Would we have been better off without it and just improved on the Saturn V design/made a successor rocket?

Demands of the military.
Their spy-sats were near-duplicates of Hubble. (Actually, the other way round. The military did it first. When Hubble was being built, guys from the DoD saw what mistakes they were making but weren't allowed to say anything.) and the military wanted cross-range capability so it could land at many of their bases.

The IDEA wasn't bad. But it got watered-down and revised so many times by political and budgetary pressures that what we got was nowhere near the original plan.
Both parties share the blame for the mess.

The are many histories.
>space.com/12085-nasa-space-shuttle-history-born.html
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle

In hindsight, of course, that's obvious. But you could argue they had to develop and fly the Shuttle to find out that reusability wasn't going to be as easy as they thought.

Whether they had to keep the thing alive for 30 years after it clearly wasn't what it was supposed to be is another matter.

It's a rather awkward design that consumed a decent amount of weight in engines that it didn't use in space. Buran seemed better thought out in that regard.

Yes. Not throwing away the expensive main engines is awkward design. Luckily the superior Russian technology solved the issue by throwing them away.

Considering how much of an expensive pain in the ass it was to maintain between flights and that Soyuz put things in orbit at about a quarter of the price, the Russians may very well have been right.

Of course. Based Russia > everyone else.

I wonder how many fish that would kill on launch

Reuse was a failure. Buran was odd, built primarily to return large payloads from LEO to Earth. The Soviets built it because they didn't understand what the shuttle was for, and were afraid to lack a capability the Americans had. But Energia was superior to the shuttle as a launch vehicle, at least in potential, had there been funding to continue using it.

>you could argue they had to develop and fly the Shuttle to find out that reusability wasn't going to be as easy as they thought.
No, it was obvious when they finalized the concept that it couldn't deliver cost savings on payload launch. The external tank cost at least as much as a complete expendable rocket would for that payload. They kept the costs of a super-heavy-lift rocket, while delivering the performance of a heavy-lift rocket.

And for crew flights, while a reusable winged or lifting-body craft was a very good idea to get away from single-use splashdown capsules, it was extremely implausible that integration with a heavy-lift cargo upper stage would improve on it, and it clearly wasn't a good idea for their first crack at it to try something so huge.

Here's from before the shuttle launch, how it was obvious from public information that it was going to be a trainwreck:
freerepublic.com/focus/news/835107/posts

Basically, the shuttle program was the same sort of thing as SLS. The US aerospace industry had gotten accustomed to the Apollo money, and the shuttle was a way to keep it flowing, with a lot of bullshit about how good the thing they're making would be, and how it could do things that it obviously couldn't.

And a 1.5% failure rate with 40% of the fleet being catastrophically destroyed is pretty pathetic while putting things in orbit to the tune of $20k per kg is pretty sad.

A L L O F T H E M

If the idea has to be watered down immensely, then the IDEA is bad, and NASA could have pushed back, legislators can't/won't force them into design choices.

It doesn't matter what the DoD wanted, DoD gave them no money & signed no contracts.

Anyways, thats all really old news at this point, people still defend NASA when they are still doing the same shit today though.. thats the real problem.
Hopefully Trump can make serious changes at NASA over this year, or nothing is going to happen in his two terms.

The 1.5% failure rate is fine. That's pretty good for orbital launch and re-entry. The problem in that regard was that they weren't being realistic about it, about the evidence that it would be true for this vehicle in particular and about the near-inevitability of it being true for a class of vehicle that can't fly tens of thousands of times to work all the bugs out.

Rockets aren't going to be safe like airliners until they fly the number of flights that airliners do. They're extreme high-performance vehicles and they're inherently dangerous. You can't solve all of the problems in simulations and paperwork. You've got to discover safety considerations by doing the launches and having accidents.

You're only going to get safe rockets by making cheap rockets and flying them multiple times per day.

Maybe, but it is likely that the "exciting new shuttle that is going to be reusable and drive costs down" meme helped get at least a little more funding than would have been the case with "Let's build more, better Saturns."

