Space Shuttle Concepts

Byeman said:
Shuttle put reuse on the wrong portion of the vehicle.
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It did make some sense at the time - Crewed spacecrafts aren't cheap, Apollo CSM were quite expensive, and most importantly their production cost scaled the worst out of all the Saturn hardware at higher production rate.

Nasa wanted a high flight rate crewed spacecraft, with this goal, it was, based on their own experience, cheaper to focus on reusing the "Orbiter" than the "Booster"

It's also likely a fully reusable VTHL shuttle wouldn't have done any miracle, better, yes, not SpaceX better, this required better technologies, different goals, and different organisations, and different funding source.
 
TheKutKu said:
It did make some sense at the time - Crewed spacecrafts aren't cheap, Apollo CSM were quite expensive, and most importantly their production cost scaled the worst out of all the Saturn hardware at higher production rate.

Nasa wanted a high flight rate crewed spacecraft, with this goal, it was, based on their own experience, cheaper to focus on reusing the "Orbiter" than the "Booster"

It's also likely a fully reusable VTHL shuttle wouldn't have done any miracle, better, yes, not SpaceX better, this required better technologies, different goals, and different organisations, and different funding source.
Click to expand...
Not really. NASA wanted a high flight rate launch vehicle. It thought crew needed to operate it. Crew was not need for most of the shuttle missions. That was the fallacy.

See my thread on alternative Shuttle
 
Byeman said:
Not really. NASA wanted a high flight rate launch vehicle. It thought crew needed to operate it. Crew was not need for most of the shuttle missions. That was the fallacy.

See my thread on alternative Shuttle
Click to expand...

To be fair, the NASA Astronaut Corps pushed a crew on every flight as a requirement. There were a lot of assumptions that the Shuttle design was based on that should have been more heavily questioned.

Randy
 
RanulfC said:
To be fair, the NASA Astronaut Corps pushed a crew on every flight as a requirement. There were a lot of assumptions that the Shuttle design was based on that should have been more heavily questioned.

Randy
Click to expand...
not in the beginning
 
Byeman said:
Not really. NASA wanted a high flight rate launch vehicle. It thought crew needed to operate it. Crew was not need for most of the shuttle missions. That was the fallacy.
Click to expand...
Ironically, the Buran orbiter carbon copy proved that on its one and only flight.
 
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@RAP : thanks for that link. It is a bit of a hodgepodge of Shuttle artwork, from 1969 to the late 1970's. Fully reusable or not, space tug, SBSP 1977 (Space Based Solar Power, O'Neill and Peter Glaser).

There are also some Triamese stuff, including Triamese elements as boosters clustered around an expendable rocket core (the irony being that partially expendable system would work better than Triamese itself).
 
fightingirish said:
Hi folks,
just for your info,
@numbers station posted a few pictures showing space shuttle concepts at his blog and at his flickr site. :) :cool:
Links:
e05.code.blog

Station E05

e05.code.blog e05.code.blog
www.flickr.com

Numbers Station

Explore Numbers Station’s 710 photos on Flickr!
www.flickr.com www.flickr.com
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It occurred to me that the V-shaped external tank for Lockheed's Starclipper might be thought of as a lifting body of sorts, and if so, might it be taken a step further to be recoverable?

I suppose it would win or loose after looking at the numbers for weight and cost of the necessary thermal shielding, control surfaces and landing gear (chutes & airbags, or nose-first dive into the sea, maybe).

KLM sponsored a Delft study a few years ago for a civil airliner concept called the Flying V and successfully tested a flying scale model. (I still don't think than any sort of flying or even blended wing airliner would be viable if you have passengers sitting too far from the axis, but that's another story.)

 

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