The Spruce Goose of Outer Space
Easterbrook, Gregg
The Spruce Goose of Outer Space by gregg Easterbrook would never fly again? How would we win battles with this plane-make the enemy die laughing? Couldn’t anybody see the aviator’s new clothes...
...Here the “economy” calculations reach escape velocity...
...The fact that Russian instruments would immediately identify the launch as that of an unarmed shuttle-or that we could notify them of the launch via Mailgram, at a fraction of the cost of a telegram or a Vandenberg base-was discounted...
...Some suspect the tile mounting is the least of Columbia’s difficulties...
...This orbiter would carry 65,000 pounds of cargo into a low orbit, stashing the goods in a 60-by-15-foot bay...
...December 1979...
...Delays, the least important problem, are the easiest to understand...
...What if a billiondollar spaceship wipes out on a “routine” mission “commuting” to space with some puny little satellite...
...Ten billion, it gasped-out of the question...
...The rockets it is supposed to replace have always been throw-away affairs for very pragmatic engineering reasons: the fiendish forces of space flight twist and sizzle machines into scrap...
...Budgets were drawn as if redesigns would never be needed, as if no contingencies would arise, as if 520-second engine tests could be conducted with 300-second tanks...
...Then the empty fuel tank would tumble away, to burn up in the atmosphere...
...These are the wild, uncharted rivers of space...
...In March 1979-with engines blowing up, pilots playing parcheesi to kill time, Columbia melting like an icicle in routine flight-NASA announced the first launch would be in December...
...The ground isn’t coming up...
...During development, it’s assumed that some engines will blow up...
...Not conducive to 55 reuses...
...No more zillion-dollar towers of power crumbling into ashes downrange over the Azores...
...Would you pull a billion-dollar spaceship under a rumbling stellar bowling ball that might come caroming into your ice-fragile tiles...
...Spyless Sky The original reason the shuttle was supposed to lift 65,000 pounds was to satisfy not commerce or science, but the Defense Department...
...Columbia has ejection seats like a jet fighter, but they’re useless during take-off...
...The worry runs deep enough that NASA investigated installing a crane assembly in Columbia so the crew could inspect and repair damaged tiles in space...
...It’s screaming and trembling, a vicious wounded animal...
...In this plan, the shuttle’s main part would be the “orbiter...
...and lack of work for the horse to do...
...It isn’t a “capsule,” as they called the Mercury orbiters, or a “module,” as they called the Apollo moon machine...
...Since then the outlook has brightened considerably...
...The shuttle’s promise of cheap “commuting to space” will finally be realized...
...The whole philosophy is that the shuttle is like a commercial airliner,” Day explains...
...The “true cost” of one flight of the shuttle thus approaches $40 million...
...Getting only a 30,000 payload from the shuttle is a giant step backward, compared to the Titan,” says Albert Cameron...
...Fixing them to the Columbia without breaking them is like trying to eat a bar of Bonomo Turkish Taffy without cracking it...
...It is not...
...NASA sources privately acknowledge that Columbia was taken to the Cape in unfinished condition partly for public-relations value-to make it appear that preparations were accelerat- ing...
...No alternative but to rely on an untested system...
...A third the price of those wasteful old throw-away rockets...
...NASA budgeted for only a couple of backup engines...
...Others are sent to nearly-as-high sun-synchronous orbits, where they follow the movements of the sun...
...According to the computers, as long as you can bring the shuttle back into the atmosphere, you can fly it to the airfield even if the tiles are damaged...
...And then there was this embarrassing snag that made checking their reliability all but impossible...
...The shuttle ship would be mounted piggyback on a cavernous 150-foot long fuel tank carrying the frigid liquid gases to power the shuttle’s main engines...
...well, there must be a reason or they wouldn’t build it, would they...
...The shuttle will be able to carry three Delta-class payloads,” says Chet Lee, the shuttle pricing director...
...Rockets are throwaway contraptions in part so that no one piece ever has to endure such a wild variety of conditions...
...cost overruns...
...Computers have never flown with the unpredictable combination of damaged tiles that a shuttle may experience...
...It was assumed by task group members that, once the shuttle was approved, somebody could devise some missions for it...
...Ice will form on the tank...
...NASA says three of them could go up on one shuttle-ride...
...Apollo went to the moon, came back, and dropped all its little manned modules into a target area about the size of Los Angeles International Airport...
...The entire vehicle, loaded, weighs 4.5 million pounds...
