NASA's INSANE plan to launch 86 astronauts at once - The Passenger Space Shuttle That Almost Existed
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 มิ.ย. 2021
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In the 1970s, the USA was planning vast network of solar power stations, or SPS, to wean the country off oil and avoid using nuclear power. These stations would have been huge and required vast lifting spaceplanes like the Boeing space freighter or the Star Raker to get materials into orbit.
But hold on,
There was an essential component of the SPS program that we skipped over - that the star raker for all its glory was actually not designed to carry passengers. that these gigantic SPSs in orbit 300 nautical miles above the earth would in fact require a huge workforce of zero g workers as well - but how would they get there?
That role would fall on a different spacecraft entirely. Essentially, a passenger space shuttle.
The project was called the Personal launch system and would very much like the space shuttle we have today, although its actual support rockets would be very different. This is because the space shuttle was actually under development around the same time and was seen as the obvious leaping-off point for any sort of personal ground to orbit system.
So why not just design a passenger module and turn the space shuttle into a commercial transport? Well hot off the creation of the star raker, Rockwell did just that.
This design, from 1976, would be able to carry at least 68 passengers, although there are some concepts that could increase that capacity up to 86 if needed or as low as only 50 astronauts.
Passengers would be divided into four different areas, with different passenger configurations over two decks. Section A-A was the most dense at the rear of the cabin, with 4 seats across the top and two in the bottom. Section B-B had the same densifty but room on either side of the lower seats for cargo. Section C-C and Section D-D were areas with the four doors, with C-C having only four chairs and section D only two chairs at the lower deck leaving room to maneuver around the cabin.
Passengers would first be loaded through four different doors on the ground through the shuttles cargo doors - which themselves would be replaced by a single fixed cover with door openings - the shuttle wasn't designed for any cargo and the module wouldn't be released in flight to thus opening the main bay was not nesscearly.
Once in orbit, the passengers would depart from a new airlock section built into the passenger module at the front of the passenger cabin. It was expected that once the shuttle arrived, passengers would disembark and then the returning passenger's board before heading back to earth.
For missions that only required 50 passengers, the shuttle could reach an orbit of around 500 kilomenters with the extra space given over to more fuel tanks. The 80+ seater version with a shorter range would instead remove two of the ground doors and replace them with a high density B-B section.
The shuttle would return to earth using the typical method that would be employed by its real world equivelent.
There were other designs for earth to orbit transportation, a smaller version of the star raker, but research discovered that it would be cheaper and quicker to develop a simple booster rocket with a fly back orbitor hitching along s ride.
Like the SPS heavy lifter, Boeing was called up to present their ideas.
Instead of a series of boosters, Boeing had the idea to use a single large conical booster instead of the solid rocket boosters that had been used in the apollo program. This design would have had four liquid rocket engines, fed with a potent mix of liquid oxygen and liquid propane - easily giving enough thust, 1.815 Mlbf per engine, to get the whole apparatus to orbit. The shuttles own engines wouldn't have engaged until the booster had seperated, freeing up room onboard the orbiter shuttle for more passengers.
Each booster and orbital pair would have a life span of 14 years, and would cost 12.619 million USD per mission, which would be 100 million in todays dollars. For the whole program, NASA would need 26 boosters and 10 orbiters, a staggeringly high cost.
had this been built, we would have seen the possibility of commercial ventures. Space hotels would have sprung up and there would have been a real possibility of operators filling those 86 passenger seats with those paying customers - clearly there is a market today for it and plenty of people would have paid for it very much like the rise of air travel.
But... this history never happened, and like the SPS program being cancelled, the extense of the shuttle was greatly scaled back and there was never a need to send that many passengers into orbit.
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Morning Brew has been pretty fantastic - they sum up the best of the news in a pretty funny way. Not sure who the writer is but its good to start the day with a laugh. Sign up for free here cen.yt/mbfoundandexplained
Okay 👌
another garbage youtuber that not only has a garbage sponsor but also interrupted their content to peddle that same garbage. Thumb down and multiple if I could. JUST BLODDY STOP!!!!!!!
