Early shuttle criticism

[K-P]

Somehow I came across this article, not sure if it has been linked in here somewhere before but...

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/8004.easterbrook-fulltext.html

Interesting stuff. To my surprise I found out that there was already back then a lot of same kind of criticism about the entire system that we are now seeing too, the same problems, some horribly accurate failure scenarios we now know actually happened and also pretty accurate cost estimates and visions where all this is going.

It seems really clear, that the wisdow was there already 30 years ago, but nobody in the management really had the nerves and guts to pull the plug early... too bad.

[Analyst]

And your realistic alternative would have been??? Being critical is one thing, having solutions another.

Analyst

[K-P]

And your realistic alternative would have been??? Being critical is one thing, having solutions another.

Analyst

No, no... You got me all wrong.
I have no realistic alternatives to offer. I am not pretending to be the smart one here. I just meant that this article was INTERESTING and handled many same issues we are dealing now with shuttle and also with CEV designs.

Solution, fine. How about DIRECT2.0 a'la '79?

Between the lines of the author's text you could pretty much read which solutions and paths he was preferring, even when he did not name his agenda with hip name or give out specifics...

Being critical is one thing, agreed. But being immune and deaf to any critics is another.

[DavisSTS]

It seems really clear, that the wisdow was there already 30 years ago, but nobody in the management really had the nerves and guts to pull the plug early... too bad.

That's almost inciteful, posting such a comment on a forum like this one! Or are you one of those dreamers that think we'd all be running around on Von Braun's Lunar moonbase etc.

Problem is, Apollo was killed not by Shuttle, but by lack of interest and money.

The most hilarious part is comparing it to Constellation now. CHALK AND CHEESE!

[K-P]

That's almost inciteful, posting such a comment on a forum like this one! Or are you one of those dreamers that think we'd all be running around on Von Braun's Lunar moonbase etc.

Oh come on!  Are you now blaming me for the critics which was present even before I was born...? Jesus...

I am a BIG amazing people of unmanned exploration and I would MUCH rather see Titan landers and Europa drillers in action than LEO/NEO action by any manned spacecraft. But it was obvious so early on that shuttle was flawed design missionwise and financially that it seems so weird in retrospective they did not scale the system down, or make a shuttle Mark 2 asap. or then just call it the day and admit that there was no sensible missions for shuttle to fly. Anyway all this information was pretty much in front of them already before STS-1...

[gospacex]

It seems really clear, that the wisdow was there already 30 years ago, but nobody in the management really had the nerves and guts to pull the plug early... too bad.

That's almost inciteful, posting such a comment on a forum like this one! Or are you one of those dreamers that think we'd all be running around on Von Braun's Lunar moonbase etc.

Problem is, Apollo was killed not by Shuttle, but by lack of interest and money.

It's unclear to me what you are trying to say.

Are you saying Shuttle had to be built even if its shortcomings were known and acknowledged 30+ years ago? Why? What sort of logic is THAT?

[K-P]

Problem is, Apollo was killed not by Shuttle, but by lack of interest and money.

The most hilarious part is comparing it to Constellation now. CHALK AND CHEESE!

Ehh.... yes...? I really do know and understand Apollo was killed by lack of interest and money. Where have I mentioned ANY connection between this fact and the shuttle program...? Somehow I can not follow your thoughts here...?


Chalk & Cheese:

Shuttle = Manned program
Constellation = Manned program
Shuttle = Has flaws and questionnable agenda (true benefits & useful  missions)
Constellation = as above

[Blackstar]

Wow.  Everybody needs to take a few deep breaths and count to ten.  Join in with me, okay?

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Okay, we all ready to pick this up in a thoughtful and civilized manner?

[Blackstar]

Here's some background.

Shuttle required a lot of people to lie to themselves.  There's no question about that.  They lied to themselves about the likely flight rate, about the cost, and about the complexity.  They also lied to themselves about the safety aspects.

