With the workforce still alive from Shuttle and Buran would it be feasible to build a new shuttle to fly on falcon heavy I am thinking of a 2 launch mission ?
With the workforce still alive from Shuttle and Buran would it be feasible to build a new shuttle to fly on falcon heavy I am thinking of a 2 launch mission ? The shuttle has removable Crew quarters, payload bay ,robot arm ,OMS and a heatshield .A far simpler machine capable of staying in space for a month .Crew would transfer to and from the shuttle using Dragons and Boeing CST 100 .By doing this Hubble could be repaired and ISS modules can be returned .
The shuttle was an amazing machine but a terrible idea. Why do you want it back?
Quote from: IRobot on 03/11/2018 04:25 pmThe shuttle was an amazing machine but a terrible idea. Why do you want it back?I disagree.BFS _IS_ reinventing the space shuttle with almost the same idea.It's just it's doing it without throwing away any solids, and with refurbishment costing (perhaps many) thousands, not most of a billion.Reusability is _expensive_, if you look at it with the wrong hat on.It halves the payload of BFS/R to orbit.If you were to do a fully expendable version without any of the reusability features, you can get three times payload to orbit, or the same payload with a much smaller launcher.Pretty much the same as the shuttle if you were to junk the reusability.It's just that BFS makes it cheap. (hopefully)It's not the idea that's bad, it was the execution. (if it was technically possible to execute the idea at the time is a different question)
Let's be clear. No one knows how much BFR/BFS is going to cost. Things always take more time and cost more than you think they will.
If the shuttle system was a better idea, Musk could use 4 Falcon 9's around a core like Braun, and have a space plane. He wants BFR/BFS to be more than just a shuttle to and from earth orbit, but to go to Mars and back. So wings are not needed in space. BFS will have a couple of stubby winglets for re-entry to earths atmosphere and maybe at Mars. They will serve a similar purpose as the grid fins do on the boosters. Since the BFS will already have engines, just use those to land vertically. No need for the extra weight of wings all the way to Mars (or the moon) and back.
Quote from: floss on 03/10/2018 09:02 pmWith the workforce still alive from Shuttle and Buran would it be feasible to build a new shuttle to fly on falcon heavy I am thinking of a 2 launch mission ? The shuttle has removable Crew quarters, payload bay ,robot arm ,OMS and a heatshield .A far simpler machine capable of staying in space for a month .Crew would transfer to and from the shuttle using Dragons and Boeing CST 100 .By doing this Hubble could be repaired and ISS modules can be returned .Feasible, possible and practical to do easily or convenientlyPossible most definitly.
The shuttle has removable Crew quarters, payload bay ,robot arm ,OMS and a heatshield .A far simpler machine capable of staying in space for a month .
Crew would transfer to and from the shuttle using Dragons and Boeing CST 100 .By doing this Hubble could be repaired and ISS modules can be returned .
Might be an idea, but why not scale down the shuttle so it can be more easily launched. Perhaps drop the cargo bay (it was never a good cargo lifter). Then we have something like this:https://www.sncorp.com/what-we-do/dream-chaser-space-vehicle/or this:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermes_(spacecraft)I can see other organisations apart from SpaceX, Blue Origin, Boeing, Russia and China wanting to be able to launch crew, and this might be the way.
As Ludus said, really. Well, when you think about it, BFR/BFS is strikingly similar to the original 1969 Space Shuttle, the fully reusable one. One big booster, one orbiter - minus all the aircraft around the rockets: wings, tail, jet engines, undercarriage, which were pretty heavy. Also LH2 replaced by methane. This one BFR / BFSFunnily enough, with Falcon 9R Musk re-invented the familiar, 1972 Space Shuttle. Let be clear: not in shape (the two vehicles are completely different) but in capability. And with BFR / BFS, he goes a step further: he re-invents the other Space Shuttle, the 1969 fully reusable ship. This time the shapes are a little closer. Ain't that funny when you think about it ? EDIT: between IAC 2016 and IAC 2017 BFS grew a tiny delta wing not dissimilar to a Shuttle in overall shape.
DoD asked over 1k mile cross-range because they need single polar orbit missions to return home photo films. Yes, this was the reason. This requirement has been made obsolete by electronics a long time ago, well before the shuttle has been flown.
Quote from: mike robel on 03/11/2018 08:25 pmLet's be clear. No one knows how much BFR/BFS is going to cost. Things always take more time and cost more than you think they will.Sorry just got to disagree. It is not a given that cost and schedule will exceed the initial estimate. With proper planning (including budgets and schedules) and yes a little bit of luck, the execution of major aerospace projects can under run both cost and schedule. I have been fortunate enough to be involved with said projects.