@@barrycaplin1394 why do you even bother hating on people, it does nothing good for you and its just really annoying, all it does is spread negativity around the internet and nobody wants that, so go back to club penguin and be nice
Being contrarian and negative is mistaken with being wise or intelligent by people who are neither.
Hay that’s not nice I watch this person animation a lot and keep doing so for a long time
Unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine is a hypergolic fuel. This means when it is combined with another chemical (usually nitrogen tetroxide), it reacts instantly, without the need to fancy igniters and precise flow control. Basically A + B = a whole lotta hot gas. As you might imagine it is usually an absolute bear to work with because it is insanely reactive and toxic. How toxic? When used in labs it is stored as a solution in hydrochloric acid.
Thanks!!! I wish I could retroactively add this in!
And personnel don moon suits while handling it.
@@FoundAndExplained PS it's Pronounced DIE METH ILL HIGH DRA ZEEN
'The Solid Fuel Boosters on the Shuttle look a bit risky. Can you see if there is a safer option.'
Engineer snorts a line of Cocaine.
'Hang on. I've got an idea.'
I remember someone calling it “Liquid Cancer”
Unsymmetrical - you nailed this part
Dimethyl - die-meh-thil
Hydrazine - Hi-dra-zin
thanks!
@@FoundAndExplained It is usually called Hydrazine.
Explaining phonetics in english is sure hard, lmao
Just hydrazine on its own is something else. UDMH is used to refer to the specific combo of unsymmetrical dimethyl with plain hydrazine.
7:39, "Instead of the solid rocket boosters used in the Apollo program" Apollo used liquid rocket engines in all of its stages. The shuttle used 2 refurbishable SRBs, but Apollo did not. Also, as others have mentioned the RS-25 main engines on the shuttle cannot function without the external tank. Only the propellant for the OMS system was carried onboard the orbiter itself. The first stage is the conical section at the bottom which would fall away in a suborbital trajectory, with the SSMEs continuing with the use of what we would think of as a more or less normal ET. Great video still! Just a couple easy to miss details. (Oh, and just call unsymmetrical dimethylhyadrazine UDMH like the rest of us lazy people! Problem solved!)
Uhmmm yea ,what he said
These videos make me realize we got the bad timeline..
Remember, out of all the other possible timelines, the vast majority would probably be far worse or we would probably be all dead. It may not feel like it, but any alternate where you are a) not dead, and b) not under the rule of a dictator/the soviet union is a good timeline. Take the 94% good we got and carry on.
but we have other good things in this timeline.
@@Comical1984 Yes. There is nothing in that design that would have reduced the risks any more or less than the standard STS system. There was also nothing in that design that would have allowed for a $100 million launch cost since the standard STS system ended up costing $1.5 billion per flight. At the mentioned 256 flights per year required then that would have been a hefty $384 billion dollars annually.
bankruptcy because of stupid useless projects and not beeing able to pay for the usefull stuff either is a better timeline?
@@jonmcentire 99% of timelines, the Earth never even formed, if you jumped to a random timeline and the Soviet Union had ever at all there it would be a miracle.
7:52 The Shuttle separates and use its own engines? How? Where's the external hydrolox tank for those RS-25 engines?
It’s using the orbital maneuvering engines which uses Monomethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide.
@@molockwood2787 The two OMS pods are above the three RS-25 engines. At 7:52 - as Indra Gunawan pointed out - it does indeed use the RS-25 engines which would not be possible without being mounted to the external tank.
@British Airways Boeing 747-436 The RS-25s are from the Shuttle Era, not Apollo/Saturn.
@@OzearEimaj your right I bet if this was real it would look closer to the shuttle enterprise with some sort of OMS system. Hydrolox wouldn’t even be close to dense enough
@@molockwood2787 Based on what I have read about this concept online, I think it is just an animation error. The conical propane/LOX booster gets the shuttle + ET to a sub-orbital trajectory and they then stage off and move on to orbit while the conical booster begins recovery operations.
I'm so impressed by this channel...
