Recent Gerstenmaier interview painted a clearer picture of Shuttle condition, making it clear that NASA is de facto not interested in actually making Shuttle a high cadence Interview: SpaceX also removed requirements to perform static engine firings after a turbine wheel is changed out. Instead, the company added some accelerometers on the engine to verify that the turbine wheel is operating properly. In case of any problem, the instrument can trigger an automated abort up to the last half-second before launch. “We use the actual launch countdown to effectively replace a portion of the static firing,” Gerstenmaier says. The inability to drop requirements was a primary reason why NASA’s space shuttles were never able to come close to projected flight rates, notes Gerstenamier, a former NASA associate administrator who oversaw the space shuttle, International Space Station and other human space-flight programs. During the space shuttle program’s peak years of 1992-97, NASA flew seven or eight missions per calendar year. In 1984, it flew nine times. “We got forced to be conservative for a variety of reasons, and we could never remove requirements,” Gerstenmaier says. “I attempted to remove requirements, and I was unable to, or it would take me 10 years.” For example, early in the shuttle program, NASA needed to pull the shuttle main engines after every flight for inspection. But after several flights, the inspections were not revealing any issues. “They weren’t adding any value, and I wanted to stop the inspections,” Gerstenmaier says. “But we had gotten so good at pulling engines, the program said, ‘Why don’t we just pull engines and go look because we can?’ “At the end, we were tearing apart all these shuttle engines for inspection and we ended up operating at the low end of the reliability curve,” he says. “We actually wore out components during testing and put more life on them than we did in actual flight. “If you’ve got hardware that is ready to go fly, you’re better off not tearing it apart to inspect. To understand if it has a problem, you use the reliability of the hardware to drive you and you only inspect when you start getting out to that later life period,” he adds. “We weren’t allowed to do that in shuttle. “At SpaceX, we see the benefit of removing a requirement, and then if we remove too much, we can add it back in-no harm, no foul,” Gerstenmaier notes.
Thanks for sharing. Higher flight rate would have maybe been good for Morton Thiokol (pick whichever name you want for them), but it would probably be neutral for the other contractors; they would get more work but NASA would probably want more efficiency. High flight rate wouldn't help NASA management further their careers nor would it help NASA supporters in congress, so there's very little incentive to try to achieve that. And fewer requirements doesn't help those groups either.
@@EagerSpace There were also several problematic things with Shuttle 1. Tile issue 2. Hydrogen leak on supply (believe it or not, it's a design-specific issue, not a general one. Ariane 5, Centaur & Delta IV have much less of this. SLS ofc follows the Shuttle hence problems) 3. Shuttle 2.0 4. SRB O-rings (even at desired limits it still has burn-through on flights before STS-51L) All of this will be done years ago if they got the funding, but they didn't (one of them was forced by accident/loss of life)
The US Military, specifically the Air Force had a big influence on the Shuttle program. Despite NASA being a "civilian" agency the Air Force joined the program for the Shuttle with significant requirements for mission capabilities and spacecraft characteristics. There are early shuttle missions (pre-Challenger) that are still classified today because of the military payloads that they carried. The shuttle program was like any other government project. One group said "I have a bad barely serviceable idea" and another group jumped to their feet and yelled "I CAN MAKE IT WORSE!!!". That was shuttle.
"The Shuttle Decision" is an excellent reference for this time and you can find it free online. The AF got involved because NASA needed help getting shuttle through Congress and approved by Nixon. The AF had a little influence on the size of the payload bay. IIRC, it was primarily the length of the payload bay as NASA already wanted one that had a large diameter to carry space station modules. The AF also came up with the "once around" mission and that pushed the crossrange requirement up high and required large delta wings to do that. Without that requirement, shuttle has smaller wings and would have been a bit lighter.
@@EagerSpace they were planning to launch the shuttle on military polar orbit missions from Vandenberg as early as October of 1986. Enterprise was used for fit check and the launch complex was certified and ready to go. The Challenger accident put an end to all plans to launch the shuttle from Vandenberg. The military requirements of the spacecraft were severe limitations for its civilian uses in the long run.
Very enlightening video. It explains the entire purpose of the federal government. It also completely explains why Artemis will NEVER fly. It was never intended to.
Wow, I cannot imagine the amount of work required to produce this! Very informative and interesting. Stunning summary of the (non)progress of the shuttle-program from start to finish. You deserve a bigger audience.
Thanks. This one came partly from my experience with disfunctional organizations, and partly from a comment from the excellent EDX course on the design of the space shuttle. One of the shuttle engineers commented, "we were always hoping to work on shuttle 2.0, and we didn't understand why NASA didn't do it". Seems like a really good question.
Wow, I’m lost for words That was your most interesting and well made video to date You really re-opened the inner space geek within me thinking about post Apollo, shuttle and SLS You really are climbing up to one of my favorite youtubers, the fact you have so few subscribers is insane, there are a few others like you but not many with so few subs
When you mention that NASA did an analysis of how best to build SLS and whether to do something Shuttle derived or Saturn derived you should mention your other video on the topic and link in the description so that people know its out there.
In regards to the point about Russia needing to send NASA astronauts to the ISS, even when the shuttle program was active keeping astronauts on the ISS had to be done by Soyuz and required replacing an astronaut launched on Soyuz with one launched on the shuttle. Which meant that even during the shuttle program NASA either had to pay for seats on Soyuz or cut massively short the time some Russian astronauts would stay on the ISS. That problem had persisted from the station's beginning in a more convoluted form and was only solved with SpX Crew 1.
I will add though-and this isn’t really a counterpoint to what you’re saying by any means-that there was another pretty big asymmetry in the other direction, in that only NASA with Shuttle could launch most of the really big fundamental components of the ISS. (As I understand it.) So yeah, Shuttle’s maybe-2-weeks(?) on-orbit duration definitely sucked for crew rotations compared to Soyuz. But on the other hand, at least when it came to raw cargo carrying ability (specifically for construction moreso than resupply), Shuttle could do a lot more than Roscosmos had anything capable of doing. (Sad face for Energia, the coolest-but-abandonedest rocket ever. ☹️)
@@jgottula Yes. Exactly. The shuttle was more of a cargo vehicle than crewed vehicle even in ISS operations. In terms of cost efficiency it would be worse than those Russian rockets though but in terms of payload mass and volume it could definitely lift a lot and contribute to ISS construction, although I still think ISS construction could've been done cheaper with normal launchers.
Yes. Originally the ISS plan was "hang out somewhere and we'll send a shuttle to get you", but that went away after Challenger. NASA did talk about the crew return vehicle but that never went beyond concept.
@@EagerSpace Technically the crew return vehicle got to 90% completion of the first article... but that's it. It stopped there. Shame, could've made the shuttle a viable crew vehicle, but as it stands NASA seriously shafted the payload of the shuttle by providing a crew compartment standard on every flight that wound up being a near-useless addition to any sort of regular operation; really only being a benefit for the few times it recovered satellites or repaired hubble.
@@jgottula " But on the other hand, at least when it came to raw cargo carrying ability (specifically for construction moreso than resupply), Shuttle could do a lot more than Roscosmos had anything capable of doing." Zvezda and Zarya both came in at around over 20,000 kg and were launched on Protons - they are heavier than any of the modules launched by Shuttle. It's not that the Russians couldn't launch heavy modules, it's that the US-designed ISS architecture was mostly designed around shuttle and the Russian's big ongoing contribution to ISS was resupply and crew. It's certainly true that Shuttle did a lot of assembly missions and carried up a lot of mass, but it's also possible to argue that NASA designed ISS so that it would take a lot of shuttle missions - ISS was a prime reason for shuttle's existence for many years. If NASA wanted to build ISS efficiently, they would either have contracted with Roscosmos for more nodes and/or more launch services, or they would have built one of the heavy lift shuttle variants. Being able to launch 75+ tons at once would have simplified the station design quite a bit and reduced the cost, but - as I noted - NASA's goal was not efficiency.
