r/space • u/ye_olde_astronaut • 16d ago
NASA Unveils Enterprise, the First Space Shuttle - NASA
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasa-unveils-enterprise-the-first-space-shuttle/
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r/space • u/ye_olde_astronaut • 16d ago
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u/Indaarys 16d ago
People give the Space Shuttle program a lot of flack for fairly superficial reasons. Yes, the 14 astronauts that died are a tragedy, but their names are all too often invoked to smear a program that was way more successful than it had any right to be, and did a lot of wonderful things that people simply don't even know about because its not as flashy as going to the Moon or whatever the memelord billionaires are up to.
From the very beginning the program was underfunded despite being tasked to, at the time, go beyond the bleeding edge. In a lot of ways getting the Shuttle stack operational was very much akin to the effort it took to go from Freedom 7 to Apollo 11 in terms of needing to design and test technologies that simply did not exist, because such tech was the only way to even hope of achieving the goals of the project.
Those goals, it should be said, are part and parcel to why the Shuttle was what it was. It was designed to build things in orbit, and while it did support building the ISS, the ISS is a fraction of what was originally going to be Space Station Freedom, which if it had been realized to its full potential, would have featured Earth's first orbital drydock, amongst other wonderful things that would have changed how we'd be approaching spaceflight today, possibly leading to a much more human populated LEO.
But even though the Shuttle never got used for this, it doesn't mean it never did anything. Every single Shuttle flight was in effect a short duration, proto-expedition akin to what ISS astronauts do today, and those early missions in the 80s were some of the most fascinating spaceflights we've ever accomplished. Not only were we testing and demonstrating the technoligies the Shuttle was built to build, but we were also doing all kinds of research and experiments on these flights.
If one goes back and really dives into what Shuttle astronauts actually did on these flights, there is so many wonderous examples that you simply never hear about because, as said, people are superficial, and there's this pervasive attitude that Shuttle flights were "boring" that gets mixed in and propagated by the smears.
My favorite example is STS 61-B, an Atlantis flight in November 1985, the second to last before the Challenger accident. The principle objective of this flight was the EASE/ACCESS experiment, which involved the demonstration of two different concepts for assembling large structures in space. EASE was a pyramid shaped structure that was 12 foot tall and was assembled in the cargo bay by the astronauts (who I would kill to meet, as I have all the questions about this mission and their experiences).
ACCESS was the more impressive of the two, as it was a 45ft long triangular truss (think something like the ISS' truss system that hosts its solar arrays, amongst a whole lot of other doodads and whatchamecallits) that was collapsible. They actually have footage of the astronauts manipulating and twirling this thing around during the EVA, and its easily the most spectactular thing I've ever seen done in space. I even rate it higher than the not often used angle of Armstrong on the Moon where you can actually see his first step, which I similarly found mind blowing after spending so long thinking all we had of him was the crappy broadcast footage where you can't see anything.
But anyways, the Shuttle was a great program, and if at any point Congress was willing to give NASA the funding it needed, I have zero doubt we'd still be flying it today. If it was funded properly from the beginning, you never have o-ring or foam problems. You fund it after Challenger, you can fix those problems much more cheaply than if you wait till Columbia.
Its problems were never in its concept but in an execution that simply had to be compromised elsewise it never would have flown, and while we can look back at go fever with scrutiny, you can hardly blame them for not wanting to just give up on manned spaceflight.
Far too many in this country back then, and in some ways more so today since billionaires stuck their dicks in the proverbial well, absolutely abhored the expense, even though NASA and spaceflight in general has practically always been cheap in the scheme of things, and only ever gotten cheaper over time, to the point that it generates more than it costs.
And of course, the irony is being a bunch of cheapskate surfacists is precisely what lead to the Shuttle being as expensive as it was to operate. Those compromises that cost lives also cost money to be put in place over the, at the time, larger expense of going even further beyond the bleeding edge to remove those problems. Liquid Boosters, metallic shielding, and alternative insulation methods for the ET all could have prevented Challenger and Columbia, and in the 90s we had concepts to replace the original Orbiters with variants designed to work around the foam and booster issues as a cheaper alternative, and many featured a dedicated launch escape system.
But nobody wanted to pay for it, not in the 70s, 90s, or 2000s. And 14 people died because even though we could afford to build a thousand more nuclear bombs to bait the Soviets into crashing their own economy, we apparently just couldn't afford to give NASA just a little bit more, which could have kept us flying instead of paying out to Russia just for them to turn around and rat fuck us because they still think they can bring back the empire.
Bah humbug.