Thanks so much! It means a lot to me! 9/10 comments are like “you suck and I hope there is a fire” so it’s really nice to get a positive comment
11:10 Apollo never used Solid Rocket Boosters. Except for maybe the escape rocket on the capsule.
It's really only in a late 90's mecha anime
Reminds me of the passenger-carrying Shuttles from the James Bond movie, "Moonraker" (1979). Wonder if this is where the producers got the idea.
Not to mention airplane 2!
Yes but James Bond killed a lot of lovely young woman on the space station.
the 70s were wild for space ideas.
Just thinking about that too 😂
@@NINJA-ji6jp olny Jaws and his girlfriend got off the space station all so James Bond and Goodhead got off the space station but all the lovely young woman got killed on the space station.
Imagine if all of these concepts were built back then, imagine what we would have this year,would we be in mars?
I know right we got the worst timeline of them all imagine the paradise we could have created had we just spent the money on these programs as opposed to the ISS which was a complete and massive waste of money and time.
Since there were 2 missions or more imagined for crewed Mars Missions, we would yea
Lol no, they were shelved for a reason.
@@totallynoteverything1. but it can't be built
There’s an equation/idea that questions the relationship between development time/r&d/tech and commencing a project immediately. I forget what it’s called.
The classic example is along the lines of; if we built a ship and left our solar system to visit the nearest star today, it would take many generations of space travel with current tech - let’s say this number is 400 years. If we simply wait (while tech advances) and leave in 100 years, we might have the tech to reach the same destination in only 200 years.
This means we can leave 100 years later and arrive 100 years earlier.
The same principle applies with most of these advanced concepts we see here, though obviously we aren’t going to another solar system. In these examples, vehicles would have been far more likely to fail (picture challenger but with 80+ deaths simultaneously), gigantic solar space stations with panels that would be considered ancient, redundant tech in two decades or less… total waste and massively inefficient use of resources. Whereas if we build these things now, after so much tech dev - solar panels alone could be drastically smaller and more efficient saving billions on launch costs - but the same wait calculation applies, it’ll be another few decades before solar panel tech begins to reach its limits and launching anything of this scale before that point is just not worth it.
7:29 i think you meant the space shuttle, the apollo only used srb's for separation
...yyyeah; I was about to say... the same thing.
And not the “shuttle we have today” considering we technically don’t have one today lol
The external tank would separate from the conical booster. Only at that point would the shuttles SSMEs ignite; the ET would go to orbit with the orbiter (or very nearly so). The SSMEs would not ignite without the ET attached, since that's where all the propellant was.
Thanks for the info
What that have been safer than the way STS launched, ie Challenger or Columbia?
@@hick97zit Yes for STS-51L (Challenger) maybe for STS-107 (Columbia). Columbia was hit by a piece of foam insolation from the ET (External Tank) (still in place here) but this was of course also in part because of the Vibrations caused by the SRB's (Solid Rocket Booster), so maybe... :)
I was wondering: The SSMEs need the fuel from the ET. So if they use engines on the booster they dont need the SSMEs. So thanks for the information. I guess they use the OMS like the normal Shuttle? And why didnt they use the normal SRBs? I guess it was still in development and they didnt know it would take months to repair the shuttle after every flight.
@@melon_coaster6393 The cone first stage was suppossed to be reuseable, so lifting it all the way to orbit would mean that it would need a far more complex heatshield. So the Shuttle with the ET would act as a second stage, the ET being discarded, but the expensive and complex main engines recovered. The envisioned flight rate is key to why SRB's wouldn't make sense. The SRB's on the STS as built, where a compromise to keep the idea of reuseability alive while cutting cost. The most complex part of SRB Construction is the molding of the solid Rocket propellant, through wich the different phases of flight are precast. So where a liquid rocket would throttle down in flight, the shape of the solid proppellant changes. This process cant be reuseable, so what was recovered where sophisticated, empty steel tubes with swiveling nozzles. While the flight rate of the Space Shuttle in reality turned out to be to low to ever save money through recovering the SRB's a very high flight rate would justify the developement of this more complex, but reusable first stage. It would be fished out of the water, inspected and reflown, wich is far less complex and expensive than the SRB operations. (but developement is far more expensive)
Awesome as usual! Thanks
Glad you liked it!