The Shuttle should have been abandoned when it became clear it was going to be nowhere near as cheap, reliable, safe and routine to operate as had been promised, and this was already clear by the time of the Challenger tragedy. Both disasters were avoidable, Challenger in particular, and these disasters should never have been given the chance to occur in the first place by stopping Shuttle flights by 1985.
Which is exactly what the Air Force did. After Challenger the AF said no thanks. Can’t maintain a schedule, too expensive and requires a man rating for every satellite. There’s nothing a live astronaut could do for a military satellite other than go for a ride.
great video. I think what the Shuttle and ISS did for us in developing experience working and keeping astronauts alive in LEO has been vital to what I hope will be future manned flights beyond LEO. I also think keeping Apollo CSM and Saturn IB with Saturn V and additional Skylabs would have been cheaper, faster and most importantly safer. However, I think the public would have lost interest and NASA would havd been eliminated as a manned space program without the shuttle. The public needed the lie that it was investing in something more advanced that promised to make space flight routine and cheap. It also needed the prestige of something that looked so much more advanced than the Soyuz to instill pride in a NASA manned space flight program without moon/mars landings.
By the end of Apollo, the nation had lost interest, and you're right that NASA needed something big and ongoing to continue to exist as an administration. And flying astronauts definitely helped with that.
Despite the Shuttles flaws, I really do miss it. I remember growing up I wanted to be the Commander for a mission. Even built a replica in KSP, still ironing out some kinks though. Mainly the landing part of the mission.
I can't tell from the graphic, but McDonnell Douglas Astronautics in St. Louis/St. Charles, MO also contributed to the OMS pods and later flew EOS experiments with their own astronaut, Charles Walker. SS was as much a jobs program as a space program.
They should have just keeped Saturn 1B and Appollo. Evolve that architecture and ignore anything 'Shuttle' like. Saturn 1B could be reusable potentially.
I don’t think you’ve done anything looking at Big Gemini and all the other Gemini related developments that didn’t happen. I would be keenly interested in that.
My understanding is NASA HQ didn’t even want to reuse shuttle for what became constellation but there was a political mandate to keep the shuttle related jobs at centers and industry. So NASA had to design a follow on with the existing capabilities.
O'keefe was open to commercial alternatives and NASA was willing to explore alternatives, but Griffin came in as administrator and mandated that constellation would be shuttle-derived. I talk about it in this video: studio.th-cam.com/users/videoZNZx208bw0g/edit
Interesting video about STS, thanks. I was wondering why you didn’t cover the evolution of the system final configuration? In particular, the budgetary pressures that forced NASA to build a design to carry USAF payloads. Also looking into how the military crossover was linked into flying high latitude missions launched from Vandenburg and the high crossrange capability this required; this in turn leading to the delta wing orbiter design, a decision that increased the risk around the thermal protection system for reentry. You could also compare and contrast some of the early STS concepts to the Starship-Superheavy stack, while there are a lot of differences, there are also many fundamental similarities.
Great analysis as always! What would you propose to break free from this "tyranny of the 3" and get NASA to do what we want to see? I think limiting the influence of industry on congress would be a good thing to do for pretty much all parts of government
It's mostly just how NASA operates because that's what Congress wants. To change it, you need to change what congress wants... Right now congress is fine with SLS and Orion because they don't care (much) about achievement or effectiveness, they just care about jobs and money, and it's in their political interest to do so. But if Starship and others can show an option that's a lot more exciting and economical, then the politics could change - there are openings for other politicians to advance their careers through the alternatives. Always hard to predict, however.
Great video! I think I already knew the majority of the things talked about; all those different factors and incentives involved in Shuttle and its follow-on projects that none of the people or organizations involved will ever directly own up to, yet which ultimately really are what’s driving things when you peek behind the curtain. But despite knowing a lot of that stuff already, there’s still something about a direct presentation that just lays all of it out at once cohesively that’s really satisfying in an “all the pieces fit nicely together” way. The bit about when an organization is working some way that seems to make no sense, it probably means their incentives aren’t what you think they are, is very apt. I also loved the part where you specifically called out that neither SLS Block 1, nor even SLS Block 1B, actually meet the explicit Congressional requirements for what SLS is supposed to be capable of! I’ve noticed this before myself and it’s just so jarring and idiotic. The fact that only SLS *Block 2* (which is about 1.5-2.0 not-gonna-happen’s away from where we are now) actually meets the 130t requirement is something I wish more people would talk about or just generally kinda realize. NASA sure doesn’t talk up that particular point! I think this goes back to one of your other videos, but the investigation NASA did into the possible rocket architectures they might use, and their conclusion that the Shuttle-derived hydrolox-and-SRB vehicle using an “iterative” approach would make it very easy to gradually build up to the required capability level just looks so dumb in retrospect. SLS Block 2 is so far off in the unfunded future that it’s nowhere to be seen in the Artemis planning at all, and only exists in “late 2020s” never-land. (Oh and also in glossy Boeing promotional materials showing off all the various cool payloads it could hypothetically lift if (a) it existed and (b) the payload builders all had $2B+ to spare just for launch services. Man that stuff was hilarious to read…)
WRT the 130 ton requirement... I'm not sure why that was there but I suspect it was to foreclose out some alternatives that wouldn't have been big enough - the "big project" requirement. And it totally vanished for the same reason the shuttle flight rate and cost projections vanished. I'm frankly really confused by the competition that NASA ran for SLS. Clearly Charles Boldin was not in love with being limited to the shuttle-derived design, but the RAC-2 and RAC-3 teams went off, did a whole bunch of analysis, came up with some great options and it was obvious that their choices would never be chosen because of the Space Act Language. It just ends up documenting how stupid the decision they made was.
@@EagerSpace Yeah. Good summary. Frankly, the definitive “130 tons to LEO” requirement doesn’t make much sense and is actually a really baffling thing to exist at all in the context of not having a defined mission. (Assuming the requirement was there for an actual technical reason obviously; which, of course, we can say with reasonable confidence it wasn’t.) And in fact, it’s even more dumb when also taking into account that 130t-to-LEO can translate into a fairly wide range of, for example, mass-to-TLI, based on what really amount to “implementation details” of the particular design, like how efficient its upper stage engine(s) is/are. So in addition to not being founded in the context of any actual goal, the 130t thing is also arguably somewhat meaningless for actual putative missions to asteroid/moon/Mars/whatever. (In reality, with reasonable assumptions about propellants and stages, I’m sure you could get a somewhat-narrow-ish constrained range for mass-to-TLI or whatever that encompasses the range of reasonable vehicle possibilities. But still: kinda idiotic.)
Do you know the Space Transportation System (STS) which NASA proposed in 1969 to replace the Apollo capsules and Saturn V and Saturn IB expendable rockets? The system's major components consisted of: 1. A modular space station in a 270-nautical-mile (500 km) low Earth orbit, and as a permanent lunar orbit station. 2. A chemically fueled Earth-to-station shuttle. 3. A chemically fueled space tug to move crew and equipment between Earth orbits as high as geosynchronous orbit, the space tug also could be adapted as a lunar Earth Moon transfer vehicle to ferry crew and cargo between low Earth orbit and the moon. 4. A nuclear-powered ferry using the NERVA engine, to move crew, spacecraft and supplies between low Earth orbit and lunar orbit, geosynchronous orbit, or to other planets in the solar system. As Apollo accomplished its objective of landing the first humans on the Moon, political support for further crewed space activities began to wane, which was reflected in unwillingness of the Congress to provide funding for most of these extended activities. Based on this, Nixon rejected all parts of the program except the Space Shuttle, which inherited the STS name. As funded, the Shuttle was greatly scaled back from its planned degree of reusability, and deferred in time. The Shuttle first flew in 1981, and was retired in 2011. A second part of the system, Space Station Freedom, was approved in the early 1980s and announced in 1984 by president Ronald Reagan. However, this also became politically unviable by 1993, and was replaced with the International Space Station (ISS), with substantial contribution by Russia. The ISS was completed in 2011.