After the Space Race ended, the level of spending was going to drop by a fuck-ton no matter what.

While a better system than STS was certainly possible from the engineering point of view, I'm not convinced anything that did not have some flashy new promises would have been funded at all.

With any question that involves "Why didn't they...?" the answer is almost certainly going to be "Money."

I came here to post this.

Obviously depends on launch location but likely no more than a single trawler would haul up in a day.

Yes, but really only because of military fiddling.

>If the idea has to be watered down immensely, then the IDEA is bad, and NASA could have pushed back, legislators can't/won't force them into design choices.

So your position is that a great idea that would cost 2 squillion dollars is a bad idea if the budget is set at 1 squillion dollars and you have to water down your original idea to meet the new budget.

Of course, the watered down by budget version is likely to be a bad idea, but you seem to be saying the original idea was necessarily bad as well.

>legislators can't/won't force them into design choices.

Senator Proxmire would like a word with you.

Budget realities, set by legislators, did force massive design changes.

BTW, youngsters have no idea how much loathing the name "Proxmire" produces in the hearts of older space enthusiasts.

I am getting mad just sitting here typing his name twice.

The idea was great the execution was a disaster.

>money
Not in this case. At least, not in the sense of saving money.

>Why not put the glider on top of a rocket, instead strapped alongside?
They wanted to send the engines to orbit, and retrieve them. The retrieval was easier without the tank, so they had to put it off to the side.

The space shuttle was meant to be an incremental step toward achieving the ultimate goal of an airliner-like single-stage-to-orbit rocket, that you'd just refuel and fly to space, with no staging or anything. If you look at X-33, that's what it was supposed to be leading up to, presumably with continuing incremental improvements after that until maintenance was rarely needed between flights.

>Space shuttle
>saving money

as with all things government, they cut corners to save cash
they did not succeed

>And for crew flights, while a reusable winged or lifting-body craft was a very good idea to get away from single-use splashdown capsules, it was extremely implausible that integration with a heavy-lift cargo upper stage would improve on it, and it clearly wasn't a good idea for their first crack at it to try something so huge.
Agreed, but it seems like they were kinda stuck doing this. If you make the shuttle just a crew vehicle, what's it going to do in space? You'd need a heavy lift vehicle to put up space station modules for it to visit, but that would mean retaining Saturn hardware as well as developing the shuttle, which they didn't have the budget to do. So the shuttle had to be an all-in-one system, delivering large payloads and crew.

When you look at it that way it probably was a mistake from the beginning as they were just not ready to make a vehicle that could do that efficiently. They should have just continued Saturn while developing things like the X-33 as someone said, and some kind of small lifting body crew vehicle that could have gone on a Saturn IB or something. But after riding high on the Apollo years they probably thought they could do anything.

>If you make the shuttle just a crew vehicle, what's it going to do in space?
Visit Skylab. Build a Mir-style modular station with smaller modules launched by Titan rockets.

>the shuttle had to be an all-in-one system, delivering large payloads and crew.
Nope. This made no practical sense. They scaled it up to the point of idiocy because they wanted a big-budget project to keep the cash flowing after Apollo.

Reasonable experimentation with small splashdown boosters and glider crew vehicles and upper stages would have been too affordable to keep the pork flowing, mere Gemini-scale projects.

>retaining Saturn hardware as well as developing the shuttle, which they didn't have the budget to do
Keeping Saturn V alive while developing reusability on the small scale would have been feasible. In fact, they could have made incremental development of reusability (as well as progressive cost-reduction) part of the Saturn V program.

>riding high on the Apollo years they probably thought they could do anything
The people in charge knew it was a scam.

The greatest things that never saw light. What a fucking shame

The lift capacity is almost equal to the current total mass of ISS. Imagine what we could build with that type of lift capability.

I'd think there has been a fortunate coincidence. The space shuttle being the 'doomed from the start' program it became, did eventually lead the NASA into paying private sector for launches, allowing players like SpaceX and soon others to exist and grow. And by growing, meaning growing at a rate not possible for any national space agency, with a fraction of the budget.