It would be worthwhile for someone to go back to various media and see who were the first critics and who accurately predicted the problems.  The earliest example I know is a relatively short article written by David Baker in 1974 for Flight International.  I linked to that in a previous post.  Try here:

http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1974/1974%20-%201260.html?search=david%20baker%20space%20shuttle

(unfortunately, that only gives you the first page of what I think is a 2-3 page article--anybody who finds a link to the remaining pages please post here)

Baker, most younger people don't know, authored two major books in the latter 1970s.  One was called The Rocket and the other was called The History of Manned Spaceflight.  (He has an interesting history, by the way.  I think somebody told me once that although born in England, he actually served in the US Army Signal Corps during Vietnam.  By the time he wrote those books he had degrees in astronautics, astrophysics, and planetary science.)

Baker was, as far as I know, the first person to recognize that NASA's stated cost per pound for shuttle could not be correct because it did not take into account the fact that shuttle needed to carry an upper stage as well as "aerospace support equipment" (i.e. the stuff that holds the payload securely in the payload bay) and this ate up the mass.  So Baker was there early questioning shuttle assumptions.

Then you should consider that shuttle ran into problems in the latter 1970s.  There were SSME problems and tile/TPS problems.  Each resulted in about a 1-year delay in flight availability.  (This is why NASA initially thought that shuttle might fly in 1979 and re-boost Skylab.  But Skylab was dragged down earlier than planned and shuttle was delayed by two years.)  Shuttle came close to cancellation under President Carter.

I am positive that while there were all of these delays, and the problems got reported in the media that there was media criticism of the program.  (I remember an article in Time with a picture of an orbiter that had shed a lot of tiles.  That was a famous picture at the time, although I cannot find it online.) This would have been in 1978 and 1979 and it would have predated the article that you linked to.

It would be interesting for somebody to go and research all of that and find out who was doing the best job of demonstrating that the emperor had no clothes.  I'm guessing that there were few people who took the criticism or their analysis very far.  But there were concerns voiced even before the shuttle was flying.

[More in another post.]

[psloss]

(I remember an article in Time with a picture of an orbiter that had shed a lot of tiles.  That was a famous picture at the time, although I cannot find it online.) This would have been in 1978 and 1979 and it would have predated the article that you linked to.

Would have been one of the many pictures taken of Columbia around the time of rollout from Palmdale, transport to Edwards and the ferry to KSC in March, 1979.  The ferry was delayed due to issues with tiles coming off...this was prior to implementing densification that was done in the OPF at KSC.  (There's at least one thread here w/pictures...)

Edit: here's one...
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=1545.0

Shots of ferry arrival at KSC:
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=1595.msg20933#msg20933

[Patchouli]

STS it's self was not a bad concept by any means.
It's the execution was where they messed up.

The mark I shuttle really should have been a smaller vehicle along the lines of the LKS or Faget's DC3 concept optimized for crew and pressurized cargo transport.

I feel Max Faget's NAR A would have been a safe vehicle that would have delivered everything that it promised.

Maybe STS should have been two vehicles maybe a space plane TSTO RLV for crew plus small cargo and a VTOL semi RLV for large cargo with an optional reusable capsule likely derived from Apollo if a crew is needed.
Other mistakes NASA was forced to finish STS on half the original proposed budget which forced use of the SRBs and fragile tiles.

Should we give up on RLVs because the shuttle was not perfect of course not.
We should instead learn the right lessons from it vs writing off reusable LVs and space planes.
One of these lessons is to keep things as simple as possible even if it means lower performance.
Another lesson wings though heavy are an effective and safe means to bring back a crew vehicle.
A shuttle never went ballistic or landed in a frozen lake like Soyuz.

Though by 1979 STS was too far along in the form we know it to be stopped but it could have been made safer.
They should have redesigned the O-rings at the first sign of burn through and stop all launches when the weather conditions predicted temps below 40F.
Also they should have included the Apollo life boat Rockwell wanted.
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/aponcept.htm
It probably could be used as an airlock as well so the lost performance would not be as bad as it first appears.