@@EagerSpace I just don't know why NASA chooses to use Apollo style old technologies of space capsules and expendable heavy launch rockets to go back to the moon?
16:34 same applied to ppl who think SpaceX goal is solely to makes money of launches. They're confused about Starship's massive cadence and 100+ tons payload as if it's unnecessary. Maybe, just maybe, SpaceX's interplanetary (Mars) goals are serious after all?
Yes. I'm generally of the opinion that making shuttle crewed only was the wrong choice, but shuttle did have auto land software that they tried in one of the first few flights and it did not work well, so it's possible they would have lost an early shuttle on landing.
In your opinion: Do you think than given recent and foreseeable advances in hyper-sonic air breathing engines, materials science and rocket engines, should a similar concept (or one similar to Star-raker) be revisited in the future?
Hard to predict, but I think the answer is no. I didn't think the technology is likely to ever be there. I'm in the middle of a new starship video on how ridiculously hard it is to do a two staged reusable rocket, and single stage would be much harder. I also don't see anybody funding such a project. The only reason we have partial reuse is because musk thought it would be cool, and the reason we have starship is because SpaceX figured out how to do starlink and musk has a Mars obsession. Starship is probably a $5 billion project. Who is going to spend some multiple of that on a project that will take longer and has a lower chance of success?
@@EagerSpace if you're doing a video on why it's very hard to do a two stage rocket, and very very very hard to do a single stage to orbit with a focus on Starship.... Could you at least mention why SX chose 2 stages rather than 3 stages? On the face of it a stage 0.5 that took the existing stack to about 100,000 ft would seem to have an easier time getting to the goals that SX has set. That would give the stage 1 a higher ISP, and the opportunity to switch out the outer ring of engines for a slightly more vacuum optimised engine (not the full vac engine of course)
NASA was not only created for the moon landing and has equipped and carried out many other scientific missions. Some things could have gone differently, but that applies to pretty much every area.
I appreciate the visuals but clicking through this slideshow presentation has slowed the pace of the video to it's detriment. Good info, poor pacing. That is my constructive feedback 😉
21:04 GAO and DOGE seem eerily similar... Your comment on it and what they could do differently would be appreciated. Could perhaps two damming reports about SLS be better than one?
Congress: "We want something shuttle derived." Also Congress: *cancels Constellation and creates SLS which doesn't have a clear mission* Government logic and one of the many MANY reasons that, despite possessing a PolySci degree, I will never go into Politics!!
Technically, congress didn't cancel constellation - the Obama administration did. Which they actually didn't have the power to do, but the horse trading that came after that gave us SLS + commercial crew, which is arguably a far better result than constellation would have been.
The manned “space truck” concept was ridiculous. Seven people go for a ride so one person can use the manipulator arm and press a button to release the satellite. The shuttle in the 1970s should have been a school bus sized people mover like the Sierra Dream Chaser - nothing more. Hardware would go up on expendable launch vehicles.
That is kindof where NASA started, but the problem was that such a vehicle didn't have any use if you didn't have a space station and there was no way congress would fund shuttle, space station, and the expendable launch vehicles.
@@EagerSpace Good point. One other casualty was the Superconducting Super Collider. Either you get a Space Station or a giant particle accelerator. The SSC lost. Plus the SSC and the Manned Spaceflight Center were both in Texas. Congress felt Texas was getting too big a slice of the pie.
Hard problem. Congress is the one that controls what NASA does, and congress loves programs like SLS and shuttle. But I think some things are going happen naturally. We got SpaceX because NASA could not build a solution that would send cargo and crew to the space station cheaply enough. And we got (are getting...) commercial lunar landers because it was the only way that NASA would not look foolish building a system that could take astronauts to lunar orbit but not to the surface. Assuming one or both of those are successful, they flip the cost structure of going to the moon - and doing other big things - on its head, and that is going to be very attractive to at least some people at NASA. But these things are very hard to predict, because there are a lot of political forces at play both inside and outside NASA.
I was 17 when shuttle first flew and I was already a huge NASA fan, so it was great. Then after challenger I read the report, and that took a lot of the shine off of the program. The past couple years I've been delving deeper into it, and it makes me both disappointed and angry. NASA flew astronauts on a vehicle that had about a 1 in 10 chance of killing the crew without even doing that evaluation. After doing a lot of research, a lot of thinking, and reading Lori Garver's recent book, it's pretty clear that NASA on the human spaceflight side is not doing what it was created to do. Which is just a huge shame to those of us who care about exploration. At some point that may become a video.
Would you agree that NASA didn't invent STS to satisfy these incentives but rather selected the STS as the thing to pursue? In other words, someone thought it was a good idea and proposed it to management rather than management saying 'design us a program to submit to congress that is big and expensive, etc'. Secondly, how does the whole 'STS can carry military cargo too' fit in? I guess it's just a way for NASA to have more budget going to themselves rather than other entities.
Big was important to NASA as it kept the NASA centers open and humming along and sent enough money to contractors to garner political support in the states where those contractors operated. But it couldn't be too big or they would be able to get it past Congress and Nixon. Shuttle was essentially "tuned" to be as big a program as possible within that constraint. You can also think of it as being tuned to use companies in as many states as possible - see here: www.researchgate.net/figure/Locations-of-Space-Shuttle-contractors-and-suppliers-Imagery-obtained-using-Google-Earth_fig2_245846412 Because of the unique political situations of the time, Shuttle also had to be economically better than the alternative, which at that time was Titan II. They came up with a model that showed that if you could fly shuttle a lot - 39 times a year IIRC - you would break even with the cost of shuttle compared to Titan. The military came in as a way to justify a high flight rate and another constituency who could lobby for the approval of shuttle. The vote around shuttle was very close, but it was approved. If you want more details, I highly recommend "The Shuttle Decision". It's free here: history.nasa.gov/SP-4221/contents.htm
@@EagerSpace I’ve been bingeing your videos all day and today I got to your ‘why does shuttle look weird’ video where you go into this. One more video and I’ll have your back catalog completed! Good stuff! Thanks for your efforts. I’d be interested in a video on your background.
Some shortcuts, approximations and mistakes in this analysis according to me. I agree about the congress shuttle, and the senate launch system, but saying nasa was ok with it is far from what really happened. They had to do with shrinking budgets, and were totally submitted to the congress and its interests, they failed to achieve fast reusability not because they were happy with that, but because they had n9 other choice: this was insanely hard to achieve, even if they have had infinite budget and no restrictions from politics, which was obviously not the case... Another mistake I noted: the augustine commission ended constellation when the space shuttle was already cancelled and had only a few flight left, and ares V was a much more capable and newer vehicle than the SLS, It had indeed big shuttle derived SRBs but the other parts of the rocket were new, or evolved versions of others engines/vehicles. The core stage was not a shuttle external tank with rs25, it was meant to have new big engines derived from the F1, and the 2nd stage was more inspired by the Saturn V 2nd stage with new versions of the J2 engine. Not exactly what you said.