Quote from: indaco1 on 03/24/2018 12:01 pmDoD asked over 1k mile cross-range because they need single polar orbit missions to return home photo films. Yes, this was the reason. This requirement has been made obsolete by electronics a long time ago, well before the shuttle has been flown.no, it was for abort once around. Not the one orbit mission.
The charge-coupled device grew out of the work of two specialists at Bell Labs, William Boyle and George Smith. In 1969, such technology still lay in the future. The view in the Air Force was that the CIA would need piloted spacecraft to produce the real-time photos. The late lamented MOL had represented a possible method, for an onboard photointerpreter might take, develop, and analyze photos on short notice. Now, with MOL in its graveyard, attention turned to the Space Shuttle. It might fly into space, execute a single orbit, and return to its base with film exposed less than an hour earlier....While a satellite orbit remains fixed in orientation with respect to distant stars, the earth rotates below this orbit. This permitted single reconnaissance missions to photograph much of the Soviet Union. However, it meant that if [215] a shuttle was to execute a one-orbit mission from Vandenberg, it would return to the latitude of that base after 90 minutes in space only to find that, due to the earth's rotation, this base had moved to the east by 1100 nautical miles. Air Force officials indeed expected to launch the Shuttle from Vandenberg, and they insisted that the Shuttle had to have enough crossrange to cover that distance and return successfully....In addition to this, NASA and the Air Force shared a concern that a shuttle might have to abort its mission and come down as quickly as possible after launch. This might require "once-around abort," which again would lead to a flight of a single orbit. A once-around abort on a due-east launch from Cape Canaveral would not be too difficult; the craft might land at any of a number of sites within the United States. In the words of NASA's Leroy Day, "If you were making a polar-type launch out of Vandenberg, and you had Max's straight-wing vehicle, there was no place you could go. You'd be in the water when you came back. You've got to go crossrange quite a few hundred miles in order to make land." 34
In addition to this, NASA and the Air Force shared a concern that a shuttle might have to abort its mission and come down as quickly as possible after launch. This might require "once-around abort," which again would lead to a flight of a single orbit.
Quote from: testguy on 03/26/2018 04:51 pmQuote from: mike robel on 03/11/2018 08:25 pmLet's be clear. No one knows how much BFR/BFS is going to cost. Things always take more time and cost more than you think they will.Sorry just got to disagree. It is not a given that cost and schedule will exceed the initial estimate. With proper planning (including budgets and schedules) and yes a little bit of luck, the execution of major aerospace projects can under run both cost and schedule. I have been fortunate enough to be involved with said projects.True. In fact aerospace cost models already have an allowance for cost and schedule overruns built into them, IE a "standard" level of excessive budget and schedule. They are also based on decades of (mostly) cost plus projects, which have little incentive to save money or time. So if you're not a cost plus project funded by the government, and the area you're dealing with is remotely familiar territory, you'd have to work damm hard to exceed that time frame.BTW regarding the actual Shuttle. The team were permitted no allowance for inflation and no budget for contingencies. AIUI the 70's were a period of quite high inflation in the US economy. When you factored those items in (IIRC a normal number for contingencies is 10% of the budget without a contingency allowance) Shuttle came in within budget.IIRC an estimate of the full STS programme in current $ came to about $60Bn. Of course you know have all the TPS technology you could draw on and the actual knowledge of what was expensive to service versus what people thought would be expensive to service from the Shuttle flight history.
Quote from: john smith 19 on 03/27/2018 08:44 amQuote from: testguy on 03/26/2018 04:51 pmQuote from: mike robel on 03/11/2018 08:25 pmLet's be clear. No one knows how much BFR/BFS is going to cost. Things always take more time and cost more than you think they will.Sorry just got to disagree. It is not a given that cost and schedule will exceed the initial estimate. With proper planning (including budgets and schedules) and yes a little bit of luck, the execution of major aerospace projects can under run both cost and schedule. I have been fortunate enough to be involved with said projects.True. In fact aerospace cost models already have an allowance for cost and schedule overruns built into them, IE a "standard" level of excessive budget and schedule. They are also based on decades of (mostly) cost plus projects, which have little incentive to save money or time. So if you're not a cost plus project funded by the government, and the area you're dealing with is remotely familiar territory, you'd have to work damm hard to exceed that time frame.BTW regarding the actual Shuttle. The team were permitted no allowance for inflation and no budget for contingencies. AIUI the 70's were a period of quite high inflation in the US economy. When you factored those items in (IIRC a normal number for contingencies is 10% of the budget without a contingency allowance) Shuttle came in within budget.IIRC an estimate of the full STS programme in current $ came to about $60Bn. Of course you know have all the TPS technology you could draw on and the actual knowledge of what was expensive to service versus what people thought would be expensive to service from the Shuttle flight history.No matter how you paint it, even $60Bn would be enough for some 100 Saturn V flights or more, considering cost savings. The problem is not on the project execution. The project went wrong on the requirement phase.
