When the Space Shuttle was announced in 1972
it was seen as the space vehicle to make a low Earth orbit space travel and
living in space and everyday reality but in hindsight many now believe that it
was a failed project that was hamstrung by lack of funding and interest by the
government and sky-high expectations from NASA that led them to sideline
safety to ensure that scheduled launchs continued on time in order to
secure future funding. Instead of expanding man's horizons it in fact
limited them and stopped the development of more effective safer forms of both
manned and unmanned space transport, it ultimately became a deadly a space
vehicle in history and more expensive than the expendable rocket systems that
it was meant to replace. Yet it wasn't meant to be like this,
NASA had originally proposed space transport system or STS as it was known
which was a system of reusable manned space vehicles in 1969 as a successor to
the Apollo program. The STS was going to consist of a permanent space station in
low Earth orbit, a small cheap space shuttle to transport astronauts to and
from the earth into the space station, a space tug to move men and equipment to
different earth orbits but also double up as a lunar lander and a
nuclear-powered spacecraft to go between the low Earth orbit space station and
the moon and possibly on to other planets in the solar system.
The two main goals of the STS were to reduce for cost of space flights by
replacing the then-current Rockets like Saturn V that had taken the men to
the moon but could only be used once with reusable spacecraft.
The second was for it to act as a support vehicle for NASA's more
ambitious goals of permanent manned space stations around the earth and the moon
and then manned missions to Mars
Werner von Braun, the architect of the moon missions wanted NASA to follow up
Apollo and go to Mars and the military liked the idea of a reusable shuttle to
deliver its satellites and do other things.
However, after the success of the Apollo missions and the race to put a man on
the moon was over public and political interest in further man missions waned
and Congress became unwilling to maintain the huge funding which had
peaked at 4.5% of the federal budget in the late 1960's,
so it was cut to a fraction of that in the 1970's based on
this Nixon chose to reject the STS and manned missions to Mars and go for just
for space shuttle
but in an upgraded form that would allow it to carry both men and payloads, this
suited the military and the Nixon administration but due to the cost
cutting and the need for the shuttle to be seen as an all-purpose transport
system, the design has in hindsight become to be seen not only as
compromised but also inherently unsafe and in the long run
exceedingly expensive, the very things that it was supposed to avoid. The
shuttle system was to use external solid rocket boosters or SRBs to help it get
into space
whilst the shuttles main engines were supplied with liquid fuel for a massive
external fuel tank which the shuttle and the SRBs would be attached to
unlike previous space launch vehicles which were self-contained liquid fuel
rockets with the main modules and crew at the top and away from the fuel and
the exhausts. The use of the SRBs and the external fuel tank were down to the
Pentagon wanting high-capacity payloads for its satellites and the Nixon
administration to keep the cost down by reusing parts.
Some say they're trying to achieve reusability with early 1970's
technology forced design decisions that compromised both safety
and reliability.
The reusable main engines were made a priority which meant that a new design
with new materials were required the refurbishing of these after each flight
turned out to be more expensive than building new existing design ones like
those used on the Saturn V and allowing them to burn up on re-entry.
Because the main engines were mounted to the shuttle and not to the launcher the
payload area was also significantly reduced this design of having the
shuttle strapped to a giant super called fuel tank and then having effectively to
uncontrolled rocket motors, that once fired could not be turned off, in time
led to the failures of two of the five shuttlecraft and pushed the operating costs almost as
high as the flights themselves.
Compared to the Russians and Chinese, the only other nations to operate manned
space missions the shuttle has turned out to be the deadliest space vehicle in
history
so far with the loss of 14 crew, two of the five shuttles and two of the 135
shuttle missions. This works out of the vehicle failure rate of 40%
and a flight failure rate of 1.5%, a figure which was born out by Richard
Feynman in 1986 at the official inquiry into the Challenger disaster and 17
years before Columbia.