Now turn that shuttle on its end, and imagine 50 to 86 passengers climbing around to get to their seats.
the horror
Hey uh, this is your captain speaking, rocket’s gonna lite in a minute, and I wanted to take this time to talk to you about your car’s extended warranty
You cannot escape them, even in space.
@@FoundAndExplained yep
In a way it’s a good thing this never got off the drawing board. The Challenger and Columbia disasters were terrible enough as they were. Could you imagine if they were each carrying 50+ passengers?
Uh... Still terrible.
Made you look.
I think it might be the opposite. The challenger and Columbia were terrible because it was just a few people that we knew each of their names. Now imagine if there was ‘250’ flights per year into space and 1 or 2 went down? We’d feel the same way we do when a passenger plane goes down now. It would be tragic but it we’d get over it much faster.
I could imagine, but imagine if it worked.
Good point.
The Shuttle suffered from a unnecessary high complexity.
It had huge double delta wings to get a cross range capability, it was able to fly thousands of km through the atmosphere as a glider from high altitude after reentry. This was necessary for a eventually failed attempt to refuel spy satellites with the shuttle.
This huge wings played a major role in the Columbia accident.
The Challenger disaster was caused by faulty SRBs, a problem which would not accure with a huge liquid fuel rocket
One more reason I wish we were stuck in the 70s-80s: cool music, awesome videogames, nuclear powered planes everywhere, and by 2021 we would've already have three colonies on Mars.
TH-cam did not exist then though...
I blame Nixon and his war on drugs it caused NASA to be cut back and ended up a massive drain on the country's economy.
"The shuttle's engines wouldn't have engaged until after it seperated from the booster" so basically magic since the main engines of the shuttle absolutely needed the tank, because it had no internal fuel tanks
The idea was that the conical bit on the bottom separates, while the external tank remains attached. The orbiter would have needed some major design changes for an in-flight ignition, though
@@bassett_green If you're going to do in flight ignition vs ground started the engines you might as well run the cheaper J-2S.
I’ve wondered since the first time I saw a Shuttle in 1991 why they never put a passenger cabin in the cargo bay. Thanks for answering that question!
you are welcome
Where are the tanks for the SSME's to ignite in orbit? On the real shuttle those were ignited on the ground and used fuel from the external tank. The OMS did fire to finalize orbit but they used entirely different fuel from the SSME's
Well i didnt do any research but the entire thing seems kind of bs
@@GodOfChaos_HeXa i tried to, and i've found exactly 0 about this concept. I keep getting stuck on a "Personal Launch System", something called a HL-20 which was the predecessor to the Dreamchaser
There is an animation error. The booster is just the conical section - the bit the Shuttle is attached to is basically a "regular" External Tank. The SSMEs get their fuel from there.
@@HalNordmann acctually it isnt a animation error its just absolut bs 7:53
not everything can be perfectly animated all the time.
How would that configuration _not_ tip over?🤔
Bottom heavy!
Just a little clarification: most if not all of the SPS designs were geostationary. So even if the construction was to be done on LEO, the platform would have to be transferred to GEO with some sort of a space tug. Or assembled at GEO in the first place, which then would have higher delta-v requirements (including for the passenger shuttle).
Smarter to assemble in LEO. That would dramatically decrease the total mass lifted to orbit.
With a SPS, you can easily use ion thrusters to move it to GEO, even in segments.
Di-methyl-hydrazine. Di pronounced as die. Methyl is like saying Metal with a lisp so Meth-ill. Then Finally Hydrazine, Hydra like the many headed snake monster thing and zine like seen but with a z. Put it all together and you get Dimethylhydrazine
Thanks for the input.
I'm more impressed with Boeing's booster section than the passenger module. Sounds like something that could have been developed separately as the first stage of a heavy-lift option during/post Shuttle program with a second stage and/or cargo module on the nose of the fuel tank instead of a heavy shuttle hanging off the side.