While much more could've been achieved by Saturn V or any similarly capable super-heavy lift successor, the costs of launches would've still been bloated as hell, and would've remained that way to this day and into who knows how long into the future.

While an alternate world where NASA had Saturn V -like capabilites might have had a moon base and a mars mission by now, the growth of space infrastructure would've been slower, and would've been greatly surpassed in our soon to be completely private sector dominated universe by the year 2050.

I suppose you're right, we were doomed to this timeline as soon as the space race ended and it became about money rather than just achieving things because fuck it we can.

I'd think there has been a fortunate coincidence. The space shuttle being the 'doomed from the start' program it became, did eventually lead the NASA into paying private sector for launches, allowing players like SpaceX and soon others to exist and grow. And by growing, meaning growing at a rate not possible for any national space agency, with a fraction of the budget.

While much more could've been achieved by Saturn V or any similarly capable super-heavy lift successor, the costs of launches would've still been bloated as hell, and would've remained that way to this day and into who knows how long into the future.

While an alternate world where NASA had Saturn V -like capabilites might have had a moon base and a mars mission by now, the growth of space infrastructure would've been slower, and would've been greatly surpassed in our soon to be completely private sector dominated universe by the year 2050.

So in that sense, we were FAR better off with the shuttle. At least, if you're less than 50. Older than that and you're probably somewhat (rightfully so) bitter for the slow/non-existent progress since the Apollo program.

It was never aboit that. It was about waving our dicks at the Soviets while trying to convince non aligned nations that our social philosophy was better than that of the USSR.

Sure, but that's what I meant. Going to the moon was not a business decision, or a responsible use of taxpayer money for scientific research, or anything like that. It was just "look what we can fucking do", and once there was no longer any drive to do things like that the space program inevitably took a different direction.

>moved on to
Sea Dragon was in direct competition with the Saturn V, it was designed in the early 60's but was never seriously considered because the problems the engineers were facing with combustion instability in the F-1 prototypes made a 75 foot engine nozzle seem impossible.

literally not the point faggot.

Space Shuttle was objectively an expensive boondoggle that failed to deliver EVERY initial design goal, more often than not be orders of magnitude.
Soyuz, while far less ambitious, has had a great track record and accomplished exactly what it was meant to do.
If the Americans had shifted focus after Apollo towards developing highly reliable, expendable launch vehicles and crewed spacecraft right away instead of building Shuttle and keeping it alive for 30 years we would be further along by now.

Or be completely irrelevant as the Soviet Progress craft proved you didn't necessarily need a manned resupply vehicle for a space station

>They should have just continued Saturn while developing things like the X-33 as someone said, and some kind of small lifting body crew vehicle that could have gone on a Saturn IB or something

I'm lukewarm on this. What they really should have done was combine both the Saturn IB and the Saturn V hardware into one launch vehicle, using a single F-1 engine and J-2 engine each on the first and second stages, and develop an Apollo 2.0 capsule meant for long period low Earth orbit missions to stations. Hell, they could have even added the capability to attach optional solid boosters for unmanned cargo flights if they wanted. Have each program focus on developing new manufacturing technology to build better versions of the engines, tanks and capsules they already had. This would simultaneously provide an increased level of performance for the Saturn 2 rocket, as well as make it cheaper and faster to build than the Saturn IB was. This new Saturn 2 would have had *more* up-mass capability than the Shuttle did, and for hundreds of millions of dollars less. There would also have been far smaller of a gap in American access to space, since updating an already existing capsule design would not take as long as developing the entire Shuttle did.

America would have kept the ability to launch station hardware, humans, heavy satellites, and so on. Everything except Moon missions, really. They would have been free to stay active in space while at the same time developing new hardware for successor vehicles. Reusable hardware could then be approached in a more sensible way, with the same kind of learn-as-you-fly mentality that SpaceX has today.

