big leap.

Interesting post. Next up on my reading list is an allegedly-not-to-worshipful history of STS, will b interested to see if these concepts are addressed...

haha benis :DDD

:------DDDDDDDD

>Falcon 9 has failed 3 times in 1/4 the flights as the shuttle.
The first "failure" was just an irregularity. The vehicle was built for engine-out capability (which in this case occurred because of a bad batch of alloy) and fully capable of completing the mission. The secondary payload was only dumped because NASA exercised a contract option that allowed them to.

The second failure was a bad strut. It is by no means conventional practice to test individual struts before installation. Other aerospace manufacturers also install them untested. This could have happened to anyone. In response, SpaceX both changed their supplier and began testing struts individually.

The third failure was a failure in pre-launch testing involving a new tanking procedure, not a launch failure. The payload was on top of the rocket at the option of the customer, which is why it was lost. This was an unusually spectacular and costly testing failure, but the purpose of pre-flight testing is to prevent actual launch failures, as this one did. This stemmed from doing two things nobody else has done before: immersing the helium tanks in the liquid oxygen tank, and using subcooled propellant for increased density.

These aren't the kind of failures that indicate a troubled vehicle which will end up having low reliability. Two identified bad suppliers who should have been reliable, and the third was a surprise in testing new technology.

When Ariane 5 was as old as Falcon 9 is now, it had failed 4 times out of only 14 launch attempts (less than half as many as Falcon 9). Since then it has gone 76 launches without a failure.

We are reaching levels of denial that I never thought possible.

>The shuttle was not any smaller of a booster/rocket than the Saturn V
Somewhat smaller.

The Space Shuttle was about 2000 tonnes on the pad could put 135.5 tonnes into LEO, including the fuelled orbiter and external tank.

Saturn V was about 3000 tonnes on the pad and could put 153.5 tonnes into LEO, including the empty 3rd stage.

However, part of the reason the shuttle came so close to putting the same amount in orbit was the near-SSTO parallel staging arrangement, which takes more unnecessary weight all the way to orbit. Stripped of all reusability and crew features, the shuttle would still probably be limited to about a 70 tonne payload, compared to the Saturn V's 140 tonne capacity.

That Saturn V number goes up every time I see it

What happened to the 118 tons that was cited the last 40 years?

Triggered by a realistic assessment?

SpaceX is a new company, so it's not that surprising if they'd get caught out by a couple of bad suppliers before they established the appropriate level of trust in their supply chain, and one or two other failures on a new vehicle is practically guaranteed.

It only seems like their failures are coming close together because they're moving so fast.

There's nobody who started building rockets and just had them all work.

Everybody except SpaceX is the problem.

struts don't "just" fail at 1/3 design load

aluminum is more similar to steel than to composites in that brittle fracture is very unlikely without thousands of loadings and unloadings building up internal stress

spacex missed what should have been an obviously faulty piece or they installed it wrong (NASA believes they installed it wrong, and I tend to agree)

>The third failure was a failure in pre-launch testing involving a new tanking procedure, not a launch failure.
"launch" includes everything from the point the customer hands the satellite to the launch provider up until it separates from the upper stage

the only case in which it wouldn't be considered a launch failure is if the customer didn't lose the payload

What you don't seem to get is that there isn't a problem. It's completely normal to have a few failures early in a rocket's life. This isn't a bad sign or anything, it's expected.

Do you have any idea how many rockets ULA's parent companies and Arianespace have blown up over the years? Are you aware that Atlas V had an irregularity worse than Falcon 9's first one just last March, on its 62nd launch? It has been grounded twice for investigations. By luck alone, Atlas V's two failures didn't cause a loss of payload, because they were on missions that could tolerate the reduced performance.

If it seems like SpaceX is having failures unusually frequently, that's because they're ramping up toward an extremely high flight rate.

The space shuttle was a special case, because it was an always-manned vehicle with no launch escape system, and also an extremely expensive reusable vehicle. Its managers bragged unrealistically that it had a one-in-ten-thousand probability of failure. They were not in a practical, moral, or rhetorical position to defend the program when it turned out to merely have a low-ish failure rate.

