I began work as an engineer at Grumman aerospace in 1979. I was put on the shuttle wing program, which was well under way. While searching for some data one day, i came across a bunch of advanced design studies created prior to approval of the shuttle program that proposed many configurations for shuttle stacks including above a traditional booster such as you describe. I was 22 yrs old.
My favorite alternative Shuttle concept - I'm so GLAD you did a video on it! One minor quibble: it's pronounced the "S-One-C" stage, not "S-Aye-C". NASA was fond of Roman numerals back in the day. You've probably seen videos done by younger-generation folks who similarly pronounce "Saturn-Five" as "Saturn-Vee". Thanks for NOT doing that! 😉
If they'd written a clause into the nuclear test ban treaties to permit nuclear explosions for use as spacecraft propulsion (nuclear pulse propulsion) an Orion drive probe might have launched by the late 1970s. It would be entering the Alpha Centauri system about now...
If we would of had the same budget for the apollo program after the apollo program ended. We would of had a colony on the moon by the mid 90s. It would of paid for itself 10 fold because the united states would of been the dominant provider of earth to orbit. No one would of stood a chance to compete.
According to "Curious Droid," June 18, 2024, "17:04 Although each F-1 was going to be used just once for the launch and ditched in the Atlantic afterwards, it was rated for 10 re-flights. In testing, two engines were used with one performing 20 tests for a total of 2,256 seconds (37.58 minutes) and the other for 34 tests and 2,913 seconds (48.55 minutes). During the actual flights, they were only used for between 159 and 165 seconds. if they could have been returned to earth safely then they could have been reused many more times." Somewhere else, I've seen a proposal similar to the concept shown in this video for a "fly-back" S1C first stage, so that the F1 engines, if not the entire booster, could be reused. So the concept of a modified, reusable S1C booster for the shuttle sounds feasible.
9:43 "and what happened to Columbia would have not been possible with this setup" All these concepts show the shuttle mounted on the side of something that looks like an external tank. Assuming that all the same technology choices would have been made (cryogenic propellants, foam insulation, brittle carbon-carbon wing leading edges), how would that have made a Columbia-type of incident impossible?
Great video by the way, I knew NASA played around with the idea but I didn't know that there were so many variants. Too bad it didn't work out. The idea of a MANNED first stage that flies back to the launch site is wild! We had to wait more than half a century but there's a good chance Starship will fly back and land sometime during its next few launches. It's amazing to watch and I consider myself lucky to be able to watch it all happen.
There would have been no foam insulation that could have detached and struck the shuttles leading edge. The shuttle would have been mounted above the area the foam could have dislodged from
Great video! I subbed when you first made this channel and ALWAYS enjoy every single video you make on all your channels. Can’t wait to see what you make next! ❤
I think the main problem was the lack of funding and goals. They could have made a new, purpose built fly-back booster without having to start up the old Saturn production lines with more funding and attention. The fateful solid rocket were just as much a result of lacked funding as the canceled Saturn-Shuttle. If they had gotten to this idea while Saturn V's were still being manufactured, it would have been a great transition. Hey didn't outright say it, but Starship is basically a modern, remake of the Saturn-Shuttle design (with some post-Challenger, post-Columbia and post-Falcon insights).
I doubt they had the computing power to do anything close to what Space X can do today. We didn’t even have the x86 processor until around 1978, and those chips were as primitive as stone tools compared to today.
@@starpartyguy5605 You'd be surprised how little processing power VTVL needs. Don't forget, the LM was fully capable of landing on the lunar surface automatically, and that was in 1969 at the earliest. Granted, landing on Earth in the atmosphere at a precise target location isn't exactly the same, but tech at the time wouldn't have been an obstacle. Soviet Buran was fully automated unlike the Shuttle, on its only orbital test flight which was uncrewed, it performed everything by itself, which is way more complex than rocket boosters doing VTVL, this was in late 80s so doing VTVL in 70s and early 80s wouldn't have been a problem.
I might be biased (hence the pfp) but this is a great vid. PS, yes, the RS-IC booster would've been crewed in the winged flyback booster configuration.