Man, that made me think. To be thirty and see America go from breaking the sound barrier to landing on the Moon in a couple decades, then seeing essentially ZERO progress and dying at 92 having just heard the Constellation program was cancelled in 2007.

People at the time of the Moon landings really must not have thought that they were right at the tail end of the golden age of manned space exploration, moments before the entire organization would get bogged down in the Shuttle development and flight program for more than 30 years.

Unless we're totally fucked by the Kessler syndrome first

here are two facts that might interest you.

>At no point during the Vietnam war did a majority of Americans oppose it
>At no point during the Apollo program did a majority of Americans support further exploration after a successful moonshot.

We can shit on the government all we want, but at the end of the day it's the constituent's fault too.
It's sad but it's true.

America is wasted on Americans.

Fucking Americans, ruining America for the rest of us. Wish the robots would take over sooner rather than later desu

> that would cost 2 squillion dollars
?
So you do the same thing and try to save money, NASA had room for vast amounts of money saving.
We know that most of the cost increases is just NASA bureaucrats screwing around with contractors, adding new requirements halfway through.

Lets be honest here, you want to claim that NASA would have produced a successful fully reusable vehicle if they had gotten twice the budget? More likely they would have just wasted twice as much money.

NASA's goal with the space shuttle was for private services to eventually buy into it. It seemed reasonable in an era when the majority of jet travel was expected to be supersonic by 1990 and private LEO flights commonplace by 2010. It didn't pan out because ultimately priorities changed, and Americans did not want either supersonic travel or expanded spaceflight.

Yet they went from Japanese Internment to the Civil Rights Act and then gay marriage. Boomers considered civil rights to be the defining issue of their era, and they delivered on it culminating with their greatest achievement: electing the first black President into office in 2008. Their greatest upset was the first woman President being denied in 2016. inb4 /pol/, that's not my angle. Just look at the priorities of HW, Clinton, Bush and Obama: healthcare and education reform. Boomers don't care about space exploration, they only care about practical on the ground issues because big rockets launched to some far off place is completely irrelevant to their daily lives. But then Obama let transgender students use whatever bathroom they wanted, a massive civil rights victory.

Hilariously modern SJWs tend to not be like this, because hardcore SJWs also unquestionably believe that America is being hacked by China and Russia, who seek to destroy America from the inside. Part of this is the RD-180 engine scandal and the fact that Soyuz is still launching while NASA has nothing. As insane as they are, they at least care which is head and shoulders above their parents.

Not only that but consider that healthcare and education reform has been the priority of the US government since Eisenhower, it was a lawsuit over education access (Brown v. Board of Education) that forced civil rights as a national issue in 1954. That was 64 years ago and it still hasn't stopped being the defining problem every President sets to fix. That's what people care about, and are willing to vote over. Where does spaceflight fit in? Few could have imagined NASA would actually go to the moon in ten years when it was created in 1958, but regardless the Greatest Generation made the decision to fund it out of concerns over the (then) recent flight of Sputnik in 1957. Then Boomers gradually obtained more and more control.

Brown vs Board destroyed the American public school, what a disaster, they should dig up and desecrate the graves of those supreme court justices

And if it wasn't for Elon Musk & SpaceX

Blue Origin would still be fucking around with suborbital nonsense, Virgin Galactic would still be killing pilots, and NASA would spend the next 30 years doing stupid shit in lunar orbit

I see you too have read Eyes Turned Skywards.

No space shuttles look cool

IIC the US military imposed two particularly difficult constraints. It had to lift a 50 ton payload and it had to always be able to land in the continental US. Meeting these requirements pushed engineering tolerances over the edge and destroyed its re-usability.

I came here to post this

That's gigantic

Are they even working on SLS anymore? I swear to god all they do is run these RS-25 tests every week or two. How many times do they need to test engines that have been fired a gorillion times before?

They've still never fired four of them together, or with the 5-segment solid boosters. This is important, because during shuttle development, they initially planned to skip testing the three engines together, but eventually reason prevailed and they did it, and they found that the engines shook each other apart, so they needed to go back and fix the design. Then when they flew it, they found the boosters cause the turbines to crack and lose blades, so the engines had a significant probability of failure each time they flew and needed to be overhauled between flights.