There were more realistic plans for liquid fuel boosters on the Shuttle- using kerolox and being mounted in the place of regular SRBs. But those plans were cut due to being too expensive. The Boeing booster would've needed a whole new launch infrastructure, recovery operations, and a redesign of the fuel tank to handle new loads (from bottom rather than from the sides).
there were countless different designs.
Cool concept, great execution, your 3D modelling is getting awesome!
Dude thank you! You made my day :)
I like your videos on never built aircrafts especially the gigantic ones. Imagine what life would be if these monsters ever existed, Aviation and Aerospace would be even more exciting than what we have today. Keep up the good work.
I like my videos too.
Where did you find this concept? I really want to look into the conical booster propulsion system and the staging.
Edit: sorry, I skipped the end of the video and realised you linked to aerospace projects review there! Which issue is it in?
Edit 2: All my questions answered after researching a bit. However, what is your source for the use of AJ-10 engines as the 10 retro-rockets used in booster recovery? The sources I have found list 10 x pressure-fed NTO/UDMH engines, but do not go as specific as the AJ-10, espeically since the AJ-10 uses Aerozine50 rather than UDMH.
I have my sources
There's a parallel universe where Nasa didn't shut down the Apollo program.
* where they kept Apollo-era budget.
:(
sadly it is not this one.
Possibly also one where NASA went with a smaller spaceplane design.
The large cargo bay was, apparently, intended for the US military to be able to launch and recover KH-11 satellites. Something which never happened.
There was a concept called Saturn-Shuttle which is effectively the shuttle orbiter and external tank stuck on top of a Saturn V.
A spaceplane might just use the S-IC and S-II stages.
Being on top of a booster means no possibility the damage Columbia experienced. Even if the booster explodes "hot staging" using the OMS is a possible abort.
@@markevans2294 Well, the large cargo bay had its uses - it allowed the Shuttle to carry space station modules. It definitely could've been a bit smaller, but not by much - some of the larger modules were a really tight fit.
Saturn-Shuttle was an interesting idea, but it was not much more than that. Saturn rockets had a ton of "technical debt" - there was a lot of inefficiencies on them due to their quick development, and they were only flyable with an Apollo-era budget. Saturn IB was a stop-gap rocket basically built from spare Redstone & Jupiter tanks, and Saturn V was only good at one thing - getting humans to the Moon. Trying to develop any of those systems further would likely end up in a bad way.
The positions on the 'side' of the booster has its own advantages - you can use the orbiter engines to help the lifter during ascent, the full stack is lower, and a few other upsides. Neither of the approaches is any "better" than the other - they both have their advantages and disadvantages.
Dimethylhydrazine. Pronounced die-meth-ill-high-dra-zeen. It is made of 2 methyl molecules and one hydrazine, C2H8N2.
yes, about 20 people have said so.
Seems like Buran the Soviet space shuttle would be a better fit for this. Have you done a video about Buran?
Hell yeah! My dog is named Buran.
I dont think he will du buran. mustard, the channel that have kinda similar content as this guy already made it. You should search it up
not yet, maybe.
Mustard? Who is that?
I was getting ready to ask about the elimination of the radiators, but you answered it just moments after I thought of it. Very nice!
I'm pretty sure this design illustration mis-interprets the intended function. Looking at Jenkins' book Space Shuttle, Developing an Icon 1972-2011, page II-441 includes a cutaway of this booster design. Only the conical section at the base is the booster, with the part above that being an external tank full of hydrogen and oxygen for the Shuttle main engines on the orbiter, with a separation plane between the two. So burn would be booster ignition on the pad (possibly also SSME ignition?), climb to altitude, staging off the conical booster alone for return, and then the orbiter proceeding to orbit on the propellant remaining in the external tank.
Exactly what I was looking for.
I’ve always had my own idea for a skyhook based spaceplane that uses skyhooks and has an inflatable rotating ring for long term voyages, you could even use it for military purposes like functioning as a destroyer or as a troop and cargo transport.
maybe the future will have things like this.
These videos on this channel have been very interesting and thought provoking. I had no idea that engineers have these wild solutions and next level ideas that never got made.
some engineers are crazy
Hugo Drax built this version of the Space Shuttle in his factories at Drax Industries in the 1970s. He called them "Moonrakers".
