- Hi it's me, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut.
There's nothing more exciting than a new rocket concept,
a new mission to unknown worlds,
or an exciting breakthrough technology.
Unfortunately for every proposal there's almost an equal
amount of cancellations with only a small handful
making it beyond the drawing board.
What's even more frustrating is when these concepts
leave paper, have thousands of engineering hours put in,
hardware gets built, billions of dollars invested
and then it gets put on the shelf.
In this new series called Canceled, we're going to take
a look at some space programs and concepts
that were so close to complete and sometimes even launched
before it got canceled.
Some of these are pretty frustrating,
but nevertheless, let's get started.
- [Announcer] Three, two, one.
(inspiring music) Lift off.
We have a lift off.
- This video is one of two where we're going to be focusing
on hardware that actually flew before it fizzled,
it was built and then bye bye, completed then canned.
You get the idea.
So if there's something that wasn't in this particular
video, standby there's a lot more coming.
(light music)
First up we have a really weird story,
it's the tale of a country who went through all the trouble
of engineering, building and successfully flying an orbital
rocket, only to cancel it right as it was proven to work.
Hi United Kingdom, I'm talking to you!
In 1964, the UK government authorized a proposal submitted
by the Royal Aircraft Establishment, RAE, for a rocket
capable of putting 144 kilograms into low Earth orbit.
Most of the rocket's technology and systems
were from the Black Knight rocket, an intermediate range
ballistic missile, who was built by the RAE.
The Black Arrow was also lovingly called
the lipstick rocket, because, well, look at it!
It stood 13 meters tall, two meters wide
and was three stages.
The first stage had eight engines that were fueled
by RP-1 rocket fuel and hydrogen peroxide for the oxidizer,
the second stage had two engines with the same fuel.
The third stage was a single solid rocket motor
that was spin stabilized.
The rocket launched four times, all out of Launch Area 5B,
at the Woomera Prohibited Area in Australia.
And strangely, the spent boosters would land in remote areas
of land, and not splashdown, kind of like how Russia
and China let their spent boosters fall all willy nilly,
potentially landing near people, only this area
is far more remote than Kazakhstan or China.
The first launch on June 28th, 1969 was a failure,
the second suborbital test was successful,
the third test was a failure to get into orbit
but the fourth mission on October 28, 1971, was successful,
putting the Prospero satellite into orbit.
In 1971, only a few months before the fourth launch
was scheduled, the program was canceled due to budgetary
constraints and the fact that the American made Scout rocket
was cheaper, so they could just purchase those instead.
There was also an offer from NASA to launch payloads
for free, however that was withdrawn
once the Black Arrow was canceled, whoops.
There was one more Black Arrow that was actually completed
and built, but never flown
and now sits in the Science Museum, London
along with a spare Prospero satellite.
There's also the remains of the first stage
of a flown rocket on display in a town of 10 people
in the William Creek Memorial Park in Australia.
I really want to go see that!
So that's the story of the only country to date to develop
an orbital class launch capability and then abandon it.
(light music)
Ah, the space shuttle.
One of the most iconic rockets of all time.
Look at that thing, it's just gorgeous.
Despite not quite living up to its promise
of bringing down the cost of spaceflight,
it sure did have some unmatched capabilities;
such as repairing satellites, or maybe even more impressive,
it could satellites back down from space.
As a matter of fact that military potential
was so groundbreaking, the Soviet Union
decided they needed a space shuttle as well!
So, welcome the Buran.
A more powerful, more capable version
of the United States' Space Shuttle.
And before we go any further, I've had people tell me
I think it's pronounced Boo-ran, so I'm gonna say that,
but it might be Bu-ran, I don't know.
The Buran might look an awful lot like the space shuttle,
but despite it's looks, it was to perform the work
in quite a different manner.
The Soviet Union strapped the Buran to the side of the third
most powerful rocket ever, the twice flown Energia rocket.
And again, I have no idea if it's Ener-gia or Ener-jia.
That one!
Construction of the Buran orbiters began in 1980
and the first full scale orbiter
saw the light of day in 1984.
The striking resemblance to the United State's Space Shuttle
is of course no coincidence,
but it's not just some knock off.
Physics pretty well dictates the shape of vehicles,
and the Soviet Union pretty quickly realized the U.S.
did their homework and followed suit.
But despite the looks, they still had
quite the engineering challenge ahead of them.
They developed a fully autonomous system that could perform
the entire flight and landing all by itself.
They of course had to develop
their own fuel cells, their own control system.
Then they strapped it to their massive Energia rocket,
which was a mighty and super powerful beast.
This meant the Soviets had developed a more flexible system
by making the Energia capable of other payloads
and not just the Buran.
Not only that, the Buran was also eventually to be capable
of some powered flight in the air thanks to up to four
jet engines at the aft end of the vehicle.
Although it wasn't used on its orbital flight,
they wanted to try to have two jet engines on the back
for orbital missions, but that never quite panned out.