What happens when they fire four engines together may push back the first launch by years.

Not to mention, Mike Pence just inspected NASA's leaning launch tower in Florida. He says they'll spend $1 billion dollars on it and it'll explode after one use!

Would Sea Dragon have still worked as a multi-engine design?

These old engines, up until the Merlin by SpaceX were all extremely expensive, you can't go "just add engines" if your engines cost 50 million each

Thats part of the reason they've been using solids so much

>google Proxmire
>Democrat
f u c k i n g

I'm a neophyte when it comes to space stuff, so when I say multi-engine, I'm describing something with a cluster of nozzles at the bottom not unlike the Saturn.

The whole point of Sea Dragon and other BDBs was to be as simple as possible with as few parts as possible, basically just a giant tank with an explosion coming out of one end. If it used multiple smaller engines then it would just be a normal rocket, albeit a very big one.

If you just mean the launching from water part, sure, I don't see why not.

Saturn V was a "cost is no matter" rocket that actually had a payload + a purpose for being so big.
They can't justify a billion dollar rocket for any commercial reason, nor could NASA today build a rocket on the scale of the Saturn V for anywhere close to a billion each

A one use launch tower for a one use rocket
I see no issue

It's funny seeing Dems on NSF or other liberal sites fantastizing about when the Dems take over they will totally change things lol

Don't they understand that the SLS is a bi-partisan jobs project that is kept alive by both republican and democrat senators, who want to maintain it because of the jobs it creates in their states. It doesn't matter if the next president is republican or democrat, they will not cancel or overhaul the SLS program out of fear of losing support in the senate.

Fusion powered Space plane launching and docking with fusion powered interplanetary vessel that can reach Mars in 2-3 days is best way.
>watch the brainlets refute this
radiate this mortal coil fagoo's.

fusion would be ideal, but we still lack the net-positive miniaturized fusion reactors that would require
the few companies working on getting one built have fuck all funding to use, and government attempts are ITER

>This is important, because during shuttle development, they initially planned to skip testing the three engines together, but eventually reason prevailed and they did it, and they found that the engines shook each other apart, so they needed to go back and fix the design.

so why do they keep firing single engines? you can only get so much data and vary parameters for one engine before they say - lets rig up 4 together and see what happens

The shuttle came to be because the rockets were considered dated expensive tech of the past and probably too nazi for everyone's tastes. The future belonged to luxury space planes that were just around the corner anyway so might as well get one early and by doing so save money, demonstrate technological capability, and fill some pockets. What a disaster.

>dude lets use these extremely finicky reusable engines we scavenged from the surviving Shuttles and strap them on an expendable vehicle
Do they even have plans to produce more after they run out of the left over SSMEs?

>Do they even have plans to produce more after they run out of the left over SSMEs?
they said they would start a new factory in huntsville

blue origin is probably farther along in their huntsville factory

...

>implying the engines won't last them 2-3 decades worth of launches
They'll all be comfortably retired by the time that's an issue.

They have plans for a new version of the RS-25 that will supposedly be cheaper since it won't be built to be reusable.

Yes they even signed a contract at 200 mil$ per each new engine.

I'm surprised anons don't talk about the Fusion one F1 reactor. It seems to be the breakthrough we all deserve.

>RS-25 that will supposedly be cheaper since it won't be built to be reusable.

so the RS68?

are they building it, or is it still on paper
if it's still on paper, it might as well not exist

I believe it has been sucessfuly peer reviewed and that they are currently running simulations on supercomputers to validate there findings. They plan on building fully functional net-positive reactors in a couple of years. Here is there website.
fusionone.co/
And here is a paper that goes more into detail
arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/3_VOLBERG.pdf

>the breakthrough we all deserve.
Do you mean it's a hoax, or that it'll blow up and destroy the city it's turned on in?

>nuclear reactors
>exploding