Like most big organizations, NASA management likes what is good for their careers. They *loved* flying shuttle because they were just doing the same thing year after year - easy to deal with congress, easy to do planning, easy to build a career around. And each of the NASA centers knew what their job was. Would NASA *engineers* have wanted to work on Shuttle 2? Very clearly, yes. Was NASA management going to sign up to get a bunch of new money to develop a new version? Nope. WRT Ares V, the core stage was always hydrolox. It oscillated between RS-68 and RS-25 because the RS-68 was much, much cheaper but was ablatively cooled and model showed it didn't behave well in a cluster. I *think* they had gone back to RS-25 before it was cancelled. It's certainly true that they were planning the J-2X for the upper stage, but it's closer in size to the S-IVB.
@@EagerSpace Sure! I repeat I globally agree with you, but I think you're a bit hard with nasa, they clearly had to deal with important and regular changes in management and leadership, changes of governement, and you're probably right on that point, they were proud of their shuttle and actually, they were totally aware the shuttle would never achieve the goals of hundreds of flight per years. But we can't deny that the Saturn V, as fantastic as it was, was a very dangerous vehicle which suffered lots of anomaly (only the worsts are known), but several ingeneers confessed years later that the probability of a fatal accident was growing at each flight, and the safety policy was far from the current standard in human rated spaceflight. The 1st shuttle incident pointed that out and changed drastically the way nasa would proceed after that (the Columbia disaster was, I think, not comparable with challenger, when terrible decisions were made although the toric seal problem was known and recurrent. They knew the vehicle was dangerous, they almost lost a shuttle when it came back with more than a hundred tiles missing, and worked to improve the thermal shield. But the big block of foam, falling just on the edge of the wing and breaking through the big tile on it was clearly unexpected and very unlucky. I digress, sorry, but my point is: maybe the space shuttle was a logical and necessary step in our progress in space, we (the american I mean, I'm not even from USA) had done something extraordinary which will never be possible at such a scale: starting from nearly scratch to finally succeed in landing a man on the moon in less than a decade, that was almost a miracle, and high risks were taken, hard lessons were learnt, so it was wise to master human presence in low earth orbit and long duration missions in space before the next step of continuous presence on the moon or trip to Mars (the shuttle was also designed to help the assembly of the freedom station, which would become the ISS after the cold war). That's why I wouldn't be so hard with those times, they faced a necessary evil in a way. (I'm sorry for all the mistakes, english 's not my native langage and I don't use any translation app).
Apollo was certainly risky, but it was risky to do something that was very exceptional - to put humans on the moon. They were not good at safety and ignored some established ways to improve safety, but they did hit their deadline. Shuttle put lots of astronauts at risk and killed 14 of them to do something that wasn't exceptional - it largely carried cargo, went to the same place over and over again, and carried a large crew on pretty much all the missions. Rand Simberg talks about this in his great book, "Safe is not an option". Challenger was just stupid. They knew they had a systems problem, their supplier had a new design that would fix it, they had abnormal conditions, the whole engineering team was against it, they never told the astronauts what the risk was, and they flew anyway. That wasn't just a mistake, it was criminal negligence and somebody should have gone to jail for it. The issue with foam was similar, and just another sign that they had a) a bad safety culture and b) a vehicle with some seriously bad design choices.
I believe your criticisms apply to the modern space program generally speaking and less so specifically to the shuttle. The bureaucracy and financial incentives inherent in a government operation are certainly problematic. Letting the private sector take over low orbit operations has certainly spurred a lot of innovation. My question to you - would the shuttle still be flying if the Columbia accident not occurred ??
Interesting question... If you look at the Columbia accident report, you'll find that the panel members did not recommend that the shuttle be retired - they recommended that it be re-certified and then continue flying. The Administration decided that it should be retired - I'm not clear on the reasons, but one was probably that the new "vision for space exploration" that came out of the Bush administration needed a lot of money and shuttle was the obvious source. If that's true, Columbia was a nice excuse to do that.
@@EagerSpace It Makes Me Think That The STS-107 Columbia Accident Was ALLOWED To Happen To Bring About The Goal The Government, NASA & Industry Wanted All Along ! ! ! ? ? ?🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
How does one go from “Salaried-IC-40yrOld” to “whatever socioeconomic class where it’s kind of normal to have a lawyer on-hand and affordable?” I mean, where do those kinds of jobs begin? The only future I see are salaried manager roles and constant desperation. Did I waste my time getting a 4-year degree? Feels like getting an “important” boss that can help your career is luck-of-the-draw or “need to already be in their rich circlejerk socioeconomic class”.
@@rexmann1984 I think you missed my point - NASA designed shuttle the way they did because that met their goals, which had nothing to do with shuttle being cheap/reliable/effective. More knowledge wouldn't change that. There's a very interesting online course on the design of the shuttle on edx.org; the engineers do talk about some of the systems that they might have designed differently (hydraulic versus electric comes up IIRC), but most of the non-optimal decisions they made came from monetary constraints.
It's almost like the Republic has been dead for decades. Ask a Roman where he lived in 100 AD, and he would've said, "Why, the Roman Republic, of course." It's all a façade.
Shuttle had a very specific goal - to make NASA an permanent part of the federal government - and it did that very well. Just not the goal that many of us were hoping.
SpaceX may have had some good years up to now but going to the Moon or to Mars is not really interesting for a company unless they receive tax money to develop it. It is then just a matter of time for them to suffer the same issues as NASA. The Falcon 9 launching satellites for commercial customers is another story end there the cost-effectiveness is more important then creating jobs.
SpaceX is a private company with that they are not beholden to shareholders or Congress/Senatorial wants/desires! They have a business plan and they are the biggest launch provider & owner of the largest constellation of satellite internet services! 😊
![ILLSLICK - KILLSHOT REMIX [FULL VERSION]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/RIK8RrqIAzE/mqdefault.jpg)
Recent Gerstenmaier interview painted a clearer picture of Shuttle condition, making it clear that NASA is de facto not interested in actually making Shuttle a high cadence
Interview:
SpaceX also removed requirements to perform static engine firings after a turbine wheel is changed out. Instead, the company added some accelerometers on the engine to verify that the turbine wheel is operating properly. In case of any problem, the instrument can trigger an automated abort up to the last half-second before launch. “We use the actual launch countdown to effectively replace a portion of the static firing,” Gerstenmaier says.
The inability to drop requirements was a primary reason why NASA’s space shuttles were never able to come close to projected flight rates, notes Gerstenamier, a former NASA associate administrator who oversaw the space shuttle, International Space Station and other human space-flight programs.
During the space shuttle program’s peak years of 1992-97, NASA flew seven or eight missions per calendar year. In 1984, it flew nine times.
“We got forced to be conservative for a variety of reasons, and we could never remove requirements,” Gerstenmaier says. “I attempted to remove requirements, and I was unable to, or it would take me 10 years.”
For example, early in the shuttle program, NASA needed to pull the shuttle main engines after every flight for inspection. But after several flights, the inspections were not revealing any issues. “They weren’t adding any value, and I wanted to stop the inspections,” Gerstenmaier says. “But we had gotten so good at pulling engines, the program said, ‘Why don’t we just pull engines and go look because we can?’
“At the end, we were tearing apart all these shuttle engines for inspection and we ended up operating at the low end of the reliability curve,” he says. “We actually wore out components during testing and put more life on them than we did in actual flight.
“If you’ve got hardware that is ready to go fly, you’re better off not tearing it apart to inspect. To understand if it has a problem, you use the reliability of the hardware to drive you and you only inspect when you start getting out to that later life period,” he adds. “We weren’t allowed to do that in shuttle.
“At SpaceX, we see the benefit of removing a requirement, and then if we remove too much, we can add it back in-no harm, no foul,” Gerstenmaier notes.
Thanks for sharing.
