> They didn't know why or what clandestine military purpose the shuttle had, but they knew that when they found out, they'd want the same capabilities. So they just copied it, not knowing why.
This is the exact same thing that's happened with the Chinese and the X-37B:
>The United States also operates a reusable robotic space plane, the Boeing-built X-37B. Similar to China's Shenlong space plane, little is known about the exact operations or capabilities of the X-37B. The U.S. Space Force is currently set to launch the spacecraft atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on Dec. 28 after several delays.
So China has launched a space plane and deposited some devices in space just before the US launches their space plane? I wonder if they put some "listeners" up there to see if they can get any data from the US space plane.
That's the legacy defense contractor strategy -- deliver something that checks off the boxes on the government requirement list at an exorbitant price. It's a very conservative strategy; lots of money, no risk.
The problem is that at some point SpaceX started landing rockets and the formerly safe strategy became extremely risky because Boeing/ULA not only has a competitor, the competitor is cheaper. But getting a fat, lazy organization to innovate and compete is hard even when facing an existential threat, and Boeing/ULA have not (yet?) managed that transformation. They've known it's necessary for years [1] but haven't been able to change course.
> The Shuttle was reusable only in the loosest sense
I specifically mentioned the main engines. And we can't really compare with the F9 when, once again, it has never been reflown. A lot more of the Shuttle was intended to be reusable than ended up being the case - who's to say how that will play out for the F9?
> Cost per pound to LEO wasn't remotely competitive with 60s vintage expendable systems like Soyuz
Soyuz is an excellent system, but it didn't have anything like the lift capacity of the Shuttle. The Shuttle wasn't cheap, but it was designed for a particular set of requirements - some of them reasonable, some of them less so - and for a much higher launch rate than actually happened, for a variety of reasons.
For every “send things to the ISS” and “put thing in orbit” mission, the two are directly comparable. The Space Shuttle simply wasn’t using its maximum capacity that often for big packages. The Space Shuttle was a boondoggle.
For crew launches, the per-person cost of the Shuttle still compares unfavourably to SpaceX’s projected crew launch costs. But projected isn’t actual, so we’ll let the Shuttle keep its spot for now.
(Special repair projects and ISS boosting are two things the Shuttle can do that SpaceX currently cannot.)
The thing about R&D is that you do not know ahead of time what will work and what will fail. Some of NASA's programs failed and some have succeeded. But there was no way to know if SpaceX would be the winner, or SLS, or anything else.
Reusable was never done before (AFAICT). It turns out that it is actually technically possible and useful. But there was no way to know that ahead of time. It was a risk that SpaceX, and NASA by funding them, that just happened to work out.
> Squabble over whatever details you want about performance or who had to do what R&D but F9 is clearly in a different league.
Falcon 9 First launch attempt 2007 [0]
Shuttle First launch 1981 [1]
I wonder if there's an advantage to having 26 years of watching someone else before designing yours? You also act like the rockets from the shuttle were not reused. They always (except for 2 instances) came back with the shuttle. The SRBs were also recovered, so it's not like these were wasted.
> How is it that SpaceX was able to accomplish the same thing in a fraction of the time, esp considering Boeing has been building aircraft for a century?
I have no particular insight into this subject, but an Ars article [1] from yesterday offers some speculation:
'"The difference between the two company’s cultures, design philosophies, and decision-making structures allowed SpaceX to excel in a fixed-price environment, where Boeing stumbled, even after receiving significantly more funding," said Lori Garver in an interview. She was deputy administrator of NASA from 2009 to 2013 during the formative years of the commercial crew program [...]'
and
'SpaceX was in its natural environment. Boeing's space division had never won a large fixed-price contract. Its leaders were used to operating in a cost-plus environment, in which Boeing could bill the government for all of its expenses and earn a fee. Cost overruns and delays were not the company's problem—they were NASA's. Now Boeing had to deliver a flyable spacecraft for a firm, fixed price. Boeing struggled to adjust to this environment.'
> The core stage is structurally similar to the Space Shuttle external tank,[24][25] and initial flights will use modified RS-25D engines left over from the Space Shuttle program.[26] Later flights will switch to a cheaper version of the engine not intended for reuse.[27]
So they reused as much of the space shuttle as possible, down to using left over engines. Developing a new engine from scratch using a new fuel (methane) like SpaceX did would have been a very risky proposition. Like NASA, Blue Origin and ULA both did much more conventional things and have launch costs multiple times those of SpaceX. The relative cost of NASA's more conservative design decisions is more a testament to Space X's remarkable success with the Raptor engine than NASA being somehow incompetent.