The F-1 engines were around 80% the cost of the S-1C. Since these engines were not reusable, it made recovery of the booster less viable. What really killed the rly back booster however was that the Astronaut Office insisted any fly back booster be manned which would have drove up the cost even farther killing the concept of flying back any booster
The F-1 engines _were_ in fact reusable, but they weren't _recoverable_ since NASA was unable to recover the S-IC stage. During ground tests, one engine was fired 20 times for a total duration of 37.6 minutes while another was fired 34 times for a total duration of 48.5 minutes. i.sstatic.net/kpZJP.png
I remember seeing drawings for some early shuttle designs. There would be a 'boosternaut' pilot in the reusable fly back first stage. Not too crazy, the Saturn-5 was a man rated rocket. In the designs I saw, the booster would fly back dead stick, like the shuttle.
Just heard your question about the “manned” winged booster. Yes, ALL of the early winged booster concepts for the Shuttle assumed that they would be piloted. You can see a cockpit on the nose of the flyback S-IC in the Hazegrayart video you featured. If this concept had gone into production, I wonder if the jet engines on the booster would have been deleted - just as the originally-proposed jet engines for the Orbiter were eventually deleted due to creating too-much of a mass penalty - thus necessitating the gliding landings of the production Shuttle?
The jet engines on the booster wouldn't have been deleted because the booster would have needed to get back to KSC for landing. You either need to do a boostback burn (Which is what SpaceX does with the F9) or you need someway to fly the booster back which is what this concept would have used.
The Saturn V as a first stage for the shuttle was just one of MANY configurations studied for the shuttle. It is not necessarily any better than other proposals. The shuttle was attached to an external tank in this scenario, so foam shedding could still have been an issue.
It was better. They didn't have Morton-Thiokol with their unbelievable thermal restrictions for the solid rocket boosters. You can throttle a liquid engine, the solids, not so much.
While the Shuttle-Saturn would've prevented a Challenger-type accident, it probably would not have prevented what destroyed Columbia, if only because the orbiter in the Shuttle-Saturn in most configurations would still be riding on the side of an external tank all the way on top of the S-IC stage, and that means that there would still be hazards, like ice or insulation foam that could break off and damage the orbiter's thermal protection system.
I agree on all counts. I suggest the book "Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space Transportation System The First 100 Missions" by Dennis R. Jenkins.
This design was probably safer in a lot of ways, having the shuttle of the side of the stack was a terrible idea, it was at huge risk of debris striking the vehicle, as we saw with Columbia but it happened on many other missions, they just got lucky there wasn't another loss of vehicle/crew.
How are you thinking an accident like that of Columbia wouldn't be possible with "this setup"? If you mean the setup this video is mostly focused on, the orbiter still sits on the side of a big tank and should run the same risk of being hit by debris falling from that tank hitting the orbiter which is what happened to Columbia. For that to be ruled out, the orbiter would need to sit on top of the stack.
I read about another proposition that involved a piloted launch vehicle that would return to launch site. But it didn't involve the Saturn V. In the end, it was scrapped due to lack of funding. BTW, every time you mentioned Apollo 18 & 19, I wondered why you didn't mention 20, which was also in the pipes before the funding based decision was made to end the Apollo Project after 17. I'm not a fan of the faux dust & scratches effect, but glad you at least kept them off of the videos. You just HAD to mention SpaceX after making the hilarious, "if we had computers'
How would the Columbia accident have been impossible with a Saturn/Shuttle? That design still had the orbiter mounted next to the propellant tank so stuff still could have fallen off.