This could have potentially offered some flexibility
when trying to land, unlike the Space Shuttle
which is completely a glider.
It only had one shot at landing, wherever you were pointing
is pretty much where the thing's gonna land.
The only orbital flight of the Buran, OK-1K1,
took place 30 years ago, on November 15th, 1988 at 3:00 UTC.
It went off flawlessly, putting the Buran into space,
boosting itself into a slightly higher orbit,
and then returning to Earth after just two orbits,
the Buran came back and had a perfect runway landing.
Ang again, it did this 100% autonomously.
Once it landed, it really looked quite fantastic.
It only lost eight of its 38,000 thermal tiles,
which is quite a big contrast to the United State's
first Space Shuttle mission which lost 16 tiles
and had 148 of them really damaged.
The Buran was supposed to fly again five years later,
but with the fall of the Soviet Union
and the end of the Cold War, the program went on ice
and the Buran orbiter would never fly again.
And to add insult to injury, on May 12, 2002,
the only flown Buran was wrecked when the hangar storing it
completely collapsed because of poor maintenance.
The collapse tragically killed eight people as well
and also completely destroyed the OK-1K1 orbiter.
Today, there are still two derelict Burans wasting away
in a really rusty hangar in Kazakhstan.
A few adventure seekers have actually snuck in
to photograph them.
There's also the OK-GLI glider prototype,
which is on display at the Speyer Technik Museum in Germany.
This is kind of like the glider prototype cousin
to the Space Shuttle Enterprise.
And lastly, there's a test-article Buran, the OKM
that's on display at the Baikonur Cosmodrome History Museum.
Again, I really want to go see this.
And that's the story of Russia's one and only flight
of a re-usable spacecraft.
(light music)
Now back to the rocket that launched the Buran, the Energia.
This thing was extremely impressive
and definitely deserves its own segment here in this video!
The Energia was a super heavy lift rocket,
coming in just after the Saturn V in thrust
and despite only have 75% the sea level thrust of the N-1,
it actually could loft more payload to Low Earth Orbit.
It was only a two stage vehicle, and although it might look
like the stack of the space shuttle minus the orbiter,
it operates very, very differently.
The Energia began development after the Soviet Union
cancelled the N-1 rocket, which we'll talk about more
in another video about alternate space history.
Since the Energia was the vehicle that was putting
the Buran into space, it carried its payloads on its side,
which is super weird.
It even did that when it wasn't
carrying the Buran into space.
I think the coolest thing about the Energia
is those side-engines on the booster.
Now those are four liquid boosters as opposed
to two solid rocket boosters like on the Space Shuttle.
But these side boosters have the RD-170.
The RD-170 is the most powerful liquid fueled
rocket engine ever, it ran on RP-1 and LOX.
That's right, move over F-1 engine,
the RD-170 is actually the most powerful engine!
But there is a small caveat, instead of a single
giant combustion chamber like the F-1, the RD-170
had four combustion chambers and a single turbo pump.
Technically, the industry defines the rocket engine
as the power pack, or turbo pump, which feed the combustion
chamber, the RD-170 has a single turbo pump.
So although it may look like four engines,
it's actually considered a single engine.
The reason they split up a single engine
into four combustion chambers is because the Soviets
hadn't figured out how to solve the combustion instability
that's a problem with large combustion chambers.
So they fed a single turbo pump
into four combustion chambers, brilliant!
Then we have the center core stage with four RD-0120 engines
that ran on liquid hydrogen and LOX.
The RD-0120 is almost like the Soviet's equivalent
to the RS-25 space shuttle main engine.
Despite almost exactly matching all the specs to the RS-25,
the RD-0120 was a lot more simple and also was not recovered
since they were not attached to the orbiter.
The Energia wound up flying twice.
The first mission of the Energia went pretty well,
at least for the Energia itself, which performed fantastic.
However, it's payload, the Polyus spacecraft
wound up de-orbiting.
This is one of those funny missions that'll be part
of my Biggest Face Palms of spaceflight history,
so I won't go into detail now, but basically
instead of putting itself into orbit, it de-orbited itself.
The Energia wound up launching one more time,
with the Buran spacecraft as mentioned
and performed literally flawlessly.
The Energia also fell to the same fate as the Buran,
being canceled as the Soviet Union fell.
It's truly a shame that such an amazing, powerful
and capable rocket never flew again.
Despite talks of it being resurrected many times,
it never seems to make it's way beyond the drawing board.
(light music)
Recognize this?
Yup, that sure is pretty much the solid rocket booster
off of a space shuttle.
So wait, what's it doing out there on the pad all by itself?
You my friends are looking at one of the strangest and most
dangerous rockets ever considered for human spaceflight.
In 2004, President Bush announced the Constellation program
which proposed taking humans back to the moon
on a massive rocket called the Ares V,
which is sort of now the SLS but kind of different.