...Countdown is back to minus one year and holding...
...We wanted to have only miniscule involvement with the rocket concept in the future,’’ Day says...
...Take a Walk But we all know there’s something the shuttle can do that rockets can’t...
...Costs keep rising, like a rocket gushing flame and trembling to get off the pad...
...Communications satellites fit Columbia just perfectly...
...Former Apollo astronaut Richard Cooper doubts the computers know what they’re meeping about...
...Spacelab is a little workshop that rides in the shuttle bay...
...Nobody spent much time asking what it would do once it got up there...
...The failures, of course, are taking place on the test stand...
...That means it assumed everything would work the first time...
...All the things that you used to throw away and forget about now must be returned to earth, fixed, and cobbled together for another launch, Lee says the “true cost” of a launch is “about 25 percent” more than will be charged in the first three years...
...b) Nobody wants them back in the first More than two thirds of the satellites place...
...Spacelab is being built by the European Space Agency...
...But to require six shuttle launches a year, there would have to be 18 satellites...
...Period...
...It’s much cheaper to build a new one...
...Since Cape Kennedy could already accommodate more shuttle flights than were planned, it was hard for DOD to justify $4 billion to build and operate another base...
...If the beast is too badly wounded to land, but you can slow it down to a few hundred m.p.h...
...Getting there was all the fun...
...So once you get back into the atmosphere, the mad joyride begins...
...NASA has eliminated it, You have no choice but to launch on the shuttle, do you?’ Indeed, NASA has even eliminated the word “rocket...
...Simply and flatly, can’t...
...According to a GAO study, fully 75 percent of the shuttle program cost savings are based on Mathematica’s assumptions about how much we will benefit from recovering crippled satellites...
...You have to keep your pole a little shorter than everybody else’s,’’ says a NASA engineer...
...Then the shuttle must glide along, under control, at speeds up to Mach 25, three times faster than any other piloted aircraft has ever flown...
...Now you really have some options...
...But NASA had made its $5 billion to $6 billion projection based on “success-oriented planning...
...Turn Down the Volume What was the basis of Mathematica’s cost projections...
...I don’t think anybody appreciates the depths of the problems,” Kapryan says...
...Better be...
...But so far, according to Ed Fritz of GAO, only one American firm has shown any interest...
...The Spruce Goose of Outer Space by gregg Easterbrook would never fly again...
...Fitting under the shuttle’s fuel tank, it will generate enough thrust to lift an extra 10,000 to 20,000 pounds...
...One of the old throw-away jobs could go haywire, and spiral down into the ocean off the Bahamas, and everybody would feel miserable and millions would be wasted and everybody would go back to work...
...This is necessary, he maintains, to attract customers away from disposable rockets and into the shuttle...
...Intelsat, the international consortium that is the largest private space user (Comsat is part of it), plans to send up two satellites in the next three years, a spokesman says...
...No more throw-away hardware...
...Considering the ambitious nature of the shuttle program, the overruns are not unspeakable...
...Biting into the denser air, your elevators and speed brakes lend some control...
...If you plunk down $50 million or more, you could probably arrange to get a Titan 111, the rocket the Air Force uses to launch military satellites...
...And, in order to entice it, NASA has promised to foot the bill for the full cost of the test flight, Fritz says...
...The space shuttle is to the Apollo module what the DC-3 was to Wright’s flyer...
...then the shuttle snaps closed and brings the whole package back, to be outfitted for another flight...
...They may be able to lift 65,000 pounds...
...The spirit of ’75 is great for satellite customers, since the cost of regular rockets is inflating right along with the rest of reality...
...Meanwhile, will the interim step fly 20 times a year-a total of 200 times...
...They can be several hundred degrees hot on one side while remaining cool to the touch on the other...
...You can book Columbia for $22.4 million, Lee says...
...If a booster shuts down, there will be 2.5 million pounds of thrust on one side battling zero pounds on the other...
...sometimes, it can’t launch as much...
...enough said...
...Fighter planes-“chase planes”-have picked you up...
...NASA likes to give the impression ESA is paying for all its flights...
...Everybody wrote it down...
...NASA officials won’t be too upset if it doesn’t fly next year eitherbecause when you’re not launching them, you don’t have to explain awkward things like higher costs and lower payloads...
...During ascent, the shuttle must withstand 3 Gs of stress-inertial drag equivalent to three times its own weight...
...Instead, it arrived at the Cape only 75 percent complete, according to NASA...