>What you don't seem to get is that there isn't a problem.
Pic related isn't a problem?
>It's completely normal to have a few failures early in a rocket's life.
31 flights is not "early" in a rocket's life you retard
>Do you have any idea how many rockets ULA's parent companies and Arianespace have blown up over the years?
Far less per launch than SpaceX.
>Are you aware that Atlas V had an irregularity worse than Falcon 9's first one just last March
Not worse, as no payload was lost.
>It has been grounded twice for investigations.
SpaceX was grounded for launch failures twice in the last two years.
>By luck alone
What? Luck doesn't exist.
>If it seems like SpaceX is having failures unusually frequently, that's because they're ramping up toward an extremely high flight rate.
They've been "ramping up" since late 2014
this is a tired old meme that nobody believes anymore
>The space shuttle was a special case
>everything that proves me wrong is a special case

forgot pic

SpaceX was 100% the problem in their most recent failure.

>struts don't "just" fail at 1/3 design load
That's right, they have to be seriously defective, and for these high-quality aerospace struts, the industry standard practice is to simply trust the supplier after initial verification of their manufacturing and quality control processes.

>spacex missed what should have been an obviously faulty piece
You're an obviously faulty piece. Anyone who has worked with high-strength metal components knows that strength-compromising flaws aren't always visible. The supplier wouldn't have passed along visibly faulty parts. These aren't cheap parts that come straight off a machine and drop into boxes, they at least looked at each one before shipping it.

>NASA believes they installed it wrong
Bullshit. What's your source? SpaceX went through their inventory and found that if they tested enough of them under load, a few of them failed at far under the rated load.

>"launch" includes everything from the point the customer hands the satellite to the launch provider up until it separates from the upper stage
No it doesn't, you dimwit. Ground-handling damage is a separate issue from launch failure. It's covered by different insurance and has different implications.

Furthermore, as I pointed out, it was at the customer's option that the payload be on top of the rocket for preflight tests that had a catastrophic failure potential. They chose that to save money.

I'm partial to forgiving them for that one, since the circumstances of the failure were relatively exotic and reasonably unforeseen before the vehicle exploded - so long as that kind of failure never happens again.

They were running dangerous fuel tests with a customer on board.
Not acceptable.

Customer's decision.

They didn't ask the customer if they were ok with trying to fuel the whole rocket in 10 minutes so their meme landing would be more likely.
>but they were ok with being on board for the static fire
A pad accident in 2016 is unprecedented. The last one in the US was half a century ago.

So was the vehicle configuration. The fact that it hadn't happened in half a century didn't give good reason to expect a major vehicle failure from a procedure modification that the systems were in spec for.

>in spec
No.
They literally didn't even check the thermo effects before running the test. Complete incompetence.

This is why nobody takes you spacex shitters seriously.

Great ad-hominem, bro. I am not a poster who claims SpaceX is infallible, but I'm not going to start chomping at the bit to condemn them in line with the anti-circlejerk.

>amos-6 was the customer's fault!
>crs-7 was the supplier's fault!
>commercial crew delays are NASA's fault!
>FH isn't a priority that's why it's been delayed for 6 years!
>these failures are just growing pains!
>spacex was the first to land rockets!
>cancel NASA and give all the money to spacex!
>killing people is ok when Elon does it
>the russians sabotaged the rocket with a laser weapon!
>ULA shot the rocket with a sniper rifle from their rooftop!
>they will fly ITS before 2022!
Every day you retards lose more an more credibility.

>31 flights is not "early" in a rocket's life you retard
It is in a rocket that's supposed to fly multiple times per a month, and when those flights are divided between three versions with major differences.

Falcon 9 1.0 was a prototype, proof of concept rocket. It used an engine designed to meet the production rate needs of Falcon 1 (which would have needed only one tenth as many Merlin engines) and only flew five times over three years. It had one failure, from a bad supplier.

Falcon 9 1.1 was the first production block. There were major changes from the 1.0, including a new engine, a tank stretch, and the option to experiment with propulsive landing. It first flew in September 2013, less than three and a half years ago. It flew twice in 2013, six times in 2014, and had its failure on its seventh flight of 2015, only halfway through the year. One failure, bad supplier.

Falcon 9 FT was the second major revision. It also featured major changes, including an uprated version of the Merlin 1D, the unprecedented technology of propellant densification, and landing-related upgrades. It first flew in December 2015, barely over a year ago, landed successfully, and immediately kept up the pace of one launch per month. One failure in preflight testing, from a surprising issue related to pioneering a new technology.

Next up is Block 5, intended to be the last major revision, featuring mature reusability and a routinely-available Heavy configuration.