Higher flight rate would have maybe been good for Morton Thiokol (pick whichever name you want for them), but it would probably be neutral for the other contractors; they would get more work but NASA would probably want more efficiency.
High flight rate wouldn't help NASA management further their careers nor would it help NASA supporters in congress, so there's very little incentive to try to achieve that. And fewer requirements doesn't help those groups either.
@@EagerSpace There were also several problematic things with Shuttle
1. Tile issue
2. Hydrogen leak on supply (believe it or not, it's a design-specific issue, not a general one. Ariane 5, Centaur & Delta IV have much less of this. SLS ofc follows the Shuttle hence problems)
3. Shuttle 2.0
4. SRB O-rings (even at desired limits it still has burn-through on flights before STS-51L)
All of this will be done years ago if they got the funding, but they didn't (one of them was forced by accident/loss of life)
The fact that it was always manned prevented experimentation.
The US Military, specifically the Air Force had a big influence on the Shuttle program. Despite NASA being a "civilian" agency the Air Force joined the program for the Shuttle with significant requirements for mission capabilities and spacecraft characteristics. There are early shuttle missions (pre-Challenger) that are still classified today because of the military payloads that they carried.
The shuttle program was like any other government project. One group said "I have a bad barely serviceable idea" and another group jumped to their feet and yelled "I CAN MAKE IT WORSE!!!". That was shuttle.
"The Shuttle Decision" is an excellent reference for this time and you can find it free online. The AF got involved because NASA needed help getting shuttle through Congress and approved by Nixon.
The AF had a little influence on the size of the payload bay. IIRC, it was primarily the length of the payload bay as NASA already wanted one that had a large diameter to carry space station modules.
The AF also came up with the "once around" mission and that pushed the crossrange requirement up high and required large delta wings to do that. Without that requirement, shuttle has smaller wings and would have been a bit lighter.
@@EagerSpace they were planning to launch the shuttle on military polar orbit missions from Vandenberg as early as October of 1986. Enterprise was used for fit check and the launch complex was certified and ready to go.
The Challenger accident put an end to all plans to launch the shuttle from Vandenberg.
The military requirements of the spacecraft were severe limitations for its civilian uses in the long run.
Very enlightening video. It explains the entire purpose of the federal government. It also completely explains why Artemis will NEVER fly. It was never intended to.
Artemis may, in fact, fly. But Artemis flying and doing useful things is not the end goal, it is a means to the goal.
@@EagerSpace why fly when you can prove incompetence, get the project cancelled, and start all over again?
Well… about that
Wow, I cannot imagine the amount of work required to produce this! Very informative and interesting. Stunning summary of the (non)progress of the shuttle-program from start to finish. You deserve a bigger audience.
Thanks. This one came partly from my experience with disfunctional organizations, and partly from a comment from the excellent EDX course on the design of the space shuttle.
One of the shuttle engineers commented, "we were always hoping to work on shuttle 2.0, and we didn't understand why NASA didn't do it".
Seems like a really good question.
Great video as always!
ooh apogee, didn't expect you to be here!
It’s sucks your channel dropped off in views so hard. Your video-to-video views had a literal half-life. I wish you could come back.
Wow, I’m lost for words
That was your most interesting and well made video to date
You really re-opened the inner space geek within me thinking about post Apollo, shuttle and SLS
You really are climbing up to one of my favorite youtubers, the fact you have so few subscribers is insane, there are a few others like you but not many with so few subs
Thanks for your kind words. I haven't done much promotion, but I'm working on it.
When you mention that NASA did an analysis of how best to build SLS and whether to do something Shuttle derived or Saturn derived you should mention your other video on the topic and link in the description so that people know its out there.
In regards to the point about Russia needing to send NASA astronauts to the ISS, even when the shuttle program was active keeping astronauts on the ISS had to be done by Soyuz and required replacing an astronaut launched on Soyuz with one launched on the shuttle. Which meant that even during the shuttle program NASA either had to pay for seats on Soyuz or cut massively short the time some Russian astronauts would stay on the ISS. That problem had persisted from the station's beginning in a more convoluted form and was only solved with SpX Crew 1.
I will add though-and this isn’t really a counterpoint to what you’re saying by any means-that there was another pretty big asymmetry in the other direction, in that only NASA with Shuttle could launch most of the really big fundamental components of the ISS. (As I understand it.)
So yeah, Shuttle’s maybe-2-weeks(?) on-orbit duration definitely sucked for crew rotations compared to Soyuz. But on the other hand, at least when it came to raw cargo carrying ability (specifically for construction moreso than resupply), Shuttle could do a lot more than Roscosmos had anything capable of doing. (Sad face for Energia, the coolest-but-abandonedest rocket ever. ☹️)
@@jgottula Yes. Exactly. The shuttle was more of a cargo vehicle than crewed vehicle even in ISS operations. In terms of cost efficiency it would be worse than those Russian rockets though but in terms of payload mass and volume it could definitely lift a lot and contribute to ISS construction, although I still think ISS construction could've been done cheaper with normal launchers.
Yes. Originally the ISS plan was "hang out somewhere and we'll send a shuttle to get you", but that went away after Challenger. NASA did talk about the crew return vehicle but that never went beyond concept.
@@EagerSpace Technically the crew return vehicle got to 90% completion of the first article... but that's it. It stopped there. Shame, could've made the shuttle a viable crew vehicle, but as it stands NASA seriously shafted the payload of the shuttle by providing a crew compartment standard on every flight that wound up being a near-useless addition to any sort of regular operation; really only being a benefit for the few times it recovered satellites or repaired hubble.
@@jgottula " But on the other hand, at least when it came to raw cargo carrying ability (specifically for construction moreso than resupply), Shuttle could do a lot more than Roscosmos had anything capable of doing."
Zvezda and Zarya both came in at around over 20,000 kg and were launched on Protons - they are heavier than any of the modules launched by Shuttle. It's not that the Russians couldn't launch heavy modules, it's that the US-designed ISS architecture was mostly designed around shuttle and the Russian's big ongoing contribution to ISS was resupply and crew.
It's certainly true that Shuttle did a lot of assembly missions and carried up a lot of mass, but it's also possible to argue that NASA designed ISS so that it would take a lot of shuttle missions - ISS was a prime reason for shuttle's existence for many years.
If NASA wanted to build ISS efficiently, they would either have contracted with Roscosmos for more nodes and/or more launch services, or they would have built one of the heavy lift shuttle variants. Being able to launch 75+ tons at once would have simplified the station design quite a bit and reduced the cost, but - as I noted - NASA's goal was not efficiency.
Wow! Thank you! This was a fantastic, and informative video. Please continue the great work!
The Shuttle should have been abandoned when it became clear it was going to be nowhere near as cheap, reliable, safe and routine to operate as had been promised, and this was already clear by the time of the Challenger tragedy.
Both disasters were avoidable, Challenger in particular, and these disasters should never have been given the chance to occur in the first place by stopping Shuttle flights by 1985.
Which is exactly what the Air Force did. After Challenger the AF said no thanks. Can’t maintain a schedule, too expensive and requires a man rating for every satellite. There’s nothing a live astronaut could do for a military satellite other than go for a ride.
Okay, I'll admit that the question 'why are we sending up people on cargo flights?' didnt occur to me until you mentioned it...and it's obvious.
Love these longer videos giving intelligent insight to the space industry. Thanks!
great video. I think what the Shuttle and ISS did for us in developing experience working and keeping astronauts alive in LEO has been vital to what I hope will be future manned flights beyond LEO. I also think keeping Apollo CSM and Saturn IB with Saturn V and additional Skylabs would have been cheaper, faster and most importantly safer. However, I think the public would have lost interest and NASA would havd been eliminated as a manned space program without the shuttle. The public needed the lie that it was investing in something more advanced that promised to make space flight routine and cheap. It also needed the prestige of something that looked so much more advanced than the Soyuz to instill pride in a NASA manned space flight program without moon/mars landings.