...It has no scientific value...
...Mathematica assumed there would be 20 flights a year for something called Spacelab...
...Now you have one and only one chance to lower the landing gear...
...It can’t keep a space station aloft even a fraction as long as Skylab stayed up there...
...A rocket can be permitted to fail...
...They would blast off together, with the larger ship-the booster-spitting fire for the first 10 to 20 miles of altitude...
...Roy Day, now a top official for the shuttle program, was pulled off Apollo to help NASA order its options...
...But as time went on, DOD began to perceive that Columbia couldn’t even come close...
...To launch three Deltaclass payloads on Deltas would cost three times $23 million-$69 million...
...A shuttle has little maneuvering power...
...Crack...
...Originally the plans called for a couple of regular jet engines to give you enough power to maneuver, or maybe go around for a second approach if the first one doesn’t line up right...
...Economy at any Price Walk into NASA headquarters with a long enough line of credit, and you can buy yourself the top floor of a rocket...
...To assume that experience with one is the same as experience with the other is to confuse a slingshot with a seagull...
...And, according to The Washington Monthly’s sources, flying the shuttle will cost more, not less, than flying those old disposable rockets...
...The technological precision of Apollo was nothing short of remarkable...
...The tiles are the long pole holding up the tent,” says Mike Malkin, NASA’s shuttle project director...
...If there aren’t 50 flights a year, the cost of each flight shoots up from the projected “true” cost of $40 million...
...Arc lights gleam off its impossibly smooth surface...
...Weight a Minute...
...delays and failures are perfectly normal...
...By 80,000 feet, they’ve shut off, and you’re gliding...
...You’ve probably heard, for instance, that the space shuttle will retrieve damaged satellites and return them to earth for repair...
...The move also allows Computertesting to proceed while the tiles are being mounted...
...pushing them to the limit is part of testing...
...Every pound added to the shuttle is a pound subtracted from the payload...
...and an enormous amount of weight and equipment devoted to bringing them, and an empty cargo bay, back in one piece...
...But Apollo modules were ballistic projectiles...
...Columbia and Challenger, the second shuttle, are turning out to weigh much more than planned...
...At an altitude of 20 miles, the spent boosters would fall away, floating down on parachutes...
...At this low speed and altitude, you could punch out safely...
...Is the hull intact...
...They shine roundthe- clock, as 500 technicians work double ten-hour shifts, six days a week, trying to make the shuttle spaceworthy...
...tape and electrical connections began flapping everywhere...
...Doesn’t sound like much...
...It will blast into space like a rocket, and sail back like an airplane...
...Compared to this, the shuttle looks like a fire sale...
...The payoff is not in dollars, but in flexibility and expanded horizons...
...But let’s not worry about the tiles...
...They didn’t talk much about “expanded horizons” back in 1972 when NASA was selling the shuttle as an economy move...
...To truly grasp the challenge of building a space shuttle, think about its flight...
...Let’s hope not...
...Meanwhile, petting the animal became an obsession...
...This exercise may have been practical, but it was staggering in cost: $50 million extra to attach the tiles at the Cape, according to congressional sources...
...The tug proposal has been killed...
...It can’t launch more than they can...
...Discovery and Atlantis, the third and fourth shuttles, are slated to have stronger tiles and lighter components...
...The 65,000-pound payload is being quietly dropped, too...
...This was to be a robot rocket vehicle of some kind, assembled in space and left there...
...In return for accepting this fiscal hardship, the company gets the patent rights to anything it might develop...
...The analysts assumed that the shuttle fleet would stage at least 50 flights a year...
...If it really costs $ I3 billion, that’s within reason...
...You have no power now, the engines are spent and switched out...
...Pilots have to crawl in and light the candle and go...
...It would be flown by a crew of two to Seven astronauts...
...Cryogenic engines can achieve the impossible dream-combustion efficiency of 99 percent...
...The promised $5 billion inflates to about $8 billion today...
...If you want one of these rides, sign up now, because NASA plans to terminate all throw-away rocket launches as soon as the shuttle is working...
...By the mid-l980s,” says Defense Secretary Brown, “we will be almost totally dependent on the shuttle for our national security space missions...
...The shuttle’s own engines would keep firing until, nine minutes after launch, their fuel was exhausted...
...NASA is using the conventional business technique of a loss-leader...
...they sail around doing experiments...
...The “thrust package” will be an abbreviated first stage of a Titan rocket-two motors and four fuel tanks...