It was so stomach-pit depressing (in the 1970s) to witness humanity's manned space flight mission turn from adventurous extroversion to boring Earth-bound introversion. Along with the completely baffling abandonment of the fundamentals of the Saturn design. A cautionary tale of mega-investment leap of faith (oiled by politics) from battle-tested to dream-driven - and with no overlap period or fall-back (later repeated with the Shuttle ending). Strategically weird too - the moon race being "over" only in one sense (not others), and the "higher ground" principle remaining stark and clear. The "one small step", as in climbing, needed to be held firm until the next foothold was secure. In any case, there was a continuing market economics niche for a "big rocket". Starship excites and restores hope (e.g. in various derivatives) but now, even with that addition, the initially promising "return to the moon" goal appears at least as committee-driven-messed-up (overcomplex and fragile) as the Shuttle design. As with so many of humanity's endeavours, it needn't be this way. The main aim of the Apollo moon missions was to demonstrate (especially at home and to influenceable parts of the world) the superiority of the (relatively) free western capitalist system of civilisation to the stifling and invasive _communist system_ (not to Russia itself). This it did, at its core in a purely tech context, but with "magical" resonances beyond that to the (mainly) non tech masses. The message _now_ being shouted, manifested in recent years of "vision", psychopathy, complacency, denial, self-delusion and consequent unnecessary failures in air as well as space (and our climate, tragically) - is that our current system of civilisation is ridiculous. Nature hath no mercy. Pointless to blame people - individually or as groups - who have risen to prominence via such systems. A third (firmly founded and sustainable) alternative system is now vitally needed, via evolution not revolution. What could that possibly look like?
You call this an insane idea in the video title. Having your crew compartment directly next to a massive tank of fuel with no launch escape system is insane, and that’s what we ended up with.
The mainframe computers used by NASA during the apollo missions could do hundreds of thousands of operations per second and had megabytes of memory. Even when Falcon 1 was launching, we had smartphones that could comfortably outperform those apollo era supercomputers. We have no trouble today fitting the computing power needed to land a rocket on the rocket. That would not have been the case in 1972, when NASA were thinking about what happens next. That IMHO was the fundamental bottleneck. The fundamental reason Falcon has been such a resounding success is partly that it's reusable so they get to see what parts were only just good enough, but also because they can put astronaughts on a freighter, so people don't go near a new untested rocket design. Early unmanned rockets never had to hit anything much of a target, the only rocket that really needed to be accurate was the luner lander, and that was human controlled. Yes they had guidance computers, but they were still piloted. The unmanned rockets just had to hit orbit.. and earliest efforts to get a mission to the moon managed to miss. I very much doubt they could hit a runway or a landing pad in 1972 without a pilot.
It is a thin argument that the losses of Challenger and Columbia would of been negated. Certainly history would be different but it is just as likely that we would of had different types of disasters and loss of life. The problems at NASA were institutional and the group-think approaches to project management would not of changed.
Having a manned fly-back booster would add additional risk in itself, since you have an extra crew member being put in danger just to recover the booster.
The Insanity part is what they actually gave us to use as a safe system. They should have done this right from the get-go butt of course being a government bureaucracy the idea of giving all their buddies jobs
you lost me with the title. Why was it "insane"? There were plenty of concepts out there how to make Shuttle work, some more far-fetched than others, but strapping it to a big dumb booster was not that far-fetched and certainly not "insane". Using solid rockets was certainly much more insane than utilizing flight proven hardware from the Apollo program
ARGH. Every excuse to kill SI-C/Shuttle was then vastly worse under the bean counters' alternative. **headdesk** The only dumber space decision was the UK throwing away its orbital rockets.
Why the heck we didn't do it??? . Politics and money in early 70' and Nixon had no interest in space program .that's why!!! Space race was over! The NASA budget was drastically cut!!! THANKS TO NIXON!
It would have been reusable if it had been _recoverable._ One F-1 engine was test fired on the ground 20 times with a total duration of 37.6 minutes while another was test fired 34 times with a total duration of 48.5 minutes. i.sstatic.net/kpZJP.png
Parts of it were. It could have evolved into a reusable system. However, the urge to get to the moon as a stunt meant that none of the systems would ever be taken seriously.
Even if Watergate hadn't happened, Richard Nixon is the worst president in Modern American history. 1. He selected the space shuttle program over the exploration with the Saturn 5. 2. He took us off the gold standard 3. He canceled the Molten Salt Reactor program. (Kirk Sorenson TED talk) 4. He wasted money and lives in Vietnam All these decisions are now proven to be wrong. Elon Musk, Kirk Sorensen and Thomas Sowell are the visionaries of a future for all mankind.
