What Goes Around, Comes Around

[pmcray]

Check out this URL

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

Interesting article from 1980. Actually, the shuttle did recover at least one satellite if I remember correctly.

Comments

[lproven.livejournal.com]

And repaired the Hubble, and made the ISS possible.

But the Space Transportation System is, it must be admitted, a pale shadow of what it should have been, what it was meant to be. And I doubt they'll give the money now to build Shuttle II.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

It suffers from not really being one thing or another. It's a cold war relic at the end of the day. There's no point in having a vehicle to carry passengers which also has the payload capability of our largest unmanned vehicles. The problem was, without a space station, the shuttle has to do everything - and the USAF wanted it for spy ops.

They need a smaller vehicle for passenger runs.

Depends on perspective

[daveon.livejournal.com]

The Hubble "rescue" and servicing would have been impossible without the shuttle or similar. There was a satelitte rescue and re-deployment and also there was the long duration research platform which was deployed and recovered.

Apart from some hyperbole, much of what he said is pretty accurate - even now, looking at the "pesimistic" prediction of "only" 200 flights in 10 years. We've had 113 in 20 years.

[pmcray.livejournal.com]

Hubble was designed to be serviced by the shuttle. Interestingly, the Next Generation Space Telescope is to be in a much larger orbit and thus won't be serviceable.

One of the USAF requirements was that the shuttle had to be able to do single polar orbit put-ups out of Vandenberg and have enough lateral range to get back to Edwards. Of course, the shuttle was never launched from Vandenberg (Mark Wade suggests it would have been destroyed by the over-pressure generated in the launch silo), so that constraint placed unnecessary limits on the shuttle. I'm pretty sure there are no USAF flights anymore. I doubt there's much a spaceplane can do that U2s and Auroras plus drones can't do.