The one orbit mission was never intended to fly over the soviet land mass. It was a satellite deployment mission which could avoid overflying the USSR during the one orbit.
The shuttle was (pretty brutally) cost-capped by Caspar Weinberger OMB at $5.15 billion (or burst). NASA got the message and managed to keep the budget on track at least until 1978, when the SSME and TPS started to fall appart. In the end even with the delays the shuttle development ended with a 20% cost overrun, that is slightly above $ 6 billion. And yes, that was a very good performance from NASA, compared with its own usual cost overruns BUT also with military aircrafts, all the way from Lockheed C-5 Galaxy to... the F-35. QuoteThe one orbit mission was never intended to fly over the soviet land mass. It was a satellite deployment mission which could avoid overflying the USSR during the one orbit.No question about this. The real, bitting, and unbelievable irony was that in 1974 or so, Keldysh mathematical institute computed that one orbit flight... and got the motive completely wrong. I mean, they got scared exactly by what Jim mentionned - a possible shuttle overflight of the Soviet Union, from Vandenberg, with a single orbit. The reason why they scared themselves was that, while the U.S military only intented to flight that profile to launch the NRO Key Holes (KH-9 and beyond) into polar orbit - the Soviet mistook it for a very crazy, paranoid scenario. The shuttle would overfly Moscow, sneak between the SAM and ABM belts and drop a Minuteman warhead on the Politbure. Decapitations strike. This scared the hell out of Keldysh, who went to Ustinov, who went to Brezhnev, and Brezhnev requested an orbiter with a similar shape and crossrange (I didn't said Buran was a carbon copy of the shuttle), and the result was Buran... Keldysh, Ustinov and the late era Brezhnev were pretty paranoid, and so was Andropov and his KGB. What is really interesting is that, a decade after the shuttle, the Soviet leadership draw equally wrong conclusions about the SDI offensive potential. No kidding, they feared that Reagan spaceborne lasers, which he intented to zap ICBMs, might be used to zap... the Politburo and Moscow ! I've read very serious documents about this.
BFR would be more "capable" of such scenaio, even for non nuclear tactical strike. 100 tons of warhead.
Quote from: Katana on 04/09/2018 06:33 pmBFR would be more "capable" of such scenaio, even for non nuclear tactical strike. 100 tons of warhead.Do you think that's going to encourage countries to look favourably on it overflying them for P2P transport?Although it could be said BFR is the heir to the Shuttle concept that is quite a mixed legacy.
No matter how you paint it, even $60Bn would be enough for some 100 Saturn V flights or more, considering cost savings. The problem is not on the project execution. The project went wrong on the requirement phase.
100 Saturn V flights, that's a scary thought. At least there was a LAS.
P2P passenger transport with BFR is also too dangerous and expencive for airliner applications, but USAF could be more tolerant on hazard and cost, either for transporting military personnel...
100 tons of warhead.
Quote from: Katana on 04/09/2018 06:33 pm 100 tons of warhead.That applies to any launch vehicle.
Quote from: Jim on 04/10/2018 01:42 pmQuote from: Katana on 04/09/2018 06:33 pm 100 tons of warhead.That applies to any launch vehicle.But far low $/kg compared to ICBM and ICBM derived boosters of HTV and AHW.
No payloads for 100 Saturn V's. That is the problem with these comparisons.
No, it is useless for that. That has been fallacy since day one. There is no benefit. It is not clandestine and the troops have no support or means of extraction.
Quote from: Jim on 04/10/2018 01:42 pmQuote from: Katana on 04/09/2018 06:33 pm 100 tons of warhead.That applies to any launch vehicle.But far low $/kg compared to ICBM and ICBM derived boosters of HTV and AHW. Probably comparable to $/kg of ammunition carried by fighters, if P2P passenger transport have reasonable price.
Provided there is a big tank of LO2 and CH4 at the landing site.
And a BFR booster, also.Destination has to be an air base, a sea port, an ASDS or similar.