...The task group members reasoned that a reusable space shuttle would be the logical first step to prepare for a space station...
...You didn’t have to spend $13 billion to develop them...
...Commercial rocket launches, by law, must be financially selfsupporting...
...Locked...
...I can’t imagine what for,” says Albert Cameron, a Harvard physicist who is chairman of the Space Science Board of the National Academy of Science...
...Not so...
...Many of the projections are based on the magnificent accuracy of the Apollo landings...
...If they fail, the shuttle burns on reentry...
...Russia might interpret a burning fuel tank as a nuclear attack, the Chiefs warned...
...NASA says it will turn this ship around and have it flying again in two weeks-only 96 of those hours for “safing” and refitting...
...Money is also being shifted from other NASA projects, mainly planetary probes that are interesting but lack immediacy, and from construction of the other three shuttles, into patching Columbia...
...Couldn’t anybody see the aviator’s new clothes were not clothes at all...
...It’s gettingcloser and closer to the $69-million cost of using three Deltas, the throw-away equivalent of a shuttle...
...Routinely, the shuttle will fly to 200 miles and release a satellite mounted on the IUS booster, or a smaller booster called a SUS (for Spinning Upper Stage...
...Solid rockets can fail in two ways...
...Will Spacelab be used 20 times a year...
...Then it asked for another $185 million, and got that...
...But it’s got the fuel...
...Once there, it is beyond the shuttle’s reach...
...Suppose one of the shuttle’s three main engines fails...
...The good part is that Congress throws you money, hoping you will come out...
...That’s what they say...
...What could you do, OMB asked, for $5 billion...
...If money is no object, as it usually isn’t in space launches, we can pay more for reusable shuttles than for throw-away rockets if we have to...
...You have a fighting chance...
...The 1975 estimate inflates to about $32 million today-still cheaper than our three Deltas...
...Seems odd, since NASA would only be stealing customers frpm itself...
...The shuttle’s design goal is to take this nightmare ride 100 times...
...They can explode...
...A Flooded Basement There’s good and there’s bad to being stuck under the tent...
...Because of the delays, DOD has ordered six more Titan 111s to ensure launch capacity for the next two years’ worth of spy satellites...
...Would it stand for spending millions to train astronauts to be truck drivers, only to lose truck and drivers both...
...There’s something heavier, too...
...If enough fall off, the shuttle may become unstable during landing, and thus un-pilotable...
...Meanwhile, remember the Titan 111, lifting 29,000 pounds for about $50 million...
...For a time, engine progress looked so bleak that Congress convened a panel of National Academy of Science members to decide if the motors would ever work...
...One percent comes to 45,000 pounds...
...But those rockets are already developed...
...If the gear don’t lock, that’s it...
...A single Mars flight, requiring a nuclear-propelled spaceship traveling for years, was pegged at $100 billion...
...This doesn’t dampen DODs enthusiasm for the shuttle project...
...Surely you remember that fabled day in 1926 when Robert Goddard, father of modern rocketry, lit off the first liquidfueled rocket engine, sending a device the size and shape of a coat tree screaming into the low clouds over Auburn, Massachussetts...
...A Horse by Committee NASA longed to abandon the familiar one-shot rocket-whose stages, once fired, went tumbling into the sea or burned up, taking their titanium castings and navigational computers with them...
...This was a triumph of accurate simulation, but otherwise not amusing...
...The shuttle starts rubbing air at Mach 25-25 times the speed of sound...
...A cluster of three shuttle engines had just caught fire at NASA’s test stand, a scant nine seconds into a test...
...You’re locked in, wherever you’re going...
...But there are only 15 runways and lake beds in the world where you can land, so don’t get carried away...
...Let’s take a closer look at the numbers...
...They make the rest of the project look good by comparison...
...There was so much damage to Columbia after 17 minutes in the air-a Sunday afternoon stroll disabling a spaceship!-that it took a week to get her ready to go up again...
...That means there is no back-up for them...
...Flying and refitting the shuttle+ven assuming all goes well-will be more expensive than predicted...
...Beyond that, however, no more Titan production is planned, according to Jack Boyd of Martin-Marietta, the rocket’s builder...
...So on a fine morning in March 1979- with engines blowing up, pilots playing parcheesi to pass the time, Columbia melting like an icicle in routine flight- NASA announced that the first shuttle launch would be December 1979...