I began work as an engineer at Grumman aerospace in 1979. I was put on the shuttle wing program, which was well under way. While searching for some data one day, i came across a bunch of advanced design studies created prior to approval of the shuttle program that proposed many configurations for shuttle stacks including above a traditional booster such as you describe. I was 22 yrs old.
My favorite alternative Shuttle concept - I'm so GLAD you did a video on it!
One minor quibble: it's pronounced the "S-One-C" stage, not "S-Aye-C". NASA was fond of Roman numerals back in the day. You've probably seen videos done by younger-generation folks who similarly pronounce "Saturn-Five" as "Saturn-Vee". Thanks for NOT doing that! 😉
Back when we had an education system
you're talking to a machine.
Hello totally not found and explained.
Nice to see you uploading here again
If only we had the 1970s future predicted in the 1960s. Progress is seldom a straight line.
If they'd written a clause into the nuclear test ban treaties to permit nuclear explosions for use as spacecraft propulsion (nuclear pulse propulsion) an Orion drive probe might have launched by the late 1970s. It would be entering the Alpha Centauri system about now...
If we would of had the same budget for the apollo program after the apollo program ended. We would of had a colony on the moon by the mid 90s. It would of paid for itself 10 fold because the united states would of been the dominant provider of earth to orbit. No one would of stood a chance to compete.
@@Doofwarrior88 - Would have.
Nice! Good to see you're still making videos. I love the Saturn-Shuttle, so I'm looking forward to watching this.
According to "Curious Droid," June 18, 2024, "17:04 Although each F-1 was going to be used just once for the launch and ditched in the Atlantic afterwards,
it was rated for 10 re-flights. In testing, two engines were used with one performing 20 tests for a total of 2,256 seconds (37.58 minutes) and the other for 34
tests and 2,913 seconds (48.55 minutes). During the actual flights, they were only used for between 159 and 165 seconds. if they could have been returned to
earth safely then they could have been reused many more times." Somewhere else, I've seen a proposal similar to the concept shown in this video for a "fly-back"
S1C first stage, so that the F1 engines, if not the entire booster, could be reused. So the concept of a modified, reusable S1C booster for the shuttle sounds feasible.
I got so confused when this popped up in my subscription feed lmao but glad to see you posting on here again
It wouldve been nice to have seen the Saturn hardware continue on. Such an amazing feat of engineering.
9:43 "and what happened to Columbia would have not been possible with this setup"
All these concepts show the shuttle mounted on the side of something that looks like an external tank. Assuming that all the same technology choices would have been made (cryogenic propellants, foam insulation, brittle carbon-carbon wing leading edges), how would that have made a Columbia-type of incident impossible?
Great video by the way, I knew NASA played around with the idea but I didn't know that there were so many variants. Too bad it didn't work out. The idea of a MANNED first stage that flies back to the launch site is wild!
We had to wait more than half a century but there's a good chance Starship will fly back and land sometime during its next few launches. It's amazing to watch and I consider myself lucky to be able to watch it all happen.
There would have been no foam insulation that could have detached and struck the shuttles leading edge. The shuttle would have been mounted above the area the foam could have dislodged from
@@matthewcaughey8898 what if form from the top of the et gets dislodged
Waiting forward to your next video!
I am guessing that the person you gave control of this channel didn't work out in the end. Such is life. Nice to see this channel back on the "air"
Please do a video about the 'what could have been' with the Buran space shuttle!
Great video! I subbed when you first made this channel and ALWAYS enjoy every single video you make on all your channels.
Can’t wait to see what you make next! ❤
Canceling the Saturn V entirely and going with all new clean sheet designs was a mistake
Totally agree, evolution always work better than revolution...👍🏻
I think the main problem was the lack of funding and goals. They could have made a new, purpose built fly-back booster without having to start up the old Saturn production lines with more funding and attention. The fateful solid rocket were just as much a result of lacked funding as the canceled Saturn-Shuttle. If they had gotten to this idea while Saturn V's were still being manufactured, it would have been a great transition. Hey didn't outright say it, but Starship is basically a modern, remake of the Saturn-Shuttle design (with some post-Challenger, post-Columbia and post-Falcon insights).
