Shuttle Centaur

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Byeman

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This was built but unflown and canceled. Here are the first two flight units at the launch site.
 

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So stupid but such a cool almost-was, having astronauts deploy deep space probes from a spacecraft definitely has some romanticism and I’m glad it could still be done with solid rockets. I doubt starships that do the same will be crewed, and I’m glad we stopped, but the art and photos of deep space probes deploying from the shuttle are incredible
 
Byeman said:
This was built but unflown and canceled. Here are the first two flight units at the launch site.
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I never realized they shipped flight hardware to the Cape.

What's the best history on the cancellation of that program? I know I've researched this in the past, but have forgotten what I found.
 
Byeman said:

Taming Liquid Hydrogen: The Centaur Upper Stage Rocket 1958-2002​

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Yeah, not to be a nudge, but is that actually the best source on the Shuttle-Centaur? I read it when it came out (actually, I might even be cited in the acknowledgements because I provided the author some source material), but I vaguely remember wanting more about the Shuttle-Centaur story. In particular, I don't think anybody truly captured the cancellation part of the history. It seemed to me like it was "Challenger happened, Shuttle Centaur was canceled." But what was the series of events in between those two things? There must have been memos and meetings that occurred. I don't remember reading a lot of details on that.

I could be wrong. I have Taming Liquid Hydrogen somewhere and will take a look.
 
Here's an interesting video concerning the Centaur G uploaded two years ago:


NASA build a centaur upper stage to launch planetary probes from the space shuttle. Was this a good thing, or was it a ticket to disaster?
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References
Taming Liquid Hydrogen: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploa...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...ent/uploads/2023/04/sp-4230.pdf&v=wsXttXnqNNM
Centaur G Technical Description: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/ind...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...tach;topic=2398.0;attach=620740&v=wsXttXnqNNM
Study of upper stage alternatives: https://play.google.com/books/reader?...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...5MVGAQAAMAAJ&pg=GBS.PA578&hl=en&v=wsXttXnqNNM
Upper stage alternatives for the shuttle era: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19820...
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It was part of the plan to get funding from all quarters for the Shuttle .... sold the Shuttle as a platform for every mission ....

In hindsight, it was madness to carry LH2 in the cargo bay, considering they already have a huge ET full of LO2/LH2 .....
 
Dagger said:
'Taming Liquid Hydrogen' is NASA publication SP-2004-4230 by Virginia Dawson and Mark Bowles, and can therefore freely be downloaded from the NASA website: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20040084080

Chapter 10 of 'To Reach the High Frontier' is about Shuttle with Centaur and also written by Mark Bowles.
Most pages can be read on Google Books:
https://books.google.nl/books?id=mUNS96ZHyNUC&pg=PA415
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Nice! This was one of the best books that introduced me to the various space launchers ..... I had my copy somewhere in my book shelf ... cost me quite a bit as I had just started my adult working life .....
 
zjz said:
Nice! This was one of the best books that introduced me to the various space launchers ..... I had my copy somewhere in my book shelf ... cost me quite a bit as I had just started my adult working life .....
Click to expand...

A number of years ago I was in an online discussion with somebody who was critical of the book. They felt that it focused too much on the NASA side and not enough on the contractor side. That might be a fair criticism, but I noted that the problem with writing corporate histories is that companies don't keep their records and if they do, they don't let anybody see them. So you have to take what you can get.
 

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