Love that film
Yes but James Bond killed a lot of lovely young woman on the space station.
"Greatly scaled back" is a serious understatement. It's like planning to bake a apple pie and and deciding to serve a unpeeled apple instead and still calling it a pie.
86 passenger space shuttle
CIA: 86 tactical nukes?
Dave Reed (Reid) was the engineer who initially designed STARRAKER while he was employed at ROCKWELL. Met him & his wife at a planetarium show I was giving at Tessmann planetarium located on the campus of Santa Ana College, Santa Ana Ca
Later, Dave gave me additional slides of STARRAKER which I included in other planetarium presentations (late 1970s into 1970s).
I must have missed that part, what fuel where the SSMEs running on ? They feed of the large orange tank, but you were quite specific about the Shuttle seperating before SSME ignition.
it's very extraordinary this video
you are extraordinary
-Problem 1: Shuttle doesn't have fuel tanks so how can you use its engines once disconnected from the external tank?
-Problem Two: if you're not going to use all the space in cargo you might as well keep the radiators on the cargo bay doors, or create doors with fluid radiators. A big water tank isn't saving you much weight.
Problem 3: No four engines are powerful enough to get a 90 ton orbiter, 100 ton plus 1000 tons of fuel into orbit.
This never happened because it's not possible.
Hey make a video about the buran energia
The hypergolic chemical compound is pronounced as "die-methall-hi-dro-zeen"
Perhaps he's British.
I really wish they went with the star raker :(
That was a good design and it would’ve made space travel a lot more feasible a lot sooner; although I do like the design of the PLS, it looks a lot cleaner and more uniform!
Where'd you get your sources on this? I'd love to look more into this! All I can find is the HL-20 PLS, which was the precursor to the Dream Chaser.
The normal space shuttle not having a launch abort system was bad enough, imagine giving this thing one!
Good stories on this channel
7:36 There was a grand total of zero (0) solid rocket boosters used in the Apollo program.
I really love your videos, their short, entertaining and more ,keep up the great work :)
Thanks a ton!
We need a Buran video ❤
Makes mental note to watch the Bond film Moonraker again and count how many passengers they carried.
Well, I think I now know what to build next in ksp
I assume the orbiter would not have needed SSME's in this version. (Unfortunately, I don't see the technology back then supporting such a system. It would have been too expensive and not safe enough for civilian passengers)
The backside of the cargo doors held the ship’s radiator system which was usually pointed to deep space to eliminate heat from solar radiation and onboard cooling systems. Having no cargo doors would have no method to cooling the ship. There was a planned passenger module designed that could be placed in all space shuttles so no need for a specialty shuttle and the fleet could be more flexible in missions.
One of the functions of the orbiter cargo bay doors was to keep the orbiter cool.
IIRC either Young or Crippen said, prior to STS-1, that if they couldn't get them to open they'd need to land ASAP.
Putting 84 passengers in the back adds an additional 9-10kw of cooling requirements.
On top of that it would be necessary to upgrade the life support systems.
I find it very interesting that during the development of the now defunct space shuttle, prople were thinking of passenger variants, it would be nice to have space hotels and transport to get there. However, how much would a ticket cost? Probably out of reach for many. I also think it is high time for Space Planes to come into production, An aircraft with the capability of taking off and land like todays commercial aircraft but powerful enough to bring people to space would be an out of this world experience.
it would be very expensive.
Do you happen to have sources for this video? I'm interested in reading more about it but I can't find anything
All the best and good luck
You too.
The 3 large bells on the shuttles only burn hydrolox from the underbelly tank, the the 2 smaller ones burn unsymmetrical monomethylhydrazine which is stored on board the orbiter itself, therefore the wrong engine are burnng in the animation when teh conical tank is laft behind.
oh well, it is done now.
Imagine this thing blowing up like the Challenger...
Should skyhooks be used instead?
Do y’all think we could build the SPS and passenger space shuttle and the Rockwell plane/space ship today
If we can convince the world to work together on it....