Feynman said then said then that NASA's management's own estimates of one flight
failure for every 100,000 flights was
wildly fantastical and after he anonymously polled the NASA engineers
themselves of what they thought the odds of a failure would be
he came back with an average figure of one failure
in every 100 flights. We have now had the benefit of seeing the entire shuttle
program through to the end and the actual failure rate was one failure in
every 68 flights which is nearly 1,500 times worse than NASA had
predicted it should have been. The Challenger disaster of 1986 was blamed
in equal parts on the failure of one of the seals on one of the SRBs because of
the unusually cold launch conditions and NASA's management that attempt to launch
at all costs, even when warned that doing so could lead to the loss of the entire
vehicle. But if the design had been different and hadn't used the SRBs then
this failure would not have been possible.
Equally the breakup of the Columbia on its reentry in 2003 can be traced back
to the failure of the heat resistant tiles on the underside of the left wing
of a craft. This was caused by flying debris falling off the main fuel tank
and damaging the tiles at launch. This flying debris which was a mixture of
insulation foam from the main fuel tank and ice from the atmospheric
condensation was a common occurrence and well known about,
in fact impacts with the shuttle had happened on a regular basis and missing
tiles can be seen in this shot of the shuttle
whilst in orbit. But the foam had not been designed or expected to fall off
and the thermal tiles had not been designed to withstand any impacts with
debris at all.
It was this gradual acceptance by NASA managers of more events outside the
design tolerances simply because they had not caused a catastrophic failure
before the enabled the design flaw of strapping the shuttle to the side of a
fuel tank
were frozen debris could fall off and hit the shuttle, meant the in
reality it was only a matter of time before an accident like that of Columbia
would happen. If the shuttle had been mounted on the top or away from the fuel
tank as main modules were on previous launch vehicles or even if the thermal
tiles had been redesigned to withstand minor impacts the loss of Columbia could
have been avoided.
One of the main goals of the shuttle was to bring the cost of space launches down.
It was envisioned by NASA's engineers that each shuttle would fly up to 50
missions per year but in reality the complexity of the shuttle maintenance
and repairs took months between flights and this reduced the average number of
flights to about four per year for the entire fleet. In 2011
the final cost for each shuttle flight when allowed for design and maintenance
had been worked out it was approximately 1.5 billion dollars for about $27,000
per pound of payload this in comparison to the
originally envisioned costs of around $118 dollars per
pound in 1972 or approximately $657 dollars adjusted for inflation to 2013
levels. The expendable Russian Proton cargo launchers which are still based
largely on a 1965 design is estimated to cost around $110 million dollars per
flight or around $2,300 per pound and the 2014
prices for Elon Musks,
SpaceX are between $1000 and 2500 per pound for
communication satellites. Since the end of the shuttle missions
the only way to get people to and from the International Space Station has been
by the Russian space agency Soyuz rockets and all though the cost has never been
officially publicized by the RSA it is believed to be
around $80 million per launch, which is still much cheaper than the
shuttle and it has operated with a 100% success rate and zero
fatalities.
It's rather ironic to think that the system developed by the Soviets to prove
communist superiority in the space race and which was divided by the USA is now
the most reliable and the most commercialized in the world. In 2007
NASA administrator Michael D Griffin wrote a paper in which she said but if
the saturn program and commercially available boosters had been continued
instead of developing the shuttle
it could have provided six-man launches per year, two of them to the moon have
the capability to lift heavier payloads and all for the same price as the
shuttle.
He also said that if we had done this we would have been on Mars by now instead
of just writing about it and we would have had decades of experience operating
long duration space systems in Earth orbit and similar decades of experience
in exploring and utilizing the moon. Adopting the shuttle kept new more
efficient and safer designs from NASA out of the skies and led to the growth
of the private spacecraft industry which is now doing what the original STS
program was going to do but with out the hindrance of government policy
depending on which way the political wind is blowing. The main difference
between these and the shuttle is not a technical one but they have been
designed to be profitable commercial spacecraft from the outset made from
commercially available parts from a private enterprise chain with paying
customers including NASA.
It's now expected that NASA will be looking to give the business of moving
men and materials to places like the International Space Station to the
private sector which can do it cheaper and better and leave NASA to the job
it's best that and also wanted to do in the first place, which is pushing the
boundaries of what can be done and sending men to Mars.
that's if the private sector doesn't get
there before them. Thank you for watching I, hope you enjoyed the video and if you
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