...Did all that stress-stress that would have twisted any other flying machine into a croissant-pop off any of your tiles...
...These are “safe life” numbers...
...Cross-range maneuvering is no longer possible by 50,000 feet...
...It’s a spaceship, designed to be used over and over again, instead of thrown away like a rocket...
...That means, for instance, three communications satellites and the extra boosters needed to push them to high orbits...
...doesn’t work...
...The inch-thick tiles, made of pyrolized carbon, are amazing in two respects...
...You’ll notice that NASAalways says the first shuttle will launch within the year,” says Dr...
...Better keep a close eye on that cost-rocket...
...So how was $22.4 million arrived at...
...Two a year...
...The booster then blasts the satellite out to its final destination...
...Not ridden by strapped-down guinea pigs like those capsules and modules, but flown by pilots...
...Barring some extraordinary breakthrough in technology,” says an informed communications industry source, “that’s inconceivable...
...At one point in 1976, NASA was projecting 75 flights a year...
...The act of firing does such violence to the rocket engine, immolating and warping its components, it’s impractical to use again even if you can get it back...
...Bolts and hoses fastened, the shuttle spaceship, its fuel tank, and the boosters would blast off together from Cape Kennedy, a tremendous troika of power...
...Grumman and McDonnell-Douglas came up with a plan that called for two huge winged ships, each with its own pilots and engines, mated piggyback...
...Even Lord acknowledges that the applications of Spacelab are limited: “It’s really an interim step, to demonstrate to the world that a permanent space station is a worthwhile idea...
...You can still maneuver “cross range”-several hundred miles north or south relative to your approach from the west...
...That’s the section that gets a name, like Columbia...
...the rest of the time they would pretty much watch the instruments...
...Despite these problems-which have been widely discussed in the trade press since as early as 1977-NASA made routine announcements that a launch was right around the corner...
...DOD was brought into the shuttle planning because they wanted something big with a lot of payload,” Doug Lord explains...
...Planetary missions were rejected as technically feasible but absurdly expensive...
...Suppose one of the solid-fueled boosters fails...
...A billion-dollar ship, and this is how they were cutting costs...
...DODs chief concern was being able to launch south over the poles, where sunsynchronous orbits are available...
...NASA has repeatedly noted that there will be no attempt to recover-amortize, you might say-the development cost of the “cheaper” shuttle...
...Plan B is burn up coming back...
...But something doesn’t look right about the astronaut’s new clothes, either...
...So it was important to project lots of flights...
...You can hardly do it on the ground...
...Would it fork over ancther billion dollars to build a replacement...
...Because the earth spins west to east, rockets launching east get a boost from the earth’s own momentum...
...As with any volume merchandising, the more flights there are, the lower the cost of each individual flight...
...Less, that is, until you remember that the Deltas were already around...
...Punching out at several thousand m.p.h...
...Sitting around waiting for new engine parts to be built can cost the program up to $7.5 million a day in idle facilities and personnel, Cassidy saysmuch more than what would have been spent had the costs been predicted honestly in the first place...
...Then, fuel spent, it would circle back to land like an airplane...
...The number has been dropping steadily since, and now stands at “around 40 to 50 flights a year,” Lee says...
...They are: delays...
...It can’t bring back satellites...
...It’s cold enough to embrittle and shatter most materials...
...What it would do was...
...To be “success-oriented,” NASA decided to test shuttle components only after assembling them together, instead of individually as had been the case with all previous spacecraft...
...The space station sparked a lot of interest, but it too was overwhelmingly expensive...
...It was supposed to be able to carry 65,000 pounds into a low orbit, launching due-east...
...Even a split second of this imbalance will send the ship twisting into oblivion, overriding any application of pilot skill...
...Columbia was supposed to be finished last March, when it was transferred from the factory of the prime contractor, Rockwell International...
...So how many shuttle flights a year seem reasonable...
...Most of the technicians swarming over Columbia are trying to glue down tiles...
...So now we’re throwing money at it,” former NASA official Gray declared...
...But this doesn’t guarantee that Columbia will be able to cope with them...
...In a complex technological project, very little works at first...
...The money you pay is “total cost incurred”- NASA’s price for everything associated with the launch, covering the rocket itself, the fuel, the command personnel to fire it, and the guys who sweep up the pad afterwards...
...Fine-if you don’t mind paying more for a “cheap” launch than for rockets you throw away...
