A piece of 1970’s technology that has already suffered a couple of critical failures. What could go wrong?
They should have been kept flying at least until there was a replacement.
Ridiculous.
NeedleSLY huge, heavy and wasteful.
Cool as all hell, yes, It’s almost like a 747.
DRONES
Obama has made us weaker as a nation in every way he could.
I saw a tv special once, that outlined some of the weaknesses of the shuttle:
- Cost savings with the re-useable craft were dimished, because of the practically complete tear down and rebuild required.
- Turn around times never met original expectations
- Positioning the crew astride the rocket, and not on top, made it impossible to include a launch pad ejection system
- Using the entire vehicle as a re-entry device caused a huge need for heat shielding...since the very beginning, the heat tiles were a problem, always some were lost...which really was walking on a razor’s edge
- Positioning the craft astride and almost under the fuel tank made it very vulnerable to debris falling off the fuel tank.
The conclusion of the special was that we already have a ‘platform’ for doing experiments in space - the ISS. And, and new rocket should resemble the traditional rocket, with crew pod on top. It could still deliver a large payload - satellites are launched into space with traditional rockets, all the time.
Obama couldn’t wait to give the shuttles to his friends
Congress/NASA killed it by not funding the Ares/SLS adequately. Michoud can only hold STS or SLS assemblies, but not both. So to build the new(er) rockets, NASA had to kill the STS to have room at Michoud. Hard to believe that they could spend so much money on paper and starting/stopping SLS efforts and they couldn’t find enough money to build another huge empty building. That was a shovel ready program.
Reminds me of when they killed the SR71 for the Keyholes.
Bring back Dyna-Soar!!!
The Orion system is safer and more efficient. What we should never have shut down, and should have improved, is the Saturn V heavy lift system. We would have maintained a competitive edge over the Russian system.
Who would have thought in 1969 that we would be stuck in LEO for the next 50 years? (Look kids - an astronaut eating a water bubble! Ever seen that before?)
Oh and it killed 14 people.
I think the Shuttle did a good job but needed to be retired. The Orion program should not have been killed.
The Shuttle was poorly designed for safety and civilian missions. It was also expensive for what we used it for. The Shuttle was supposed to be retired in the early 90’s. The ISS delays kept it going.
In the next 3 years we’re going to have more crewed capsules and rockets than we’ll know what to do with. They’ll all be safer, far more economical and better suited for their missions than the Shuttle.
They were only designed to last 20 years, the remaining ships had done many more flights than they ever were intended to. More disasters were going to happen. The big problem isn’t their retirement but that 5 presidents in a row failed to greenlight their replacement.
I’m not opposed to us having a shuttle program, but we should be looking forward not backwards. How about launching a shuttle from a dirigible platform? Save yourself the bother of pushing through the lower atmosphere, and you don’t need huge booster rockets, so you could make a true SSTO spaceplane work.
Some people here obviously believe that since the shuttle was not 100% safe that it should not have ever flown; that anything to do with manned space flight is a waste of money; that somehow unmanned drones should be used to replace far cheaper unmanned resupply missions to the ISS.
We’ve seen all these arguments before - they basically boil down to a group of people so ingrown staring down their lint filled navels that they rival fundamental Islamists in their fervent dislike of anything which contradicts what they believe should exist; its their religion.
We are building the aurora.
Maybe build more, but the ones we had probably went well beyond their day and would have eventually shook apart on a launch.
Two hundred billion dollars and thirty years wasted riding around and around and around in a clunky low earth orbit pickup truck instead of returning to the moon and prepping for journeys to other planets.
Should have just saved the money.
They should have never been built. The concept just didn’t make sense, given the amount of time and money that had to be put into turning them around.
Trying to combine manned flight with a cargo hauler proved to be a bad model, given the amount of money it takes to get a pound into orbit. It was like shipping all of your USPS packages in a steel box with return shipping on the box, so that you can use it again.
Reusable capsules and boosters aren’t a bad idea, but that can be done without taking all the extra weight into orbit.
There is also the matter of the extra cost of manned flight being attached to everything. Decouple the cargo from the people and launches get a lot cheaper.
The original idea was to have a fleet of these, several, ready to go at any time so that if there were an emergency there were others that could go to their assistance.
That never materialized. They never had more than one ready to go at any one time as far as I know.