Be Honest, It’s Time To Scuttle The Shuttle
Discovery makes it back (that’s good) and watching the live footage when it did, with a single IR camera focussed on the Shuttle from 125,000 feet to it’s eventual touchdown and rolling out, there was part of me wondering if that was it, the last shuttle flight.
Putting politics aside, and the practice of farming out a little bit of shuttle contracts out to every state which doomed the shuttle program to an overspend the size of a small african country, the shuttle was saddles with too many expectations and needs. It’s time to go back to the drawing board and start again.
Actually, that’s wrong. After a lot of talk on #mobitopia, the answer seems relatively simple. Go back to capsules and heavy lift rockets. The USAF has the Lockheed-Martin Delta range of rockets that will quite happily loft a decent sized capsule. For a capsule the Gemini mk 2 plans could be reopened, or (my personal favourite) would be to extend the Apollo capsule to take five astronauts. The original Apollo could do this at a push, as witnessed by the evacuation plans that were prepped for Skylab 4… two astronauts to take up the final Apollo capsule to get the crew of three down if they didn’t fix their capsule. In the end it wasn’t needed and the capsule was used for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Program.
Ah, I hear you ask, but what about the ISS – how would we finish that? Well frankly, why bother. Just commission a couple of Saturn V rockets (remember them?) and dig out the Skylab plans. Loft a couple of them, pop a four way connector with some docking ports to join them all up and you have the rest of your space station.
Link: Yahoo News “Experts Might Scuttle Shuttle.”
The trouble with your suggestion, Ewan, is that all these rockets are non-reusable and leave at least some debris (‘junk’) in orbit. There’s too much of that up there already! IMHO, the Shuttle was a great achievement but it’s time to look at the original plans for what NASA wanted and this time not compromise with this 50-50 resuable system. Still, the ESA aren’t much better with Ariane.
What junk? Most manned craft are in low earth orbit and that means any third stage is going to burn up (just like the Shuttles External Tank which isn;t reusable). It’s only when you start looking getting stuff up to a higher orbit you’re leaving crap around – much like he shuttles Payload Assist Module. ;-)