A side note keeping the Apollo CM in production they might have been able to save Skylab by sending a CSM launched on a titian III or surplus Saturn IB .

It also was the mission gap that drove them to finish the shuttle in the form it is now hoping they could fix the flaws later before anything bad happens which sounds oddly like another program that happened 30 years later.

[Blackstar]

Here are the first two pages of the David Baker article from 1974 (they have the weirdest software for archiving their old articles--you can download them only as single pages, and they don't make it obvious.  It's like software written by chipmunks.).

[Blackstar]

Here is the third and final page from David Baker's 1974 article.

[Jorge]

STS it's self was not a bad concept by any means.
It's the execution was where they messed up.

The mark I shuttle really should have been a smaller vehicle along the lines of the LKS or Faget's DC3 concept optimized for crew and pressurized cargo transport.

I feel Max Faget's NAR A would have been a safe vehicle that would have delivered everything that it promised.

While I agree with the general sentiment, beware the "grass is always greener" syndrome. It's a logical fallacy, and a fairly insidious one at that.

Faget's orbiter would indeed have allowed a less fragile TPS during entry but it had a couple of major flaws. It would have entered at 80 degrees alpha and had to perform a "belly flop" maneuver to transition from ballistic flight to controlled flight. With its stubby wings and relatively large, sail-like fuselage, it would have been extremely susceptible to crosswinds during landing. There were many who doubted whether the fly-by-wire control systems of the era were up to either challenge.

Even if the control systems were up to it, the low crosswind landing performance, combined with low entry crossrange capability, would have put severe operational limitations on the Faget orbiter. The crosswind landing limits would have been tighter and therefore the chances of a launch being scrubbed due to excessive crosswinds at the abort landing sites would have been much higher.

Once launched, the low crossrange would have greatly reduced the number of landing opportunities per orbit since the orbiter would only have been able to reach landing sites within a narrow "swath" on either side of the groundtrack. For high inclination missions, there would have been a "gap" between the swaths of adjoining orbits and the landing sites in those gaps would have been unreachable. (The current orbiter has sufficient crossrange that the swaths always overlap). Then throw the crosswind limits on top of that, and you end up with a situation where the Faget orbiter might have to loiter in orbit for days waiting for a suitable landing opportunity (the current orbiter has had to wait up to two days; it would have been far worse for the Faget orbiter).

And those are just the flaws we already know about: the real core of the "grass is always greener" fallacy is that we already know the weaknesses of the path we chose, but we never got far enough along the paths we didn't choose to see many of their weaknesses.

[Fequalsma]

Blackstar -

Here are the three pages you posted assembled
into one file.  Thanks for digging them up!

Cheers,
F=ma

Here are the first two pages of the David Baker article from 1974 (they have the weirdest software for archiving their old articles--you can download them only as single pages, and they don't make it obvious.  It's like software written by chipmunks.).

[Fequalsma]

Also, here's an interesting article about the technical
aspects of the shuttle tiles and their early problems.

F=ma

[Blackstar]

Thanks for assembling that.  I don't have the proper Acrobat software to do that myself (or maybe I have something on my iMac that I don't know about).

Baker's piece appears to have sunk without a trace back then.  The myth of low-cost shuttle launches persisted for many years.  The first several flights indicated that it was going to be a monster to service, however.  In fact, I think that the very first flight did a lot to persuade people working on it that it was not going to live up to the promises.  I forget the details, but they discovered the need to add a lot of ballast after that first flight and this chopped something like 5K pounds off the payload capability right from the start.

This whole issue of perceptions of shuttle's capabilities is something worth investigating.  When did people finally start to realize that shuttle was not going to live up to its promises?  And who?

[Blackstar]

Somehow I came across this article, not sure if it has been linked in here somewhere before but...

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/8004.easterbrook-fulltext.html

Okay, now back to the original post...

I read that article.  It's probably the first Gregg Easterbrook article about space that did not contain an egregious error (unless you want to count his claim that solid rocket motors can simply go out on their own).  After this, Easterbrook simply phoned it in with his space criticism.  More on that later. 