...The agency explained that having a crew of pilots aboard would add “flexibility” and “new dimensions” to space flight, but otherwise NASA wasn’t terribly specific about what the astronauts would do...
...A shuttle launching 65,000 pounds due-east was supposed to have enough energy to lift 40,000 pounds over the poles...
...If you get twisted back around toward the Cape...
...It started selling contracts for shuttle launches at $22.4 million per, for the first three years of flight-a guaranteed price with no escalator for inflation...
...Then, using the throttles on the remaining engines, you try to turn the beast around...
...Whack...
...But the question never answered is-what will the shuttle do that rockets couldn’t do...
...During blast-off, unlike those capsules and modules with escape rockets to pull the pilots free in case of trouble, there is no way out of the shuttle...
...Now, let’s check...
...Feels like a dive bomber...
...Some space venture had to be found to succeed Apollo...
...The shuttle can recover damaged satellites...
...Wonder if the Russians have one of those...
...The big jet hastily banked back to the field and rolled to a stop...
...Just the air rushing by and the computers meeping to each other...
...The instant the 747 nosed off the field, Columbia began to rattle itself to pieces...
...For what...
...some prankster from Hell is throwing it at you...
...In 1975, NASA froze that number...
...Considering what the Columbia is supposed to do, it’s no surprise that it didn’t fly in 1977, or in 1978, or in 1979, and can’t fly now...
...Good thing you didn’t have to punch out...
...If you haven’t heard this, don’t be surprised...
...Down at Cape Kennedy the National Aeronautics and Space Administration‘ is tinkering with the champion, the $1 billion, 2,300- ton space shuttle Columbia...
...Waning Moon Even as the Apollo 11 moonship was being primed for what President Nixon called ‘‘the most important event since Creation”-the August 1969 moon landing- plans for a space shuttle were being drafted...
...The routine came close to slapstick comedy in March 1979...
...Now you have company...
...This January it asked for still another $300 million extra...
...The moonbase was nixed as useless...
...Until recently, the shuttle program had an admirable record for cost control...
...History will record that there were no rolled eyes in Congress, no catcalls and guffaws at press conferences, no panic on the floor at Lloyd’s of London...
...Rocket engines are essentially explosions with a hole at one end...
...Since it’s only a tank, NASA reasoned, it’s cheaper to let it fry than bolt on all the navigational and heat-shielding hardware needed to get it back...
...A special White House “task group” was formed to select the next program...
...Suddenly a shuttle launch costs $66 million-just about the same as three Deltas...
...Hope the rubber in those tires didn’t blow from that long cold soak...
...Especially, Weekly adds, since the cost of a new satellite-now running $20 million to $40 million-is likely to be less than the cost of sending a repairman after an old one...
...It would be a winged rocket-powered flying machine about the size and weight of a DC-9 airliner...
...All the evidence is that “true” costs will be high indeed...
...It’s supposed to build a small rocket booster, the Inertial Upper Stage (IUS), to ride in the shuttle bay...
...In 1979 NASA asked for, and got, a $220 million supplemental appropriation for Columbia...
...But you’re in luck-the launch goes fine...
...It’s silent in the ship...
...No time to cycle them...
...So insulation was added to the tank...
...Everybody wrote it down...
...No one is certain when-or even if-the remaining work will be finished...
...Their motors would be the fiercest ever imaginedgenerating 2.5 million pounds of thrust each, as opposed to 470,000 pounds for each of the shuttle’s three main engines...
...But if it didn’t, thedamn thing had to be torn down and tested from scratch...
...Pole Sitting Down at Cape Kennedy, Columbia lies in an assembly hangar, imprisoned in scaffolding...
...Down at 220 m.p.h...
...Launching north or south to reach polar orbits bucks the spin...
...Only a few more seconds...
...you blow the fuel tank off and glide home...
...But the shuttle engines often start flaming under normal operational conditions...
...The craft itself would have no scientific function...
...The shuttle would go about its business in orbit...
...Just after the engineers managed to get single engines to fire properly for the full duration, for instance, they tried to fire three simultaneously, as would be required during a launch...
...This is the official rationalization of the official contention that the shuttle will be cheaper...
...Of course, NASA planners knew everything would not work the first time...
...But the Joint Chiefs of Staff pointed out that, after a polar launch from Cape Kennedy, the empty fuel tank would tumble away and burn up in the skies over Russia...
...Cooper fears it might drive a stake through the heart of the manned space program...
...It goes like this...
...NASA planned the first launch for 1977...
