Space Shuttle Concepts

[TheKutKu]

Shuttle put reuse on the wrong portion of the vehicle.

It did make some sense at the time - Crewed spacecrafts aren't cheap, Apollo CSM were quite expensive, and most importantly their production cost scaled the worst out of all the Saturn hardware at higher production rate.

Nasa wanted a high flight rate crewed spacecraft, with this goal, it was, based on their own experience, cheaper to focus on reusing the "Orbiter" than the "Booster"

It's also likely a fully reusable VTHL shuttle wouldn't have done any miracle, better, yes, not SpaceX better, this required better technologies, different goals, and different organisations, and different funding source.

 

[Byeman]

It did make some sense at the time - Crewed spacecrafts aren't cheap, Apollo CSM were quite expensive, and most importantly their production cost scaled the worst out of all the Saturn hardware at higher production rate.

Nasa wanted a high flight rate crewed spacecraft, with this goal, it was, based on their own experience, cheaper to focus on reusing the "Orbiter" than the "Booster"

It's also likely a fully reusable VTHL shuttle wouldn't have done any miracle, better, yes, not SpaceX better, this required better technologies, different goals, and different organisations, and different funding source.

Not really. NASA wanted a high flight rate launch vehicle. It thought crew needed to operate it. Crew was not need for most of the shuttle missions. That was the fallacy.

See my thread on alternative Shuttle

 

[RanulfC]

Not really. NASA wanted a high flight rate launch vehicle. It thought crew needed to operate it. Crew was not need for most of the shuttle missions. That was the fallacy.

See my thread on alternative Shuttle

To be fair, the NASA Astronaut Corps pushed a crew on every flight as a requirement. There were a lot of assumptions that the Shuttle design was based on that should have been more heavily questioned.

Randy

 

[Byeman]

To be fair, the NASA Astronaut Corps pushed a crew on every flight as a requirement. There were a lot of assumptions that the Shuttle design was based on that should have been more heavily questioned.

Randy

not in the beginning

 

[martinbayer]

Not really. NASA wanted a high flight rate launch vehicle. It thought crew needed to operate it. Crew was not need for most of the shuttle missions. That was the fallacy.

Ironically, the Buran orbiter carbon copy proved that on its one and only flight.