We've had the technology. Just not enough to make the price tag small enough to be reasonable.
It would take a lot of government money and support.
good luck on that...
when he said "unlike the solid rocket boosters used in the Apollo program" i went "wait... what?"
This version reminds me of the scene from 007's Moonraker where the space shuttle had passengers not cargo.
you are not alone.
The Star Taker would be an excellent ship for the trips between the Earth and the moon.
This is what I imagine for the shuttles in " Enders Game".
Mustard has nothing... I repeat NOTHING on this channel. Keep on doing what you're doing man!!
Thanks
Flying into space on a giant traffic cone.
is there a better way?
funny note.. in Brazil we call it "ônibus espacial" (space bus)
I had to stop watching and head to google when you mentioned Chrysler helping build the Saturn V 🤯
Deadass it looks like a ksp craft
How many passengers would the smaller star raker have been able to carry? Or did it not even get to that stage of its design?
That orange rocket booster.... 🤣😂🤣😅😂🤣😅🤣😂
I didn’t know about this little gem of an idea. The propellant choices are questionable but the design concept was sound. Using the conical booster would eliminate the need to fire the RS25 engines on liftoff. Maybe air breathing engines could have been used to lift at first thus saving some weight as well?
Actually they were working on NERVA about the same time. The possibilities then…
Outstanding son, I never knew this variation was ever penned.
there are many different plans out there.
Saw this Shuttle in a James Bond Movie The "Moonraker" shuttle.🚀
7:53 There is an error only the lower cone part would separate return the top cylinder part basically the Shuttle ET would have continued with the orbiter as it's needed to fuel the shuttle main engines.
The orbiter only carriers fuel for the two smaller OMS engines internally.
The SSME also would have been ground lite as well.
AMAZINGNES!!!
Awesome
7:38 - solid rocket boosters used in the Apollo programme - click ;-)
So there is a BIG SHUTTLE ROCKET even before Elon Musk was born
Whole point of the video...no.
there were a few.
The one part I don't understand are the RS-25s on the orbiter. They're grossly overpowered to be used while the shuttle is on its own, not to mention they're angled wrong for that. Wouldn't it make more sense to just use the orbital manoeuvring thrusters and forgo the RS-25s entirely?
For all mankind writers: write that down
i think they did
OG starship
the idea was first visualized in 1979's James Bond film Moonraker
"...and would be very much like the Space Shuttle we have today." (1:50) Uh, we don't have a space shuttle today!
7:38 Apollo didn't use SRBs, the standard STS shuttle did
can you make a video about Energia II?
maybe
Introducing Airbus's newest subsidiary, Spacebus!
Theortically, they couls have constructed 2 reusable space shuttles for torists. They would only need to repair parts of the shuttle and for fuel.
Its true, but also, before cost cutbacks and comitti controlled project management, the sts was originally designed to have its main tank, boosters and shuttle all incorporated into 1 vehicle, not 4 separate parts. And tha5s where the passenger carrying unit became part of the integral sts plan, and was the last add-on to be scrapped
probably
Let’s see the main engines don’t engage until that orange “booster” well where the fuel for them stored at? Haha
That James Bond movie and Airplane 2 took this passenger space shuttle idea from NASA.
refer @7:39, what, solid rocket motors were used in the "apollo program" I think you meant shuttle program.
That breed of engineers who had never taken a basic course in economics. “They’re threatening our oil supply, so let’s build solar power farms in space and use masers to beam the power to ground sites”
Maybe in 2100, but not 1976. They were designing a horse before finding a load for the cart they hadn’t any idea how to build. Solar was 40 years from being any good, and space might double the energy available but the cells don’t like heat.
Nuclear energy is the best
it was a crazy time.
The magic schoolbus
how is the shuttle running its engines without its fuel tank?
When the shuttle was still flying (prior to accidents), I had an idea they should build a container (life support) with seats, windows, that would fill the cargo compartment so passengers could look out after the doors were opened? ;-)
The cargo doors also are required for heat to dissipate (solar power?).
What, more junk thrown into space for the ISS to avoid?