As a kid I thought the shuttle was awesome. As an adult I'm horrified by it. Damn near every tile was custom and snowflake. Orbiter had to be stripped down to the frame every launch. Tanks required major refurbishing... Massive gaping black hole of endless funding that bled NASA dry for years. My suburban school system failed teaching anything whatsoever about the Saturn V. Everything in the 80's and 90's catered to the space truck, even after the tragedies and slow launch schedules. It did a great job at keeping kids interested in big-space after the cold war ended though.
Joe Sutter aka "father of the 747" gave a talk at the UW School of Aeronautics and Astronautics after the Challenger disaster in 1986. [0] He was on the Rogers Commission with Feynman and others that investigated the root causes.
The thing that still sticks in my head was his description of the shuttle as an experimental vehicle, which he described as having 700 "critical" components. Critical in this case means that if that component fails you lose the vehicle. He stated that by contrast the 747 had zero critical parts.
It's still the best engineering talks I've ever heard.
What counts as a component in this context? Obviously it couldn’t fly without a wing. (I would like to use this stat to comfort someone who doesn’t like flying)
They could have made a new one and launched that instead. The Hubble cost, up through launch, was $6.6B in today's dollars. [1] Making a second one would have been expensive, but less than that since you can reuse the design, software, and much of the experience.
The shuttle program cost $269B in today's dollars [2] so you need a lot of other benefits, not just fixing the Hubble.
I would also believe that they could have done all of the Hubble servicing missions with a capsule-style vehicle. If they had involved loading it into the payload bay and bringing it back to Earth to service on the ground, sure. But they were all done onsite, and you can do spacewalks from a capsule, too. I admittedly don't know any of the details, but I'm guessing that there's not really anything about the Hubble servicing missions that's fundamentally more difficult to do without a space truck than assembling Mir and Tiangong were.
No, as someone else pointed out the repairs were done in the cargo bay of the shuttle over the course of 5 days. GP is right though - just building and launching a replacement would make more sense that spinning up a shuttle program to do the repairs.
A Soyuz with a booster - a Blok D - launched on Proton together would be much cheaper and likely much safer than a Shuttle launch. That would be enough to get to 540 km height orbit, bring two or three people there, bring spares, make an EVA (the orbital module of Soyuz was designed partially to be able to do EVAs), and come back. The Blok D would have a docking module so Soyuz would connect to it and use it to raise (and lower) the orbit as needed.
The repair mission couldn't have been done by Eva only. There was to much work and it would have taken forever and most of it couldn't have been done with their suits since it was very precise work.
They had to take it into the shuttle's cargo bay to do the repairs. They worked on it for 5 days and changed the faulty instruments and also changed the solar array and gyroscopes.
Correct me if I'm wrong but Soyuz just doesn't have the capacity to do that type of mission.
This is, of course, a stretch - requires to have a really good relationships between USA and Russia.
But technically, bringing Hubble to the Shuttle cargo bay doesn't change things much. Ok, the telescope isn't flying anywhere - but if you have a Soyuz nearby, you could also attach it to Hubble firmly enough, just as with Shuttle. And just as with Shuttle you can't avoid having to work with the instrument in spacesuits - since you can't bring Hubble into the pressurized environment where the spacesuits are not needed.
So, I don't know for sure how many technical details should be overcome for that mission to work - but in principle you at least can get to the Hubble with something different than the Shuttle. Today it could be the Crew Dragon, and 10 years ago it could be Soyuz.
I was in the building overlooking the airport when endeavor landed at LAX. People literally parked on the freeway to watch [1]. Highway patrol parked as well and enjoyed the show.
Couple years later, I'm walking down the street and I see this giant orange tank and a slew of workers dismantling traffic lights to make space for it [2].
I'm gonna make sure I'm there for this as well, right on my kids birthday.
Regardless what any critics might have to say, the Space Shuttle Orbiters (and all their accessories) are practically heroes wherever they go. They're a kid's dreams brought to reality and then some.
I hope we can fly something as cool looking and mindblowing as them again some day.
> Regardless what any critics might have to say, the Space Shuttle Orbiters (and all their accessories) are practically heroes wherever they go. They're a kid's dreams brought to reality and then some.
They certainly have enormous cultural cachet. There's a reason why, even now, it's pretty common for movies to use a shuttle when they want a rocket that takes people to space.
Too bad they were hot garbage when it came to actual performance.
> I hope we can fly something as cool looking and mindblowing as them again some day.
I like to think that we're already doing that right now.
The Falcon 9 is doing the job the Shuttle was created do to: it's a cheap, powerful, and reliable taxi to LEO.
The Falcon 9 is also heavily based on research that NASA conducted in designing and building the Shuttle and its intended successors, which is a large part of why it can be cheap, powerful, and reliable.
Can the falcon 9 fix the Hubble? I agree having a space plane as your only launch vehicle is very short sighted but I think a space plane has some very unique capabilities.
Maybe. There's a plan to use the Dragon capsule to reboost the Hubble and possibly EVA to it. No one knows what exactly will happen, although if you're interested in learning more, the potential mission is Polaris II[1].
But that ignores the bigger point - the Shuttle had a bunch of rarely used capabilities. And the tradeoff for that is that it's main mission: taking people and cargo to space was severely compromised.
It would have been easy to just buy a new Hubble with the savings if the US had a reasonably designed and priced rocket instead of the Shuttle.
The NRO offered NASA multiple Hubbles, but the cost to retrofit them was outside of NASA's budget. Also, how are you getting that new Hubble off the ground without a shuttle?
> The NRO offered NASA multiple Hubbles, but the cost to retrofit them was outside of NASA's budget.
