Are there many pictures of Space Shuttles in space? It seems the crews took pictures of other things rather than the truck they went to space in.
(Of course I didn't look very hard either, so don't slap me down too hard.)
The world STILL needs to put something like this back into space.
NASA has their archive online.
I'm still waiting for Elon or someone else with the financial might to construct one of these and send it into deep space:
In reply to 1988RedT2 :
I bet that'd make a heck of a book series.
Wait...
I think it'll be sometime before we see another shuttle program from anyone. The Russians weren't very successful with their copycat and NASA is going to be very risk averse to something like that after the issues we saw late in that program.
What part of the shuttle do you want back? Superheavy is going to have the lift and volume capability and it will be able to land. There's a crew in space RIGHT NOW getting ready for a spacewalk from a capsule.
You definitely don't want the cost of the shuttle back, it was extraordinarily expensive to fly. It was also prone to extensive delays and killed two crews.
If there's a way to make money by shooting people into space, private-sector corporations will be doing it tomorrow. We don't need no NASA!
This from a long-time NASA fan. Just stating a fact.
DirtyBird222 said:I think it'll be sometime before we see another shuttle program from anyone. The Russians weren't very successful with their copycat and NASA is going to be very risk averse to something like that after the issues we saw late in that program.
The "big spaceplane" design model has fundamental safety flaws due to the "staging from the side" approach. It both exposes safety-critical parts (the heat shield) to damage at launch, and also makes a launch escape system very difficult to implement.
There are only a few things you could do with the shuttle that you can't do with Dragon. Cross-range landing capability is a feature that the military wanted (has no real commercial use); and while the ability to go up, grab a satellite, and bring it back down is cool, it's not really all that useful. The big one it's missing is the ability to bring up a space station module on the same launch as the crew and use the robot arm to install it. The lack of the robot arm is one reason why Dragon can't do a shuttle-style servicing mission for Hubble.
In theory Starship should allow both of those things, although it's got its own crew safety concerns.
The other big problem with the space truck is that wings are big and heavy and wasted mass.
Starship has more cargo volume than the ISS has interior space IIRC. Instead of launching a bunch of components and assembling, you just leave the Starship up there.
The big difference between Starship and the Shuttle is that the former will continue to develop and evolve. The Shuttle never really finished development because it was just so crazy expensive, so all of the various improvements it needed just didn't happen. There's no reason a Starship couldn't be fitted with a Canadarm, for example. It will likely always pull more Gs on reentry.
1988RedT2 said:If there's a way to make money by shooting people into space, private-sector corporations will be doing it tomorrow. We don't need no NASA!
This from a long-time NASA fan. Just stating a fact.
They're not doing it tomorrow. They did it two days ago :) There's a crew of 4 in orbit right now, about to do the first spacewalks by private citizens. It's the fifth non-NASA flight of a Crew Dragon.
https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=polarisdawn
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Kinda proves my point. 
And I stand corrected as for the usefulness vs expense of the Shuttle.
Meanwhile,
Fantastic.
It was a cool looking machine for sure, it's still what a spacecraft looks like to the bulk of the population.
About those costs? It's eye-opening how much they've dropped. According to Wikipedia: (with some correction for inflation, but it may be inconsistent) as well as this NSF thread.
Launch Vehicle Payload cost per kg
Vanguard $1,000,000
Space Shuttle $54,500
Electron $19,039
Ariane 5G $9,167
Atlas V $8,150
Vulcan $7,750
Soyuz 2.1a $5,000-ish
Long March 3B $4,412
Proton $4,320
Falcon 9 $2,720
Falcon Heavy $1,500
The ambitious stretch goal for Starship is to improve on Falcon Heavy by one or two orders of magnitude. Will they get there? It's going to be fun to find out, but it's fair to say that the more of your rocket you can reuse (with minimal refurb), the better. I don't know if there are any estimates/publicly stated goals for New Glenn yet.
Of that list, I think only the Shuttle and Falcon 9 are human-rated. The Falcon doesn't require people to fly, the Shuttle did.
You'll need to log in to post.