I doubt they had the computing power to do anything close to what Space X can do today. We didn’t even have the x86 processor until around 1978, and those chips were as primitive as stone tools compared to today.
@@starpartyguy5605 You'd be surprised how little processing power VTVL needs. Don't forget, the LM was fully capable of landing on the lunar surface automatically, and that was in 1969 at the earliest. Granted, landing on Earth in the atmosphere at a precise target location isn't exactly the same, but tech at the time wouldn't have been an obstacle. Soviet Buran was fully automated unlike the Shuttle, on its only orbital test flight which was uncrewed, it performed everything by itself, which is way more complex than rocket boosters doing VTVL, this was in late 80s so doing VTVL in 70s and early 80s wouldn't have been a problem.
I might be biased (hence the pfp) but this is a great vid. PS, yes, the RS-IC booster would've been crewed in the winged flyback booster configuration.
Excellent video.
The F-1 engines were around 80% the cost of the S-1C. Since these engines were not reusable, it made recovery of the booster less viable. What really killed the rly back booster however was that the Astronaut Office insisted any fly back booster be manned which would have drove up the cost even farther killing the concept of flying back any booster
The F-1 engines _were_ in fact reusable, but they weren't _recoverable_ since NASA was unable to recover the S-IC stage. During ground tests, one engine was fired 20 times for a total duration of 37.6 minutes while another was fired 34 times for a total duration of 48.5 minutes.
i.sstatic.net/kpZJP.png
I remember seeing drawings for some early shuttle designs. There would be a 'boosternaut' pilot in the reusable fly back first stage. Not too crazy, the Saturn-5 was a man rated rocket. In the designs I saw, the booster would fly back dead stick, like the shuttle.
no! Its S one C not S.I.C. The "I" is a Roman Numeral, bad spelling practice yes, but that's what it was.
Well, he does say, "A polo" so I didn't expect much from the narration.
Reminds me of the proposed flyback external fuel tanks for the shuttle. Would love a video on those
Y'all gotta check out For All Mankind
Just heard your question about the “manned” winged booster. Yes, ALL of the early winged booster concepts for the Shuttle assumed that they would be piloted. You can see a cockpit on the nose of the flyback S-IC in the Hazegrayart video you featured.
If this concept had gone into production, I wonder if the jet engines on the booster would have been deleted - just as the originally-proposed jet engines for the Orbiter were eventually deleted due to creating too-much of a mass penalty - thus necessitating the gliding landings of the production Shuttle?
The jet engines on the booster wouldn't have been deleted because the booster would have needed to get back to KSC for landing. You either need to do a boostback burn (Which is what SpaceX does with the F9) or you need someway to fly the booster back which is what this concept would have used.
Just Commenting in hopes of seeing more video from this channel.
The Saturn V as a first stage for the shuttle was just one of MANY configurations studied for the shuttle. It is not necessarily any better than other proposals. The shuttle was attached to an external tank in this scenario, so foam shedding could still have been an issue.
It was better. They didn't have Morton-Thiokol with their unbelievable thermal restrictions for the solid rocket boosters. You can throttle a liquid engine, the solids, not so much.
While the Shuttle-Saturn would've prevented a Challenger-type accident, it probably would not have prevented what destroyed Columbia, if only because the orbiter in the Shuttle-Saturn in most configurations would still be riding on the side of an external tank all the way on top of the S-IC stage, and that means that there would still be hazards, like ice or insulation foam that could break off and damage the orbiter's thermal protection system.
I agree on all counts. I suggest the book "Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space Transportation System The First 100 Missions" by Dennis R. Jenkins.
Good content
I just want to point out that 60s and 70s film and video did not have that amount of "floater debris" by a long shot.
Try the 1920s matey.