Well, yes - that's kind of the point. If NASA didn't have the Shuttle's fully amortized $1.5B/launch cost weighing it down they'd have been able to do a lot more things.
> Also, how are you getting that new Hubble off the ground without a shuttle?
Who knows what rocket NASA should have gone with. But the easy answer is: they could have kept Saturn V around for the few really big payloads they needed it for.
Another option is the Delta IV Heavy. It's longest fairing is just a little bit short of what's needed for Hubble. I'm sure a 1-off xl fairing would be quite expensive, but since the difference between a Delta IV Heavy launch and a Shuttle launch is $1B, there's quite a bit of room in the budget to work with.
"On February 17, 2016, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (then known as the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope or WFIRST) was formally designated as a mission by NASA, predicated on using one of the space telescopes."
> Also, how are you getting that new Hubble off the ground without a shuttle?
"As of July 2022, Roman is scheduled to be launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket under a contract specifying readiness by October 2026 supporting a NASA launch commitment of May 2027."
Can it get people there to get out into space and turn some wrenches? Absolutely.
Could it haul a new full-diameter mirror? No. It's constrained by it's diameter, and the cargo capacity is the Dragon's trunk. Bigger rockets may be required, but nothing about the shuttle is strictly necessary there.
The thing the "space plane" had that was entirely unique was the capability to load something large into the cargo bay and bring it back down. But in practice that capability was barely ever used. Starship might eventually offer that capability, but it won't be as gentle as a shuttle landing.
There may one day again be a beautiful space plane, should that particular need become important again.
Those are NASA F/A-18s flying chase. Extra set of eyes on the aircraft, photography/video for PR, etc. In this particular case there's almost certainly a "let's put on a show" motivator as part of it; they flew the shuttle around various major cities and landmarks on the way.
Are there particular capabilities they have that would necessitate that type of aircraft specifically? I would think that they'd have really high operating costs compared to (e.g.) a turboprop of some kind.
For this particular mission, probably not; rule of cool probably played a factor. (They also have a much-upgraded 1950s B-57 for similar purposes; https://airbornescience.nasa.gov/aircraft/WB-57_-_JSC) For other missions, though, being able to get up to Mach 1.8 is probably helpful when you might be intercepting a Space Shuttle on the tail end of re-entry. Manoeuvrability is also a factor; being nimble helps get around a test aircraft. Or chasing one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-59_Quesst
Wake turbulence and pilot experience could be factors. Fighter jets are designed to fly near larger aircraft and their pilots have the training for it.
Maybe they're using the high definition optical targeting pods for video?
"Chase aircraft also are used as camera platforms for research missions that must be documented with photographs or video. Aeronautical engineers monitor and verify various aspects of a research project by extensively using photos and video."
That article is hilariously waffly. And I almost posted the exact City Hall quote.
The pedant in me wants to point out that the external tank is not "Endeavour's" because the external tanks were not recovered after flights so that one has never been on a mission and could have been a tank for any shuttle mission.
> The pedant in me wants to point out that the external tank is not "Endeavour's" because the external tanks were not recovered after flights so that one has never been on a mission and could have been a tank for any shuttle mission.
It sure is Endeavour’s now, for hopefully many decades longer than any other tank.
Yes, it struck me that the article missed all comment on interesting, relevant points about the tanks, such as how they were not recovered after launch, and therefore the actual existence of this last one should have warranted comment.
I suppose that the external tanks may have been commissioned for specific missions, like Atlas IV and Delta V rockets were. Maybe this tank was commissioned for a mission that never flew, like the current museum Saturn Vs.
I remember, possibly incorrectly, that there was a contingency rescue mission stacked but not flown, though I think that the stack did fly on a NASA designated mission (as opposed to the usual Congress designated missions). Though I think that was Atlantis.
The external tank destined for display at the California Science Center is
ET-94, the last flight-qualified external tank in existence. This lightweight
tank (LWT) — donated to the Science Center by NASA — was ordered to support
science missions for space shuttle Columbia.
There are lots of "stories" like this from space programs. The ESA "lost" the fuel tanks for their last Vega launch because they were just sitting around for so long they got crushed down into scrap metal because they were not entered into their asset management software.[0]
This is unironically correct; the American measurement system is known as the United States Customary System, Imperial is the British measurement system.
I know this is a worn out trope (that has a name which I cannot recall now) but I feel like repeating: when you find misleading explanations and factual deficiencies in an article whose subject matter you're familiar with, you can reasonably extrapolate that everything else you read about is likely fraught with the same level of veracity.
I had to look it up in case this was a Berenstein Bears/Shazam bad collective memory:
The external tank's orange color is the color of the spray-on foam insulation. The first two tanks, used for STS-1 and STS-2, were painted white to protect the tanks from ultraviolet light during the extended time that the shuttle spent on the launch pad prior to launch. Because this did not turn out to be a problem, Martin Marietta (now part of Lockheed Martin) reduced weight by leaving the rust-colored spray-on insulation unpainted beginning with STS-3, saving approximately 272 kg (600 lb).
Rarely mentioned, but I think the foam is polyisocyanurate. I think it changes to the rust colour due to exposure (it's typically light yellow). Anyone got more info?
In Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, the first colony ships are built from shuttle tanks given an extra kick of delta vee to put them in LEO. Then they stitch them together into all sorts of Lincoln Log things. Seems like a neat idea except for the tyranny of the rocket equation . . although, well, the final configuration of the SST sort of spat in the face of the rocket equation.
How long till someone get's the idea to incorporate this exhibit piece a as a critical plot element in some fluffy Sci Fi movie of the kind that requires megatons of suspension of disbelief to be watched?