The article is pretty accurate at predicting all the problems with shuttle that would eventually crop up, and recounting all of those that already had.  As a matter of fact, by the time he wrote that, most of the shuttle's problems had been fixed and its development was nearing completion--except for the nasty problems encountered on the first flight.  You'll note that he quotes a shuttle official who claimed that first flight would occur by late 1980 or the first quarter of 1981.  It launched in April 1981, which was pretty close.  Of course, it was already several years behind schedule.

Easterbrook also conceded that if the shuttle did not cost significantly more than it already had, then its development costs could not be considered outrageous considering the difficulty of the task.  He was right.  There are lots of things that you can bash shuttle for, but its development costs were relatively good.  I think it was only about 20% over the estimate, which is pretty amazing considering the difficulty of the task, and pretty amazing when compared to so many other spacecraft (look at JWST and MSL, which are both significantly higher than their original estimates).

Easterbrook systematically demolished many claims for the shuttle:

-it would not be cheaper to fly
-it would not achieve the high flight rates forecast for it
-it would not be able to retrieve obsolete or broken comsats for refurbishments (ones at GEO)
-it would never fly a large number of Spacelab missions
etc.

He was right on virtually all accounts.  Of course, he was awfully snarky while making all of these points, but he was writing for Washington Monthly, not Aviation Week, and I suspect that he was a young journalist just feeling his oats in the post-Watergate years.

It's a pretty good article.  Very prescient.  More later.

[Blackstar]

Now here's something you might also find interesting: when Challenger blew up, all his colleagues looked at Easterbrook's article from six years earlier and considered him a genius.  From that point on, they declared Easterbrook a "space policy expert." 

After that, he would write articles about NASA every year or two and he would always bash the agency.  But I don't think that I've ever read an Easterbrook article that did not contain a major mistake or misunderstanding.  He was always rushing so fast to condemn NASA that he did not bother to check his facts, or didn't want the facts to get in the way of his story. 

Back when Columbia came apart he wrote an article for Time or Newsweek about the shuttle and he could barely contain his sneering.  The whole thing was along the lines of "See?  These NASA guys are a bunch of idiots, just like I said."  Considering how quickly the issue was produced, he must have written it the day of the accident, without doing any research.  Lots of journalists are forced to write on a short deadline, but this was just a case of Easterbrook reaching into his bag of NASA insults and grabbing a bunch.

Similarly, after Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration, he wrote a snotty piece attacking it.  He then did some "simple math" to come up with a high price tag.  I wrote a piece deconstructing his article, pointing out, for instance, that he double-counted $200 billion and then rounded up by another $200 billion to reach a trillion dollar price tag.  It was an amazing degree of sloppiness.

He doesn't write much about space anymore--once every couple of years--but when he does he still commits whoppers.  He wrote an article for Atlantic Monthly about asteroids last year, and it's pretty sloppy.  He's not the kind of journalist that people in the community take seriously, because they know that he's largely a hit and run artist.  He takes a shot and then goes on.  There are other reporters who spend a lot of time in this field who are better respected, and if they criticize NASA, they are taken more seriously.  Easterbrook is mostly a clown.

But this is a good article.  It's a shame that now, nearly 30 years later, he still has the snide attitude, but long ago lost the accuracy.

[Patchouli]

Oddly enough I feel if the shuttle were redesigned using the latest systems and TPS materials.
Well maybe a little smaller like the soviet LKS but not as small as that but the same shape etc as the present orbiters it would be a safe and affordable vehicle.

The STS stack it's self is probably now safer then Soyuz is even with an LAS.

 I severely doubt Ares I and Orion will be safer during their first 30 missions then the shuttle was before the Columbia accident.

Most of the issues now are with the aging 1970s plumbing and fragile TPS .
The SRBs are now well understood and the Ares team is completely insane to want totally redesign them .
The SSME is the most reliable liquid fueled rocket engine period.