Do you mean no STS launches were DoD payloads or do you mean no STS launches required DoD specs? I'm not saying the "cost effectiveness" promise of the Shuttle was met, but there appears to be evidence that neither of the above claims are accurate. For example, STS-38 was a classified DoD payload [1] and there are book chapters dedicated to fact that DoD specs drove the shuttle design [2]. The gist from [3] is
"the support and budget for space decreased, increasing the need for NASA to work closely with the DOD. Their partnership prompted many compromises that were made on the vehicle’s uses and design, which resulted in a broad set of requirements"
Those compromises were largely to accommodate the DoD payload and range requirements. Whether or not they were ultimately necessary we can't know because much of that is classified and unverifiable. But they still drove the design and eroded the cost benefits that NASA wanted.
> NASA had no way to get crew to the ISS, and relied exclusively on Russia.
The reason NASA was doing that was because of risk aversion and lack of innovation!
The shuttle was shut down because NASA couldn’t afford another disaster like Columbia and there had been absolutely no meaningful progress to replace it .
Without spacex, that would still be the case , Dreamliner is still not done a demo flight and Boeing would have held NASA by the balls and renegotiated from fixed price to cost plus contract as they have been doing for decades.
SpaceX forced the hand by delivering on commercial crew (CCS)
The shuttle had bunch of older parts designed for other programs and was 30 years old in 2010.
SLS flies on engines that are decades old from shuttle era with no plan for new engines and still costs in multiple billions per launch !
If not for spaceX we would be cheering BO for successfully delivering the Vulcan engines and being proud of that as pinnacle of private space .
BO official Moro is step by step ferociously. They were always culturally tuned to be risk averse and careful
>The test article isn't even capable of reaching orbit, or returning from orbit, or landing yet.
>It's also different from reusable boosters as developed by SpaceX ... Those can be more expensive than the actual plane
You misunderstand. The capabilities ISRO demonstrated today are for developing a reusable first stage (booster), not a reusable second stage.
>The solid boosters were also recovered, but since they were just steel tubes, they didn't require much refurbishment
They also contained thrust vectoring equipment on the rear. All those actuators, controllers, etc had to be completely disassembled, cleaned, inspected, reassembled, and recertified after being fished out of the ocean.
Like the Shuttle, the SRBs were more expensive to refurbish than an expendable design would have been.
> The space shuttle was reusable and yet, it is generally seen as a disappointment (and I don't believe for a second SpaceX engineers are better than NASA engineers).
It helps that SpaceX actually lets their engineers design the rocket, while the Space Shuttle was designed by Congress for defense missions that never happened.
SpaceX engineers probably aren't better than NASA engineers (though the fact that they have a clear mission and actually get stuff done helps with recruiting the best talent). The SpaceX organisation is significantly better than NASA.
>It's also entirely plausible that the SpaceX parts did their job and something the government insisted on using / was sending up didn't work as expected.
The payload adapter was not the SpaceX built hardware SpaceX usually uses, but was built by Northrop Grumman
>Aren't their reused rockets significantly cheaper than the competition already?
Are they? Have they re-used their rockets commercially, outside of testing? I was unaware of that, but I don't follow it very closely.
Did they not ditch the idea of re-using the second stage, as it proved too expensive? If so, that demonstrates there's sometimes a gap between targets and reality.
No, it wasn't. It was sort of reusable, but only with a lot of expensive refurbishment.
> I don't believe for a second SpaceX engineers are better than NASA engineers
Modern materials and computer aided design tools are incomparable to those the Shuttle designers had. Also, SpaceX is less conflicted than NASA was when it designed the Shuttle.
Maybe. There's a plan to use the Dragon capsule to reboost the Hubble and possibly EVA to it. No one knows what exactly will happen, although if you're interested in learning more, the potential mission is Polaris II[1].
But that ignores the bigger point - the Shuttle had a bunch of rarely used capabilities. And the tradeoff for that is that it's main mission: taking people and cargo to space was severely compromised.
It would have been easy to just buy a new Hubble with the savings if the US had a reasonably designed and priced rocket instead of the Shuttle.
This is the exact same thing that's happened with the Chinese and the X-37B:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2022/08/22/mysterious-...
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