This design was probably safer in a lot of ways, having the shuttle of the side of the stack was a terrible idea, it was at huge risk of debris striking the vehicle, as we saw with Columbia but it happened on many other missions, they just got lucky there wasn't another loss of vehicle/crew.
ok this channel is alive
How are you thinking an accident like that of Columbia wouldn't be possible with "this setup"? If you mean the setup this video is mostly focused on, the orbiter still sits on the side of a big tank and should run the same risk of being hit by debris falling from that tank hitting the orbiter which is what happened to Columbia. For that to be ruled out, the orbiter would need to sit on top of the stack.
A cautionary tale of the perils of shortsightedness. Great question; "What if?"
I read about another proposition that involved a piloted launch vehicle that would return to launch site. But it didn't involve the Saturn V.
In the end, it was scrapped due to lack of funding.
BTW, every time you mentioned Apollo 18 & 19, I wondered why you didn't mention 20, which was also in the pipes before the funding based decision was made to end the Apollo Project after 17.
I'm not a fan of the faux dust & scratches effect, but glad you at least kept them off of the videos. You just HAD to mention SpaceX after making the hilarious, "if we had computers'
Do a video on the Lockheed LS-200 Starclipper its a super cool space shuttle alternative and theres not many videos on it unfortunately
The reduction of NASA's budget was also related to the war that was being fought in SE Asia.....
How would the Columbia accident have been impossible with a Saturn/Shuttle? That design still had the orbiter mounted next to the propellant tank so stuff still could have fallen off.
maybe him confused with Challenger
I think was a sensible concept; Not sure any external tank covered with the absurdly flimsy foam insulation would then be needed.
Dang, I wish we could have seen this in "For All Mankind" ...
Omg finally I thought that this channel died😢❤
NASA should have focused on building space stations first. They could have had a Dream Chaser class vehicle to shuttle personnel to the stations.
It was so stomach-pit depressing (in the 1970s) to witness humanity's manned space flight mission turn from adventurous extroversion to boring Earth-bound introversion. Along with the completely baffling abandonment of the fundamentals of the Saturn design. A cautionary tale of mega-investment leap of faith (oiled by politics) from battle-tested to dream-driven - and with no overlap period or fall-back (later repeated with the Shuttle ending). Strategically weird too - the moon race being "over" only in one sense (not others), and the "higher ground" principle remaining stark and clear. The "one small step", as in climbing, needed to be held firm until the next foothold was secure. In any case, there was a continuing market economics niche for a "big rocket".
Starship excites and restores hope (e.g. in various derivatives) but now, even with that addition, the initially promising "return to the moon" goal appears at least as committee-driven-messed-up (overcomplex and fragile) as the Shuttle design. As with so many of humanity's endeavours, it needn't be this way.
The main aim of the Apollo moon missions was to demonstrate (especially at home and to influenceable parts of the world) the superiority of the (relatively) free western capitalist system of civilisation to the stifling and invasive _communist system_ (not to Russia itself). This it did, at its core in a purely tech context, but with "magical" resonances beyond that to the (mainly) non tech masses.
The message _now_ being shouted, manifested in recent years of "vision", psychopathy, complacency, denial, self-delusion and consequent unnecessary failures in air as well as space (and our climate, tragically) - is that our current system of civilisation is ridiculous. Nature hath no mercy. Pointless to blame people - individually or as groups - who have risen to prominence via such systems. A third (firmly founded and sustainable) alternative system is now vitally needed, via evolution not revolution. What could that possibly look like?
Man being Human reted... Souls and such the whole stack has to be certified.
Not "S-eye-C" but S-ONE-C" (S-IC)
Second stage was S-II, and third stage S-IVB.
Or is this computer narration?
Just an Aussie who doesn't know much about the topic he made a video on.
4:06 The S-IC booster is S-One-C, not S-eye-C. Just so ya know. Like the S-IVB is the S-four-B.
It put 10,000s out of work!
Can you please tell me the names of the two background musics you added at the start ? ( from 0:00 to 1:05, from 1:06 to 2:01 )
Came to this straight from the Drakon video
I didn't know you had a space channel...