>They've been "ramping up" since late 2014
Wow, late 2014, two years ago, and sixteen successful launches since then. So long. Very not ramping up. I don't think you understand the timescale rocket programs operate on, or what a typical launch rate is. Launching once a month is an extremely high rate.

In Ariane 5's first 7 years, it only flew 14 times, with one major revision, and had 4 failures. Atlas V only flew 19 times in its first 7 years, with no major revisions, and had 1 failure.

see More endless excuse making from the spacex groupies.

Literally the only thing I said was AMOS-6 is forgivable in my eyes.

>They didn't ask the customer if they were ok with trying to fuel the whole rocket in 10 minutes
Yes they did. They discussed it in detail with the customer.

This is a $60+ million rocket launch of a comparably costly satellite, not a $50 tow to a junkyard of a rusty old car. There are people on both sides discussing everything that's going to happen in detail before they do it, because there's a lot to lose and plenty of money floating around to pay teams of people on each side to give their full attention to decisions like this.

>Yes they did. They discussed it in detail with the customer.
No, they didn't.

Go be a chimp somewhere else. You don't know what you're talking about.

See

>amos-6 was the customer's fault!
The customer certainly shared responsibility in the loss of payload.

>crs-7 was the supplier's fault!
Absolutely true. ULA, Arianespace, and MSFC are just as vulnerable to this kind of fuck-up from their suppliers.

>commercial crew delays are NASA's fault!
Absolutely true. They are not doing their side of the work in a timely manner.

>FH isn't a priority that's why it's been delayed for 6 years!
Yup. FH is a configuration of F9, like Delta IV Heavy is the heavy configuration of Delta IV.

>these failures are just growing pains!
Absolutely true.

>spacex was the first to land rockets!
The first to propulsively land boosters used for orbital spaceflight, yes. This is a major advancement and is almost certainly going to result in the first beneficial reusability of an orbital launch vehicle.

>cancel NASA and give all the money to spacex!
MSFC is indeed garbage which should be abolished.

>killing people is ok when Elon does it
Reasonable risks in pursuit of noble goals should be accepted. For instance, the Apollo 1 deaths weren't a valid reason to end the Apollo Program, but the shuttle was a pork program, and Challenger was just shameful.

>the russians sabotaged the rocket with a laser weapon!
>ULA shot the rocket with a sniper rifle from their rooftop!
Peanut gallery comments.

>they will fly ITS before 2022!
Entirely possible, of course not guaranteed.

You're like a monkey throwing shit at people when they talk, not understanding anything they say.

Where I differ from this user is that AMOS-6 should never have resulted in the loss of the customer payload, whether the customer agreed to it or not. SpaceX's right to experimentation ends the instant it could put the payload at risk. If they test the vehicle before launch, they need to make sure it will not impact the customer's schedule. If they test in flight, they don't have a right to do something risky and new with the vehicle until staging. I can forgive them for learning this the hard way, but that doesn't make it acceptable.

>[ULA] are just as vulnerable to this kind of fuck-up from their suppliers.
Tory Bruno specifically stated that ULA tests such components; part of the reason for their large overhead (and uniquely low accident rate.)

Apollo 1 was objectively a worse fuckup than Challenger.

>AMOS-6 should never have resulted in the loss of the customer payload, whether the customer agreed to it or not.
Welcome to the realities of the commercial world, where the gambles you take don't always pay off.

>SpaceX's right to experimentation ends the instant it could put the payload at risk.
It's not a matter of rights, it's a matter of contracts. SpaceX doesn't have a right to experimentation, they have to negotiate launch contracts that allow them to experiment.

SpaceX has only been able to make the rapid progress they have because of changing things on almost every flight. If they had to fly their experiments without a payload, they wouldn't be able to afford it. If customers don't like the balance of risk and cost SpaceX is offering, they can go to Arianespace or ULA, or talk to the Russians, Chinese, or Indians. They can also accept prices never coming down for them in the future, because they're demonstrating that the market is price insensitive and risk intolerant.

>Tory Bruno specifically stated that ULA tests such components
Source? These are struts. They're like bolts. It's not normal to test them. Testing them also imposes a risk of damage and weakening.

>uniquely low accident rate
Atlas V only missed losing a payload last year by sheer luck: the failure of the first stage reduced performance, but it happened to not be enough for the payload to be lost. Ariane 5 has more consecutively-successful launches than Atlas V has had launches at all.