By the end of Apollo, the nation had lost interest, and you're right that NASA needed something big and ongoing to continue to exist as an administration.
And flying astronauts definitely helped with that.
Despite the Shuttles flaws, I really do miss it. I remember growing up I wanted to be the Commander for a mission. Even built a replica in KSP, still ironing out some kinks though. Mainly the landing part of the mission.
Same here, now I just get sad seeing it in a museum
I can't tell from the graphic, but McDonnell Douglas Astronautics in St. Louis/St. Charles, MO also contributed to the OMS pods and later flew EOS experiments with their own astronaut, Charles Walker. SS was as much a jobs program as a space program.
Thank you for the excellent analysis of the political factors that influenced the Shuttle design and caused it to not meet its stated goals.
I kinda like your style, feels like a class.
They should have just keeped Saturn 1B and Appollo. Evolve that architecture and ignore anything 'Shuttle' like. Saturn 1B could be reusable potentially.
Look up the Eyes Turned Skyward alternate history series
Top notch, cheers Eric!
TH-cam god keep recomending this video.. i goess i watch it.
I do enjoy this chanel quite a lot.
Fascinating and highly detailed. Excellent content.
The main problem is that NASA and the contractors' demands and promises didn't really pan out. Ex. Rapid Reuse and low price.
I don’t think you’ve done anything looking at Big Gemini and all the other Gemini related developments that didn’t happen. I would be keenly interested in that.
I've added that to my list, though it's a very long list these days. I *do* like alternate history topics.
@@EagerSpace Looking forward to it!
My understanding is NASA HQ didn’t even want to reuse shuttle for what became constellation but there was a political mandate to keep the shuttle related jobs at centers and industry. So NASA had to design a follow on with the existing capabilities.
O'keefe was open to commercial alternatives and NASA was willing to explore alternatives, but Griffin came in as administrator and mandated that constellation would be shuttle-derived.
I talk about it in this video: studio.th-cam.com/users/videoZNZx208bw0g/edit
I had forgotten all about Dyna-Soar 😐 a shame they never revisited it. Though as you mention there's no incentive for it in the post-apollo period.
Interesting video about STS, thanks.
I was wondering why you didn’t cover the evolution of the system final configuration? In particular, the budgetary pressures that forced NASA to build a design to carry USAF payloads. Also looking into how the military crossover was linked into flying high latitude missions launched from Vandenburg and the high crossrange capability this required; this in turn leading to the delta wing orbiter design, a decision that increased the risk around the thermal protection system for reentry.
You could also compare and contrast some of the early STS concepts to the Starship-Superheavy stack, while there are a lot of differences, there are also many fundamental similarities.
Here you go:
th-cam.com/video/qUxxKSBu-Ss/w-d-xo.html
I haven't done anything looking at those designs and starship.
I think that most of your videos will also work well as podcasts (giving you more popularity with the same effort)
Interesting idea...
Great analysis as always! What would you propose to break free from this "tyranny of the 3" and get NASA to do what we want to see? I think limiting the influence of industry on congress would be a good thing to do for pretty much all parts of government
It's mostly just how NASA operates because that's what Congress wants. To change it, you need to change what congress wants...
Right now congress is fine with SLS and Orion because they don't care (much) about achievement or effectiveness, they just care about jobs and money, and it's in their political interest to do so. But if Starship and others can show an option that's a lot more exciting and economical, then the politics could change - there are openings for other politicians to advance their careers through the alternatives.
Always hard to predict, however.
Great video!
I think I already knew the majority of the things talked about; all those different factors and incentives involved in Shuttle and its follow-on projects that none of the people or organizations involved will ever directly own up to, yet which ultimately really are what’s driving things when you peek behind the curtain. But despite knowing a lot of that stuff already, there’s still something about a direct presentation that just lays all of it out at once cohesively that’s really satisfying in an “all the pieces fit nicely together” way.
The bit about when an organization is working some way that seems to make no sense, it probably means their incentives aren’t what you think they are, is very apt.
I also loved the part where you specifically called out that neither SLS Block 1, nor even SLS Block 1B, actually meet the explicit Congressional requirements for what SLS is supposed to be capable of! I’ve noticed this before myself and it’s just so jarring and idiotic. The fact that only SLS *Block 2* (which is about 1.5-2.0 not-gonna-happen’s away from where we are now) actually meets the 130t requirement is something I wish more people would talk about or just generally kinda realize. NASA sure doesn’t talk up that particular point!
I think this goes back to one of your other videos, but the investigation NASA did into the possible rocket architectures they might use, and their conclusion that the Shuttle-derived hydrolox-and-SRB vehicle using an “iterative” approach would make it very easy to gradually build up to the required capability level just looks so dumb in retrospect. SLS Block 2 is so far off in the unfunded future that it’s nowhere to be seen in the Artemis planning at all, and only exists in “late 2020s” never-land. (Oh and also in glossy Boeing promotional materials showing off all the various cool payloads it could hypothetically lift if (a) it existed and (b) the payload builders all had $2B+ to spare just for launch services. Man that stuff was hilarious to read…)
WRT the 130 ton requirement... I'm not sure why that was there but I suspect it was to foreclose out some alternatives that wouldn't have been big enough - the "big project" requirement. And it totally vanished for the same reason the shuttle flight rate and cost projections vanished.
I'm frankly really confused by the competition that NASA ran for SLS. Clearly Charles Boldin was not in love with being limited to the shuttle-derived design, but the RAC-2 and RAC-3 teams went off, did a whole bunch of analysis, came up with some great options and it was obvious that their choices would never be chosen because of the Space Act Language.
It just ends up documenting how stupid the decision they made was.
@@EagerSpace Yeah. Good summary.
Frankly, the definitive “130 tons to LEO” requirement doesn’t make much sense and is actually a really baffling thing to exist at all in the context of not having a defined mission. (Assuming the requirement was there for an actual technical reason obviously; which, of course, we can say with reasonable confidence it wasn’t.)
And in fact, it’s even more dumb when also taking into account that 130t-to-LEO can translate into a fairly wide range of, for example, mass-to-TLI, based on what really amount to “implementation details” of the particular design, like how efficient its upper stage engine(s) is/are. So in addition to not being founded in the context of any actual goal, the 130t thing is also arguably somewhat meaningless for actual putative missions to asteroid/moon/Mars/whatever. (In reality, with reasonable assumptions about propellants and stages, I’m sure you could get a somewhat-narrow-ish constrained range for mass-to-TLI or whatever that encompasses the range of reasonable vehicle possibilities. But still: kinda idiotic.)
Do you know the Space Transportation System (STS) which NASA proposed in 1969 to replace the Apollo capsules and Saturn V and Saturn IB expendable rockets? The system's major components consisted of:
1. A modular space station in a 270-nautical-mile (500 km) low Earth orbit, and as a permanent lunar orbit station.
2. A chemically fueled Earth-to-station shuttle.
3. A chemically fueled space tug to move crew and equipment between Earth orbits as high as geosynchronous orbit, the space tug also could be adapted as a lunar Earth Moon transfer vehicle to ferry crew and cargo between low Earth orbit and the moon.
4. A nuclear-powered ferry using the NERVA engine, to move crew, spacecraft and supplies between low Earth orbit and lunar orbit, geosynchronous orbit, or to other planets in the solar system. As Apollo accomplished its objective of landing the first humans on the Moon, political support for further crewed space activities began to wane, which was reflected in unwillingness of the Congress to provide funding for most of these extended activities. Based on this, Nixon rejected all parts of the program except the Space Shuttle, which inherited the STS name. As funded, the Shuttle was greatly scaled back from its planned degree of reusability, and deferred in time. The Shuttle first flew in 1981, and was retired in 2011.
