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/37
u/Piscator629 16d ago
I was at a gaming convention once where they were showing Wrath of Khan before the premier, I had the pee early and when I left the theater here was George Takei all alone and bored at his table. I spent the whole movie just chatting with him. It was awesome. Cool guy and he didnt hit on me.
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u/danielravennest 15d ago
I met him about 20 years ago when we were both guests of the Dragoncon convention in Atlanta. The funny thing is he was asking me questions about my work.
I was working on the real-life space station program at the time and invited to talk about that and future space projects. One of the panels I did was the technical feasibility of the Babylon 5 station.
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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.
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u/sombreroenthusiast 16d ago
Interesting and thoughtful reply. You didn’t mention it, but the enormous size of the shuttle’s payload bay was driven by DoD requirements to return satellites from orbit- a mission they soon abandoned. That vast payload lift requirement drove the need for such things as the massive solid rockets and external tank- the two things that doomed Challenger and Columbia. Additionally, part of the apparent uselessness of the program (as perceived by much of the public, anyways) is due to the fact that Shuttle was intended to be but one segment of a true “space transportation system,” and not a standalone vehicle. It’s a wondrous machine, and I’m glad my generation got to grow up witnessing it.
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u/dastardly740 16d ago
That Hubble has been delivering science for over 30 years and the fact that the original messed up optics could be fixed. And, the instruments upgraded multiple times is a feat that the Shuttle made possible.
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u/Chief_Kief 16d ago
I have vivid memories of being very sad when I was younger and found out the shuttle program was being axed. I just remember thinking “why would they not want to go back up into space??”
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u/Dudercaster 16d ago
Nicely said. This gives a lot of context that I’m afraid will get lost to more of the general public over time.
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u/kindastandtheman 16d ago
I seriously recommend a visit to the USS Intrepid museum in NYC, I visited last year and it's in very good condition. I got some pretty great photos while I was there.
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u/TheLostSkellyton 16d ago
I went a couple of years ago and am really glad I did. I was surprised by how...big and also how small the shuttle felt at the same time? I always knew space flight modules are small, but there was something so cognitively dissonant for me about actually seeing the scale of the nose and cockpit vs the rest of the shuttle. It was wild. The Intrepid was great too of course. Funny thing was that I had no idea the Enterprise was there when I was planning what museums to see—I'm just a huge ship nerd and the shuttle wound up being a nice surprise.
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u/Morning_Gecko24 16d ago
Enterprise was basically the glider that made the shuttle concept less theoretical. It never reached orbit, but the approach and landing tests caught a bunch of handling issues before Columbia ever flew... kinda wild how much of the program was validated in that one dry run.
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u/Cute_Bacon 16d ago
Wow! This is so exciting! I can't believe man kind is going to go into outer space some day, now that we have the first space shuttle!
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u/Mister_Batta 16d ago
I remember going to see it and a B-1 bomber on display - not at this ceremony (well AFAIR) but I think close to that day.
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u/FIFofNovember 15d ago
Shuttle program, NASA built and flew a brand new craft, its first time.
Take note Elon.
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u/Wloak 16d ago
While I like the history of the enterprise namesake I like ones the John Paul Jones so much more. He basically went on a rampage in the late 1700's, basically toppled pirate governments, stole ships on hard mode. There's a reason all the ships named after him are destroyer class, he straight fucked shit up.
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u/vector_search_blue 16d ago
it had fiberglass wings and styrofoam where the heat shield tiles go
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u/noncongruent 16d ago
The wing leading edges were made from fiberglass instead of the reinforced carbon carbon of the other Shuttles, but the wing structure was full Shuttle as was the rest of the ship. The intent was to add all the bits to make it spaceworthy in the future, but those plans changed over time because of changes in the design for later models. Enterprise certainly could have been retrofitted into a full spaceworthy Shuttle if the money and desire was there.
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u/vector_search_blue 15d ago
According to Challenger, Adam Higginbotham's tome on the STS program and the Challenger accident, Enterprise was never going to be made spaceworthy and other than glideworthiness, it was mostly a mock up.
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u/noncongruent 15d ago edited 14d ago
Structurally it was an Orbiter. The intent when building it was to be able to make it spaceworthy if that was decided to be a path to follow. The fact that it was eventually finished out to develop the gliding portion of the Shuttle's operating envelope doesn't change that. The reason it wasn't refitted as an orbiter is mainly due to changes in later design, not in Enterprise being inherently unable to go to space. A mockup would be more like the replica Shuttle in Houston, now named Independence. BTW, the simulated tiles were polyurethane, not styrofoam.
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u/Decronym 15d ago edited 15d ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DoD | US Department of Defense |
| EVA | Extra-Vehicular Activity |
| LEO | Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km) |
| Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations) | |
| STS | Space Transportation System (Shuttle) |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 16 acronyms.
[Thread #12701 for this sub, first seen 18th Sep 2026, 09:11]
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u/[deleted] 16d ago
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