They're working on it just hold your horses.

youtube.com/watch?v=IJjGUd5VG84

>Apollo 1 was objectively a worse fuckup than Challenger.
Apollo 1 killed 3 military-background astronauts who had heroically signed up to participate in what was billed as "the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked". It happened when NASA and orbital spaceflight itself were both under ten years old, to people preparing to take part in what would have been only the 27th manned spaceflight ever. It was groundbreaking work in service of real exploration under significant time pressure.

The Challenger disaster killed 7, four of which were civilians, including two women, one of which was someone lacking all qualifications chosen specifically as an "ordinary person" to emphasize how routine and safe space flight had become thanks to the space shuttle. It happened when NASA and orbital spaceflight were nearly thirty years old, after men had walked on the moon and spent months in orbit aboard various space stations, and after hundreds of orbital launches. It was in service of a deeply dishonest pork program which served primarily as an obstacle to any real advancement in spaceflight.

We could debate all day which was the more egregious engineering/management/operational failure in the context of the time, but Challenger sacrificed more than twice as many lives, of people dramatically less informed of the risk, for an inestimably poorer cause.

>These are struts. They're like bolts.

...

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It's not about efficiency, it's about reusability. No one seriously expects Falcon accomplish useful things. It's merely a milestone that needs to be reached on the way to real innovation.

...

The only two space entities today that have "reused" anything are NASA and Blue origin.

>No one seriously expects Falcon accomplish useful things
Launching satellites at a lower price is useful. Even without re-usability this tech is cheaper, with it it's wildly cheaper.

Look, I understand being skeptical. Musk is kind of a cunt and is infamous for cutting corners and missing milestones, but this kind of technology is a good thing. Reusable rockets are a fucking game-changer. By the time we're old men, people will proibably regard going into space as not THAT big of a deal, akin to buying a nice car.

Even if Elon fails,other people will step in and try this again,whether it's Bezos or some other billionaire or a state. Because it's massively useful. The sheer cost of putting things into orbit strangles our access to space,if you could cut that in half,or even more, you'd do a lot of good.

$60 mil vs $125 mil per launch doesn't matter when insurance costs $100 mil and the satellite costs $600 mil

>This stemmed from doing two things nobody else has done before: immersing the helium tanks in the liquid oxygen tank, and using subcooled propellant for increased density.
Not just that, but also having using a COPV tank
If it wasn't for the carbon exploding with the LOX + ignition source nothing would have happened.
A titanium tank would have been fine

>A titanium tank would have been fine
An oxygen impermeable fiberglass wrapped COPV would have been fine too.

>By the time we're old men, people will proibably regard going into space as not THAT big of a deal, akin to buying a nice car.

Some of us are already old men, and heard this song a time or two before.

Not saying I don't hope it's really true this time. But I'm from Earth, the "Show Me Planet."

I assure you that 50 million dollars always matters
Even if you are spending 500+ million total on the launch

Sure, that was an important part of the problem, but I don't think COPVs were new.

>$60 mil vs $125 mil per launch doesn't matter when insurance costs $100 mil and the satellite costs $600 mil
It matters when you start developing technology and producing duplicates. For instance, you can take that savings and throw up a second $5 mil satellite that's just a cobbled-together testbed for some things you'd like to consider using on your next gen vehicle. Or you can buy some space on a DragonLab flight that's cheap because the launches are.

Another thing is that when SpaceX gets up to speed, they're going to be able to launch on short notice. You'll be able to order a launch one month, and see your payload in orbit the next month, because they've got a bunch of reusable boosters sitting around ready to go, and they can produce enough upper stages to fly twice a week. The current (and pre-SpaceX) situation is a years-long waiting list.

If the satellite + insurance + launch now costs $825 million, then it'll pay off fast to buy some cheap, quick-turnaround development launches to iterate cost-reduction strategies.

I've mentioned this in every STS bitching thread. It (1969-1979) was simply a different era, everyone back then (NASA, defense contractors, Congress, regular people) had unrealistic expectations for the future of flight. Everyone seriously thought that by 1990 supersonic flight would be the norm and by 2000 hypersonic (ie LEO) flight would be commercially viable. They expected ramjet tech to evolve a lot faster than it did.

In that situation, the Shuttle made a lot of sense. It could have eventually had it's engines replaced with newer ones, allowing for smaller internal fuel tanks. It even had a huge cargo bay which could be used for something like a ramjet engine allowing for the boosters could be eliminated. Future shuttles would have integrated advancements in tech and be SSTOs. The original Orbiter itself would have been phased out by the early 90s.