The External Tank was originally to be reused. IMO Big mistake in not doing that.
You call this an insane idea in the video title. Having your crew compartment directly next to a massive tank of fuel with no launch escape system is insane, and that’s what we ended up with.
Yeah the geometry of side mounts are just fundementally riskier than inline layouts
👍👍👍❤❤❤🚀🚀🚀
The mainframe computers used by NASA during the apollo missions could do hundreds of thousands of operations per second and had megabytes of memory. Even when Falcon 1 was launching, we had smartphones that could comfortably outperform those apollo era supercomputers. We have no trouble today fitting the computing power needed to land a rocket on the rocket. That would not have been the case in 1972, when NASA were thinking about what happens next. That IMHO was the fundamental bottleneck. The fundamental reason Falcon has been such a resounding success is partly that it's reusable so they get to see what parts were only just good enough, but also because they can put astronaughts on a freighter, so people don't go near a new untested rocket design. Early unmanned rockets never had to hit anything much of a target, the only rocket that really needed to be accurate was the luner lander, and that was human controlled. Yes they had guidance computers, but they were still piloted. The unmanned rockets just had to hit orbit.. and earliest efforts to get a mission to the moon managed to miss. I very much doubt they could hit a runway or a landing pad in 1972 without a pilot.
so many choices, only so much money - and then they cut the budget. .maybe the time was just not right.
The design was just not right. Where was this thing going to? LEO is not exploration.
How cute to think Space X will actually deliver on their promises. Silly.
Not "S eye C" stage, it was the "S one C" stage!
It is a thin argument that the losses of Challenger and Columbia would of been negated. Certainly history would be different but it is just as likely that we would of had different types of disasters and loss of life.
The problems at NASA were institutional and the group-think approaches to project management would not of changed.
Having a manned fly-back booster would add additional risk in itself, since you have an extra crew member being put in danger just to recover the booster.
S-One-C.
Guy sounds like thoughty2
Nixon, the answer is always Nixon.
You lost me at S.I.C.
Saturn V first stage SIC was called S-one-C
Saturn IC = "Saturn One C"
S-IC = "S One C"
How do you know it didn't make it?
And we got the STS.
Instead. LOL
The Insanity part is what they actually gave us to use as a safe system. They should have done this right from the get-go butt of course being a government bureaucracy the idea of giving all their buddies jobs
you lost me with the title. Why was it "insane"? There were plenty of concepts out there how to make Shuttle work, some more far-fetched than others, but strapping it to a big dumb booster was not that far-fetched and certainly not "insane". Using solid rockets was certainly much more insane than utilizing flight proven hardware from the Apollo program
I think you might have overdone the vintage film effect. Don’t do that again.
ARGH. Every excuse to kill SI-C/Shuttle was then vastly worse under the bean counters' alternative. **headdesk** The only dumber space decision was the UK throwing away its orbital rockets.
Why, the basic answer is politics
Why the heck we didn't do it??? . Politics and money in early 70' and Nixon had no interest in space program .that's why!!! Space race was over! The NASA budget was drastically cut!!! THANKS TO NIXON!
The Saturn V booster wasn’t reusable
It would have been reusable if it had been _recoverable._
One F-1 engine was test fired on the ground 20 times with a total duration of 37.6 minutes while another was test fired 34 times with a total duration of 48.5 minutes.
i.sstatic.net/kpZJP.png
Parts of it were. It could have evolved into a reusable system. However, the urge to get to the moon as a stunt meant that none of the systems would ever be taken seriously.
Greed, political-pork and cowardice are the reasons.
Even if Watergate hadn't happened, Richard Nixon is the worst president in Modern American history.
1. He selected the space shuttle program over the exploration with the Saturn 5.
2. He took us off the gold standard
3. He canceled the Molten Salt Reactor program. (Kirk Sorenson TED talk)
4. He wasted money and lives in Vietnam
All these decisions are now proven to be wrong. Elon Musk, Kirk Sorensen and Thomas Sowell are the visionaries of a future for all mankind.