EJ – The Shuttle was a disaster. It flew a tiny fraction of its planned mission rate, and still we managed to lose 40% of the fleet. It soaked up an enormous amount of funds taking us down a path now, for good reasons, abandoned.
From the start, it was a political design, not an engineering design. It was justified by claims to reduce the cost to orbit of everything, which also required giving it a monopoly on launches – even for military/intelligence satellites.
If the Shuttle was so great, why haven’t other space powers developed similar technology?
Putting on my engineering hat, let me point out a few obvious problems with the idea:
1) It has to fly in multiple realms – launch, orbit, re-entry, hypersonic flight and subsonic flight to landing. This means lots of complex systems and dangerous phase transitions. The Shuttle is, basically, an enormously expensive kludge – a truly inelegant system.
2) It requires a human crew. That means the probability of failure must be dramatically lower (for political and human reasons) than an unmanned vehicle. Thus everything we put into orbit had to fly on a man-rated vehicle and be man-rated itself. This dramatically raised costs and reduced mission rates.
3) The manning requirement also caused a need for life support systems. More cost, more wasted weight, more potential for failure.
4) The hypersonic flight requirement requires an aircraft-like vehicle, just for the short time this space-ship is coming home. That vehicle required the invention of the fragile insulating tiles (because an aircraft couldn’t use simple ablation). It required atmospheric flight controls, and retractable landing gear. In other words, it put all sorts of absurd requirements on a space vehicle.
Now going back to a simple system for lifting people, with other systems for lifting cargo (many in the private sphere) is much better. The new manned system, if NASA doesn’t screw it up too much, simply uses a scaled up rocket (a ’60s technology), a capsule with long proven, simple reentry and landing technology (Apollo, Soyuz), and little else.
In Engineering, KISS is a good principle – something grossly ignored by the Shuttle politicians and bureaucrats who forced the Shuttle design.