A second part of the system, Space Station Freedom, was approved in the early 1980s and announced in 1984 by president Ronald Reagan. However, this also became politically unviable by 1993, and was replaced with the International Space Station (ISS), with substantial contribution by Russia. The ISS was completed in 2011.
@@EagerSpace I just don't know why NASA chooses to use Apollo style old technologies of space capsules and expendable heavy launch rockets to go back to the moon?
@@powerfulstrong5673 Yes. I talk about that a little bit in my "why does the shuttle look so weird?" video.
16:34 same applied to ppl who think SpaceX goal is solely to makes money of launches. They're confused about Starship's massive cadence and 100+ tons payload as if it's unnecessary. Maybe, just maybe, SpaceX's interplanetary (Mars) goals are serious after all?
Interestingly the Soviet Buran was designed to be optionally manned. In fact to only orbital test flight was unmanned.
Yes.
I'm generally of the opinion that making shuttle crewed only was the wrong choice, but shuttle did have auto land software that they tried in one of the first few flights and it did not work well, so it's possible they would have lost an early shuttle on landing.
In your opinion: Do you think than given recent and foreseeable advances in hyper-sonic air breathing engines, materials science and rocket engines, should a similar concept (or one similar to Star-raker) be revisited in the future?
Hard to predict, but I think the answer is no.
I didn't think the technology is likely to ever be there. I'm in the middle of a new starship video on how ridiculously hard it is to do a two staged reusable rocket, and single stage would be much harder.
I also don't see anybody funding such a project. The only reason we have partial reuse is because musk thought it would be cool, and the reason we have starship is because SpaceX figured out how to do starlink and musk has a Mars obsession. Starship is probably a $5 billion project. Who is going to spend some multiple of that on a project that will take longer and has a lower chance of success?
@@EagerSpace if you're doing a video on why it's very hard to do a two stage rocket, and very very very hard to do a single stage to orbit with a focus on Starship.... Could you at least mention why SX chose 2 stages rather than 3 stages?
On the face of it a stage 0.5 that took the existing stack to about 100,000 ft would seem to have an easier time getting to the goals that SX has set.
That would give the stage 1 a higher ISP, and the opportunity to switch out the outer ring of engines for a slightly more vacuum optimised engine (not the full vac engine of course)
NASA was not only created for the moon landing and has equipped and carried out many other scientific missions. Some things could have gone differently, but that applies to pretty much every area.
Make videos about the Soviet space program!
Do you have a specific area? I've considered one on the death of the program but I'm not sure that works be interesting...
I wasn't happy. I wanted to see people on Mars by the 1990s.
I appreciate the visuals but clicking through this slideshow presentation has slowed the pace of the video to it's detriment.
Good info, poor pacing.
That is my constructive feedback 😉
21:04 GAO and DOGE seem eerily similar... Your comment on it and what they could do differently would be appreciated. Could perhaps two damming reports about SLS be better than one?
Congress: "We want something shuttle derived."
Also Congress: *cancels Constellation and creates SLS which doesn't have a clear mission*
Government logic and one of the many MANY reasons that, despite possessing a PolySci degree, I will never go into Politics!!
Technically, congress didn't cancel constellation - the Obama administration did. Which they actually didn't have the power to do, but the horse trading that came after that gave us SLS + commercial crew, which is arguably a far better result than constellation would have been.
The most important requirement was that it not land in the ocean because the Navy really wanted to get out the capsule recovery business.
The manned “space truck” concept was ridiculous. Seven people go for a ride so one person can use the manipulator arm and press a button to release the satellite.
The shuttle in the 1970s should have been a school bus sized people mover like the Sierra Dream Chaser - nothing more. Hardware would go up on expendable launch vehicles.
That is kindof where NASA started, but the problem was that such a vehicle didn't have any use if you didn't have a space station and there was no way congress would fund shuttle, space station, and the expendable launch vehicles.
@@EagerSpace Good point. One other casualty was the Superconducting Super Collider.
Either you get a Space Station or a giant particle accelerator. The SSC lost. Plus the SSC and the Manned Spaceflight Center were both in Texas. Congress felt Texas was getting too big a slice of the pie.
And now we are in Nov 2024 and finally rumours of cancelling Space Disgrace System are starting to surface.
Yes, manned space flight is mostly just for show.
Sadly this is happening for the SLS program too, why does space flight always struggle unless there is impending doom of nuclear war?
NASA-run programs are inherently jobs programs - that is what congress wants and that's what NASA delivers.
So, how would you fix this insanity?
Hard problem. Congress is the one that controls what NASA does, and congress loves programs like SLS and shuttle.
But I think some things are going happen naturally. We got SpaceX because NASA could not build a solution that would send cargo and crew to the space station cheaply enough. And we got (are getting...) commercial lunar landers because it was the only way that NASA would not look foolish building a system that could take astronauts to lunar orbit but not to the surface. Assuming one or both of those are successful, they flip the cost structure of going to the moon - and doing other big things - on its head, and that is going to be very attractive to at least some people at NASA.
But these things are very hard to predict, because there are a lot of political forces at play both inside and outside NASA.
The death of the two crews really hammers the point home
I was 17 when shuttle first flew and I was already a huge NASA fan, so it was great. Then after challenger I read the report, and that took a lot of the shine off of the program.
The past couple years I've been delving deeper into it, and it makes me both disappointed and angry. NASA flew astronauts on a vehicle that had about a 1 in 10 chance of killing the crew without even doing that evaluation.
After doing a lot of research, a lot of thinking, and reading Lori Garver's recent book, it's pretty clear that NASA on the human spaceflight side is not doing what it was created to do. Which is just a huge shame to those of us who care about exploration. At some point that may become a video.
Would you agree that NASA didn't invent STS to satisfy these incentives but rather selected the STS as the thing to pursue? In other words, someone thought it was a good idea and proposed it to management rather than management saying 'design us a program to submit to congress that is big and expensive, etc'. Secondly, how does the whole 'STS can carry military cargo too' fit in? I guess it's just a way for NASA to have more budget going to themselves rather than other entities.
Big was important to NASA as it kept the NASA centers open and humming along and sent enough money to contractors to garner political support in the states where those contractors operated. But it couldn't be too big or they would be able to get it past Congress and Nixon. Shuttle was essentially "tuned" to be as big a program as possible within that constraint. You can also think of it as being tuned to use companies in as many states as possible - see here: www.researchgate.net/figure/Locations-of-Space-Shuttle-contractors-and-suppliers-Imagery-obtained-using-Google-Earth_fig2_245846412
Because of the unique political situations of the time, Shuttle also had to be economically better than the alternative, which at that time was Titan II. They came up with a model that showed that if you could fly shuttle a lot - 39 times a year IIRC - you would break even with the cost of shuttle compared to Titan. The military came in as a way to justify a high flight rate and another constituency who could lobby for the approval of shuttle.
The vote around shuttle was very close, but it was approved.
If you want more details, I highly recommend "The Shuttle Decision". It's free here:
history.nasa.gov/SP-4221/contents.htm
@@EagerSpace I’ve been bingeing your videos all day and today I got to your ‘why does shuttle look weird’ video where you go into this. One more video and I’ll have your back catalog completed! Good stuff! Thanks for your efforts. I’d be interested in a video on your background.
Some shortcuts, approximations and mistakes in this analysis according to me.
I agree about the congress shuttle, and the senate launch system, but saying nasa was ok with it is far from what really happened.
