It turns out a lot of science space research is heavily driven by military space presence. For example, Hubble has a 2.4m mirror because there was already a factory making that size for dozens of spy satellite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen
And ever heard of "The Dish" at Stanford? It's a 150-foot radio telescope the US Air Force funded during the Cold War to ostensibly "study the chemical composition of the atmosphere." Total BS. The Air Force built it to intercept signals from Soviet radar systems after they bounced off the moon.
(Thankfully Stanford got to keep it and it's been used for hundreds of projects since then.)
The book _The Hubble Wars_, which describes most of this, made me pretty angry that an important scientific instrument was nearly crippled by the "national security" mindset.
But the vast majority of the Shuttle's 130 flights would have been better served by an Apollo or Gemini derived design.
The Department of Defense still actively uses a spaceplane-ish vehicle. It's just a much smaller unmanned one called the X-37b. Many folks speculate it's used to repair and refuel spy satellites, and potentially even rendezvous with and and hack enemy satellites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
Generally I totally agree though-- capsule design makes way more sense for anything leaving or reentering atmosphere. The upcoming Orion are clearly in that directly.
It did, but a capsule can do the job just fine too – for JWST, it is (or was) planned to do repairs using the Orion capsule and a mission module docked to it.
> And the orbiter's cargo bay certainly was useful to transport many parts of the ISS.
Kinda, yes. But an unmanned rocket could have done the same job, and likely cheaper than the Shuttle.
Most of the civilian Shuttle missions could have been easily served by other, much cheaper craft – but who knows what happened during the classified ones, it might actually have been cheaper to the taxpayer at large (if not NASA) to have one craft to serve both roles.
> The Department of Defense still actively uses a spaceplane-ish vehicle. It's just a much smaller unmanned one called the X-37b. Many folks speculate it's used to repair and refuel spy satellites, and potentially even rendezvous with and and hack enemy satellites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
We don't really know, but given how little fuel capacity it has and how long it stays in orbit, it's more likely that the DoD's stated purpose of long-endurance testing of new spy hardware is true.
1. Can it get to many satellites? Yes, it has good delta V, though I think you're mixing the X-37's delta V with its boosters and the delta V of the Shuttle orbiter without its SRBs and external tank.
2. Can it carry fuel for those satellites? No, not much. The X-37 has a maximum total takeoff weight of 5000 kg, while the Shuttle can get 27000 kg to LEO. Unfortunately, only one X-37 will fit in the payload bay of the Shuttle, so we can't actually lift five X-37s in the Shuttle.
Many large satellites weigh more than the X-37's total mass. The biggest individual consumer, the ISS, requires about 7000 kg of fuel annually to stay in orbit. A KC-135 in-air refueling tanker is much faster than an oceangoing supertanker, but you wouldn't use the former to empty an oil rig!
These satellites don't need altitude boosts-- they use propellant for orbital changes (e.g. to "re-task" a spy satellite to a new region). But instead of chemical rockets they often use xenon gas ion engines.
The key thing with ion drives is their "specific impulse." High-thrust chemical rockets are needed to get out of the atmosphere and perform fast burns, but ion engines are often >10x more efficient once already in orbit. And because there isn't a chemical reaction, there is less corrosion and they can last for years.
Refueling xenon for the ion drives of spy satellites would double or triple their mission lifespan. They don't need much -- maybe just a couple hundred kg. And this could literally save billions of dollars since these satellites are so expensive to build.
Those old boats had capabilities that I don't think we'll see for another two generations of manned spacecraft.
Gemini, Vokshod, Apollo and Soyuz all demonstrated that ability as well. Apollo especially with multiple lunar EVAs per mission.
The Shuttle's biggest advantage over all those was being roomier, making EVA preparations less of a hassle, but all space craft currently in development are addressing that shortcoming.
> It could also stay in orbit with a large crew for extended periods.
Meh. Yes, it could… but should it? In that role, the Shuttle was still inferior to a real space station, while being as expensive. If it wasn't for political reasons (Shuttle was approved, but it was hard to fund anything else), NASA likely would have preferred using a space station for it (and largely did, once it could access Mir/ISS).
ISS isn't going away for a while yet, the industry is working on smaller private space stations that could be rented out for this purposes, and NASA is contemplating building smaller stations in deep space when/if necessary. We didn't actually lose any capability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Titan_launches and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V
(and then going up a level, whether those missions were necessary to establish those capabilities or if different missions would have been used in the absence of the shuttle)
You're not wrong but there are some nuances. The original design for the shuttle was very different from what was ultimately built because when the Shuttle program funding was in jeopardy the Air Force was brought in and they forced the design to change to meet their needs. The shuttle got bigger and added the external fuel tank, almost entirely crippling the shuttle's reusability.
By far the most negative impact on the shuttle was the massive reduction in space flights from the he original proposal due to budget cuts and Congressional politicking. The average cost per flight was something on the order of $1.8 billion but most of that was fixed overhead and a lot of that overhead was the consequence of the Air Force redesign. If the shuttle were funded independently as originally planned, it would have cost a lot less to fly and with enough flights it would have been significantly more cost effective. Whether NASA could make it as cheap as rockets is unclear but it's not impossible that they could have brought it within a factor of two.
However, it's also unclear to me whether we could have pulled off something like the Hubble telescope repair with a rocket and pods.
Further, if the shuttle was only sending people to orbit it's design could be both reusable and vastly simpler because of vastly lower rentry temperatures and more redundancy.
Soviets decided to replicate it. So even if it was PR, it was a good PR - it managed to trick USSR to waste quite an effort.
(If that's incorrect and you're qualified to correct me please do.)
Having said that, the name Starliner writes a check that a manned capsule won't ever be able to cash. This is the first time I've heard of Boeing's Starliner and it got me really, really excited until I pulled up a picture of it. They really should have picked a less grandiose name.