...The satellite communications business is expanding, with RCA, Western Union, AT&T, and SBS (a venture of IBM, Aetna, and Comsat) planning to enter...
...The cost-cutting plan says NASA will have to replace only 1.4 percent of them after each flight...
...There’s that damn fuel tank hanging there, and it has all the aerodynamic grace of the Temple of Karnak...
...Nobody launches west...
...It was assumed that with the horse under construction some carriage-maker would build something for it to pull-a space mission only a shuttle could handle...
...When it wasn’t, the work had to be resumed at the Cape...
...NASA will pay for everything after the second Spacelab cruise, Doug Lord, the Spacelab director, notes...
...When they started blowing up, as every engineer knew they wouldwanted them to!-the scheduling went berserk...
...They’re swarming all around you, snooping around the hull for damage...
...How many communications satellites are now being launched...
...The science of ballistics is much more precise and predictable than the art of flying...
...Columbia is to be powered by the first large, high-performance “cryogenic” rocket engine, burning liquid hydrogen for fuel instead of kerosene...
...The partially finished Columbia was mounted on the back of its 747 ferry plane for the flight to Cape Kennedy...
...Add that to the $40- million “true cost” of a launch...
...This is a widely publicized aspect of shuttle mythology-grabbing and returning to earth a satellite that has worn out or broken down, so that it can be repaired and returned to orbit later...
...The shuttle would bring it fuel and satellites to move around...
...But NASA says the shuttle is still a bargain, payload for payload...
...After a polar launch from Vandenberg, it would not...
...It was assumed from the start that we needed some sort of manned mission,” Day explains...
...Tiles flew off...
...After landing it would be refitted, mated to a new tank, strapped to two refilled boosters, and blasted off again...
...A partially reusable shuttle was conceived...
...But the shuttle’s cryogenic engines have the annoying habit of blowing up...
...NASA administrator Robert Frosch says Columbia will fly “between late 1980 and the first quarter of 1981...
...Suddenly the total cost of a shuttle flight becomes $105 million-almost twice the cost of three of those wasteful Delta rockets...
...The most we ever did for Apollo was a little patch-wiring...
...Say you add one percent...
...Now, suppose the shuttles fly only the pessimistic 200 flights...
...Those insatiable trolls would burn through their fuel in scarcely a moment...
...They snoop around the landing gear...
...At that speed you can eject...
...You bounce along, you roll to a stop...
...With each vehicle having a IO-year life, that meant at least 500 flights over a 10-to-12-year period...
...Tumbles into the ocean like those despised old rockets...
...The tug would take a new satellite out to high orbit, then go find a damaged one and tow it back down to the shuttle...
...The external fuel tank, for instance, is full of oxygen and hydrogen cooled to -4OOOF...
...If the bundle worked, great...
...Yet Secretary of Defense Harold Brown recently assured Congress that IUS is not a problembecause of “revised operational requirements and shuttle program delays...
...NASA acknowledges that the shuttle wouldn’t even try to recover an unstable satellite...
...During reentry, the ship’s skin goes from cold soak to 2,700’ F., hot enough to transform many metals into Silly Putty...
...But it’s a moot point now to argue about the practical virtues of the rocket...
...But even then they may exceed its grasp...
...If the slab of rushing air doesn’t kill you, the engine exhaust flames will...
...Meanwhile, down at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, astronaut preparation was months behind even the short-pole schedule...
...When Columbia’s tiles started popping off in a stiff breeze, it occurred to engineers that ice chunks from the tank would crash into the tiles during the sonic chaos of launch: Goodbye, Columbia...
...At 250,000 feet, you have a little control with the reaction thrusters...
...The like-sized DC-9 lands, with power, at 130 m.p.h...
...They’re certainly spending enough time on them...
...Asked about the supposed bargain basement approach of “success-oriented” planning, Richard Cooper observes “Some basements get flooded...
...because 46 as far as we know, the Russians have nothing like it...
...It’ll hit $16.5 billion if you figure in NASA salaries and construction of a second shuttle launch base for the military at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California...
...NASA believed this system would be economical to operate, but would cost $10 billion to build...
...Then we’ll know...
...It’s based on conventional throw-away technology and should be the easiest part of the project, but it’s two years behind schedule and $144 million over budget...
...or, at last resort, the shuttle only...
...Much cheaper than rockets, much more versatile, it is the key to the next phase of space exploration...
...DOD plans to launch all its military spy satellites on the shuttle, using NASA tracking facilities and astronauts...