The constellation program also intended to provide
transportation services to the International Space Station
to replace the soon retiring space shuttle.
NASA was going to address some of the biggest flaws
of the Space Shuttle; like crew safety,
and the cost of flying cargo on a crew rated vehicle.
They sought a simple and cheap way to get crew
up to the ISS, and thus the Ares 1 was born.
The Ares 1 would loft an Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle
on top of a single solid rocket booster
and a liquid powered upper stage.
By 2007 things were looking good with NASA completing
its system requirements review, a first for the agency
since the Space Shuttle in the 1970's!
Although they intended to use mostly Space Shuttle
derived hardware, a lot of work went into the design
of the rocket and pretty quickly,
a lot of preliminary plans changed.
For instance, due to the massive size
of the Orion spacecraft, NASA soon realized
they would need a five segment solid rocket booster
instead of a four segment booster
like the Space Shuttle had.
Despite wanting to pull from the Space Shuttle,
a lot of technology wound up coming off the Saturn V!
For instance, NASA was originally going to use a separate
hydrogen and oxygen tank inside the upper stage,
just like the external fuel tank of the Space Shuttle,
but instead they had to use a common bulkhead
like the second and third stage of the Saturn V.
They also wanted to try to use a space shuttle main engine,
the RS-25, for an upper stage, but they soon realized
it'd be more expensive and it would require
a ton of heavy modifications to make it air startable.
And air startable isn't necessarily like sea-level
or vacuum, it's talking about starting mid-flight.
So they went with a Saturn V era J-2 engine,
but that too required so many modifications
to increase the thrust, they wound up with a clean sheet
design, known as the J-2x.
Okay, so put all this together and we end up
with a review in 2008 that wasn't so good.
It was revealed that there were such great concerns
over massive vibrations during the first few minutes
of ascent that NASA admitted the problem
was a four out of five on their risk scale.
So they had to design a solution
that would dampen the vibrations.
They stuck an active tuned-mass absorber,
otherwise known as a giant spring,
inside the rocket to absorb the vibrations.
But that wouldn't be all the bad news
the Ares 1 program would receive, perhaps the biggest blow
was a 2009 study by the Air Force's 45th space wing
that determined if the crew had to abort
between 30 to 60 seconds after launch,
they would have a 0% chance of survivability.
When a solid rocket booster is detonated,
the solid propellant fragments would easily melt
the parachutes of an aborted crew capsule
and they would fall back to Earth.
Okay, okay, but fast forward a few months later and finally,
the first NASA developed rocket since they rolled out
the Space Shuttle in 1981, hit the launch pad.
This was the Ares 1-X, a test vehicle designed primarily
to test the first stage's performance
and verify the controls and dynamics of the Ares-1.
It was a bit of a hodgepodge rocket with avionics
from an Atlas V, a four segment booster from a shuttle
with a dummy fifth segment as well as a dummy upper stage,
orion capsule and crew escape tower.
It also had the roll control system
off a Peacekeeper missile.
The rocket successfully launched on October 28th, 2009
and the flight lasted only six minutes
from liftoff to splashdown.
After two minutes of powered ascent, the first and second
stage separated and the booster began to deploy
its parachutes, just like the Space Shuttle's boosters did.
That single launch cost approximately $445 million
and that was the only time an Ares rocket took flight.
Because of cost overruns, delays in schedules,
unforeseen engineering and technical difficulties,
and an ever inflating budget, the Ares 1 program
was canceled along with the rest of the Constellation
program on February 1st, 2010.
In 2011, NASA's then acting administrator Charles Bolden
testified that the Ares 1 and the Orion capsule program
would have cost four to $4.5 billion a year,
plus $1.6 billion per flight.
Because of this, NASA ended up moving towards
the Commercial Crew program that would hopefully
bring the cost of launches down.
But it's almost 2019 and we have yet to put an astronaut
on any of these commercial providers to space.
Mostly because the Commercial Crew program
has been underfunded for quite some time now,
that's gonna end up leaving the US
with about an eight year gap in human spaceflight, ha ha.
But, we're finally almost there.
That being said, I'm really glad the Ares-1 was canned,
considering how much money it was already costing us,
how much money it would have cost per launch
and also how dangerous it was for humans,
I think we made the right choice.
This all just makes you realize how important it is
to have a clear goal, a healthy budget
and strong leadership to really make big things happen.
It makes me really thankful for what we have been able
to accomplish, but it also makes me frustrated
to know what could have been.
Before leaving me comments on things I forgot,
don't you forget, there's a few more of these videos
coming out with slightly different angles to each one
and even another one coming out with this exact same
developed and dropped theme.
So stay tuned, there's a lot more coming.
But let me know in the comments below what other questions
you have about canceled programs, rockets
or just spaceflight in general!
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Give it a listen, if you're studying to be a rocket
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Thanks everybody, that's gonna do it for me.
I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut.
Bringing Space down to Earth for everyday people.
(light music)