It didn't happen due to Congress's decision to deregulate the airlines in 1978, switching the industry from monopolastic to perfectly competitive. As a result, airlines no longer had lots of spare money to throw at manufacturers for R&D. This has more or less stalled aerospace tech, which since 1980 has been based completely on implementing fly-by-wire control systems but not much else. This accounts for Boeing's newest aircraft, the 787, which is made out of composites that increase fuel efficiency but not speed.

In hindsight it looks stupid but this is a situation where you need to actually look back at contemporary sources (again 1969-79) and the decision to build the shuttle makes a lot of sense. It was only by the late 80s, when TWA and Pan-Am started having financial problems, did people realize that it wasn't such an amazing idea. Which is how we got Orion/Ares V, which would have been flying by last year if not for 9/11 causing the government to reorganize the military/intelligence superstructure (at great cost) in the early 00s.

The Shuttle was meant to eventually create a private space industry, it was supposed to be the "DC9 for space". That didn't pan out.

it is called miniaturization

>Reusable rockets are a fucking game-changer.

They are, but regular people won't see the gains.

>By the time we're old men, people will proibably regard going into space as not THAT big of a deal, akin to buying a nice car.

Not with rockets, reusable ones especially are too complicated a setup to allow for mass market access. A 100-200 seat SSTO is needed for that, something about the size of the STS (which is one of the reasons why NASA built it) but capable of landing on a regular 12,000 foot airport runway. But even then people will bitch about noise (remember that SSTOs are noise machines as they have to be going mach 35 to escape gravity) meaning that the nascent spaceflight industry would have to deal with hardcore NIMBYism unless they want to be constrained to MIA, ATL and JFK.

Fantasies and rhetoric totally divorced from reality isn't really what it was "meant" to do

See my points here , back in 1975 it wasn't unreasonable to assume that supersonic flight would be normal by 1990 as would hypersonic flight be by 2000.

You think an engineer in 1975 would say something like that?

>It even had a huge cargo bay which could be used for something like a ramjet engine allowing for the boosters could be eliminated.
>It didn't happen due to Congress's decision to deregulate the airlines
You have no idea what you're talking about. You're just imagining things and typing them out. There was never any plan for "something like a ramjet engine", a ramjet absolutely could not eliminate the boosters, nor could it be installed in the cargo bay, and none of this had anything to do with airline deregulation.

The problem with the shuttle was not that they tried to build a spaceplane RLV, but the way they did it. Instead of building a minimum viable product to shuttle astronauts to and from the space station, they went straight for a heavy lift vehicle with exotic capabilities despite their complete lack of experience, they compromised the design process by handing out contracts to politically-connected groups instead of choosing who would do the best work. Worst of all, they continued even after it became obvious that it wouldn't work right or provide any benefits over expendable vehicles. The real insanity, of course, was continuing to fly it for three decades, with no hope of it ever getting better.

Supersonic flight didn't become the commercial norm because it was more costly and the noise was unacceptable over land. An intercontinental flight is an expensive thing, largely because of fuel consumption. Hardly anyone wants to pay twice as much just to get there in half the time.

It's the same sort of reason we don't drive 300 mph on the highway. Cars could do it, but it's not practical or economical.

>Hardly anyone wants to pay twice as much just to get there in half the time.
lol
People would GLADLY pay twice as much to get there in half the time
They pay twice as much for nicer accomodations in the plane

The problem with the concorde was that it was like 10 times as much, and could only fly super sonic over water

>People would GLADLY pay twice as much to get there in half the time
A FEW people. Most won't.

>They pay twice as much for nicer accomodations in the plane
...so you think these same people would accept being crammed in like cattle to have a shorter (but still long) flight, or that they'd pay four times as much? Most people opt for cheap seats.

>and could only fly super sonic over water
That's what we're talking about: intercontinental flights only, because supersonic flight over land is too much of a nuisance to be tolerated.

>The problem with the concorde was that it was like 10 times as much
That's what happens when hardly anyone is willing to pay twice as much. You do all the development work of something like the Concorde, and then you only build 20 planes and have to amortize your development over the flights of those few planes, while 747s get built by the hundred and spawn imitators.

Incidentally, the Concorde consumed approximately triple the fuel per passenger-mile as the 747, and travelled at a peak of about two and a half times the speed.

It was rising oil prices more than anything else that killed it.

boomsupersonic.com/
soon