They had to do with shrinking budgets, and were totally submitted to the congress and its interests, they failed to achieve fast reusability not because they were happy with that, but because they had n9 other choice: this was insanely hard to achieve, even if they have had infinite budget and no restrictions from politics, which was obviously not the case...
Another mistake I noted: the augustine commission ended constellation when the space shuttle was already cancelled and had only a few flight left, and ares V was a much more capable and newer vehicle than the SLS, It had indeed big shuttle derived SRBs but the other parts of the rocket were new, or evolved versions of others engines/vehicles. The core stage was not a shuttle external tank with rs25, it was meant to have new big engines derived from the F1, and the 2nd stage was more inspired by the Saturn V 2nd stage with new versions of the J2 engine.
Not exactly what you said.
Like most big organizations, NASA management likes what is good for their careers. They *loved* flying shuttle because they were just doing the same thing year after year - easy to deal with congress, easy to do planning, easy to build a career around. And each of the NASA centers knew what their job was. Would NASA *engineers* have wanted to work on Shuttle 2? Very clearly, yes. Was NASA management going to sign up to get a bunch of new money to develop a new version? Nope.
WRT Ares V, the core stage was always hydrolox. It oscillated between RS-68 and RS-25 because the RS-68 was much, much cheaper but was ablatively cooled and model showed it didn't behave well in a cluster. I *think* they had gone back to RS-25 before it was cancelled. It's certainly true that they were planning the J-2X for the upper stage, but it's closer in size to the S-IVB.
@@EagerSpace Sure! I repeat I globally agree with you, but I think you're a bit hard with nasa, they clearly had to deal with important and regular changes in management and leadership, changes of governement, and you're probably right on that point, they were proud of their shuttle and actually, they were totally aware the shuttle would never achieve the goals of hundreds of flight per years. But we can't deny that the Saturn V, as fantastic as it was, was a very dangerous vehicle which suffered lots of anomaly (only the worsts are known), but several ingeneers confessed years later that the probability of a fatal accident was growing at each flight, and the safety policy was far from the current standard in human rated spaceflight.
The 1st shuttle incident pointed that out and changed drastically the way nasa would proceed after that (the Columbia disaster was, I think, not comparable with challenger, when terrible decisions were made although the toric seal problem was known and recurrent.
They knew the vehicle was dangerous, they almost lost a shuttle when it came back with more than a hundred tiles missing, and worked to improve the thermal shield.
But the big block of foam, falling just on the edge of the wing and breaking through the big tile on it was clearly unexpected and very unlucky. I digress, sorry, but my point is: maybe the space shuttle was a logical and necessary step in our progress in space, we (the american I mean, I'm not even from USA) had done something extraordinary which will never be possible at such a scale: starting from nearly scratch to finally succeed in landing a man on the moon in less than a decade, that was almost a miracle, and high risks were taken, hard lessons were learnt, so it was wise to master human presence in low earth orbit and long duration missions in space before the next step of continuous presence on the moon or trip to Mars (the shuttle was also designed to help the assembly of the freedom station, which would become the ISS after the cold war).
That's why I wouldn't be so hard with those times, they faced a necessary evil in a way. (I'm sorry for all the mistakes, english 's not my native langage and I don't use any translation app).
Apollo was certainly risky, but it was risky to do something that was very exceptional - to put humans on the moon. They were not good at safety and ignored some established ways to improve safety, but they did hit their deadline.
Shuttle put lots of astronauts at risk and killed 14 of them to do something that wasn't exceptional - it largely carried cargo, went to the same place over and over again, and carried a large crew on pretty much all the missions.
Rand Simberg talks about this in his great book, "Safe is not an option".
Challenger was just stupid. They knew they had a systems problem, their supplier had a new design that would fix it, they had abnormal conditions, the whole engineering team was against it, they never told the astronauts what the risk was, and they flew anyway.
That wasn't just a mistake, it was criminal negligence and somebody should have gone to jail for it.
The issue with foam was similar, and just another sign that they had a) a bad safety culture and b) a vehicle with some seriously bad design choices.
I believe your criticisms apply to the modern space program generally speaking and less so specifically to the shuttle. The bureaucracy and financial incentives inherent in a government operation are certainly problematic. Letting the private sector take over low orbit operations has certainly spurred a lot of innovation.
My question to you - would the shuttle still be flying if the Columbia accident not occurred ??
Interesting question...
If you look at the Columbia accident report, you'll find that the panel members did not recommend that the shuttle be retired - they recommended that it be re-certified and then continue flying. The Administration decided that it should be retired - I'm not clear on the reasons, but one was probably that the new "vision for space exploration" that came out of the Bush administration needed a lot of money and shuttle was the obvious source. If that's true, Columbia was a nice excuse to do that.
@@EagerSpace It Makes Me Think That The STS-107 Columbia Accident Was ALLOWED To Happen To Bring About The Goal The Government, NASA & Industry Wanted All Along ! ! ! ? ? ?🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
@@EagerSpace WELL DONE EagerSpace FOR Making This VERY Well Produced & Informative Mini-Doc & I Get It & It All Makes Sense NOW ! ! !
It also.
Killed people on the ground.A lot of people forget about that
I recall the ones that died because they were in a pure nitrogen environment without proper breathing equipment. Were there others?
How does one go from “Salaried-IC-40yrOld” to “whatever socioeconomic class where it’s kind of normal to have a lawyer on-hand and affordable?” I mean, where do those kinds of jobs begin? The only future I see are salaried manager roles and constant desperation. Did I waste my time getting a 4-year degree? Feels like getting an “important” boss that can help your career is luck-of-the-draw or “need to already be in their rich circlejerk socioeconomic class”.
Plutocracy, since time immemorial.
Welp, At least it looks cool
I hope SpaceX learned Shuttle's lesson.
Space Shuttle TPS engineers work now on Starship.
Don't piggy back on a rocket. This isn't Looney Toons and we aren't Wiley Coyote.
SpaceX has very different incentives and motivations, and that's very obvious from Falcon 9.
@@EagerSpace agreed, but if NASA had it to do over again I bet they wouldn't design the shuttle the same way.
@@rexmann1984 I think you missed my point - NASA designed shuttle the way they did because that met their goals, which had nothing to do with shuttle being cheap/reliable/effective. More knowledge wouldn't change that.
There's a very interesting online course on the design of the shuttle on edx.org; the engineers do talk about some of the systems that they might have designed differently (hydraulic versus electric comes up IIRC), but most of the non-optimal decisions they made came from monetary constraints.
Why China Space Program is like Spacex and not like the Nasa Program?
👍👍
Having SEGMENTED solid boosters was a ridiculous politically motivated 'design' decision... and still is.
It's almost like the Republic has been dead for decades. Ask a Roman where he lived in 100 AD, and he would've said, "Why, the Roman Republic, of course." It's all a façade.
3 years late seems pretty damn good now days
Wow! Your take was awesome but that smacking and Tis-Tising was absolutely disgusting in my ear..
Sorry - the audio on some of my older videos is a bit painful to listen to.
peak cognitive dissonance is how i describe the shuttle. worst megaproject of all time
Shuttle had a very specific goal - to make NASA an permanent part of the federal government - and it did that very well. Just not the goal that many of us were hoping.
@EagerSpace yeah in the worst way possible
SpaceX may have had some good years up to now but going to the Moon or to Mars is not really interesting for a company unless they receive tax money to develop it. It is then just a matter of time for them to suffer the same issues as NASA.
The Falcon 9 launching satellites for commercial customers is another story end there the cost-effectiveness is more important then creating jobs.
SpaceX is a private company with that they are not beholden to shareholders or Congress/Senatorial wants/desires! They have a business plan and they are the biggest launch provider & owner of the largest constellation of satellite internet services! 😊