...Verdict: Can’t be done...
...The agency hoped that companies would sign up for space manufacturing tests-the search for the fabled flawless ball bearing...
...But to help the shuttle win budget approval, NASA estimated costs as if there would be no problems, according to Dan Cassidy of the House subcommittee that oversees space projects...
...I call this a ’one year and holding’ countdown...
...beyond programming...
...The engines have been fired in unison several times...
...They did talk about flexibility, though, because the shuttle payload would be greater than the other rockets...
...Back in 1972, when shuttle designs were still on the table, a consulting company called Mathematica did some cost-benefit studies for the project...
...But more important, if it does fly, it won’t do anything those old throw-away rockets couldn’t do...
...But they’re also a bit of a letdown in another respect-they’re so fragile you can hardly touch them without shattering them...
...It is believed the Klingons have nothing like it, either...
...Like most mythology, the “retrieve and return” business has a basis in fact...
...A couple of guys who ought to know better have to wrestle with that stick and call out the numbers and write when they get there...
...The chase planes are coming right down to the strip with you, following your every move like baby ducks...
...The only problems are: (a) The shuttle can’t retrieve satellites...
...The main cause of delay is currently the shuttle’s refractory tiles, which disperse the heat of reentry from the ship’s nose and fuselage...
...Didn’t quite make it that year, and won’t this year...
...they can be used indefinitely...
...its builders and astronauts accomplished more than even the most optimistic among them predicted...
...In orbit, the shuttle will drift through -250’ F. vacuum, what engineers call the “cold soak...
...The tiles are the most important system NASA has ever designed as “safe life...
...scientists crawl from the cabin into Spacelab...
...But there would be people in control-a concept popular with people, who seem to be less in control of things with every passing day...
...What could it grab hold of...
...Unknown...
...After summarily dismissing less-expensive but less-glamorous mechanized space exploration (see “Battlestar Bureauctica” on page 42), NASA devised these possibilities: a manned landing on Mars...
...NASA is adjusting for this by launching satellites worth recovering-$ 90-million spy-eyes and telescope- observatory satellites-into paths the shuttle will cross...
...Once you get into space, you check to see if any tiles are damaged...
...You blow the boosters off...
...Of course, it once cost money to develop the Delta and the Titan and what all, and that money is not amortized to each flight...
...And NASA wants you to remember all the money we’ll save when Columbia flies...
...Although the engines must fire for 520 seconds during a shuttle flight, Rockwell’s test stand held only enough fuel for 300 seconds...
...They do not boil away like the ablative heat shieldings of capsules and modules...
...For the first three years of shuttle flights, Lee says, “We’ll make no attempt to recover all of our direct operational costs...
...Apollo cost $20 billion...
...unknowable...
...Exploding gases roar out the hole, shoving the rocket in the opposite direction...
...Right...
...A communications satellite has absolutely no salvage value,” says Larry Weekly, spokesman for SBS, Inc...
...What if a billion dollar spaceship wipes out on a ‘routine’ mission ‘commuting’ to space with some puny little satellite...
...To find out if your ship can cope with them, you have to take it up there...
...That’s all you pay...
...The Office of Management and Budget balked...
...But while thermal cladding solves the ice problem, it adds weight...
...The shuttle goes up and opens its doors...
...Columbia is the first of at least four space shuttles...
...That money’s already spent...
...James Gehrig, staff director of the Senate Commerce Committee’s space and science subcommittee, sums up the two features that shuttle backers have cited again and again: its “wonderful advantages of higher payloads and lower costs...
...a permanent orbiting space station, with a shuttle vehicle to supply it...
...By spring of 1969, Apollo’s impending success seemed assured...
...Lost it, dammit-but then nobody ever expected it back...
...If it turns out they work, they will take their rightful place among the premier achievements of modern engineering (see “Because Out There is There” on page 49...
...You Only Go Around Once The shuttle is the first space vehicle that can’t be test-fired unmanned, Cooper points out...
...The progress of high technology and national prestige demanded it...
...Once those things get moving, they really pick up speed fast...
...ESA is paying for its first flight...
...Problems involving tiles continue, with residual doubt about “whether they can be relied on at all,” according to the General Accounting Office...
...Those regular rockets the space shuttle is supposed to replace have been throw-away affairs for pragmatic engineering reasons: the fiendish forces of space flight twist and sizzle machines into scrap...
...Suppose the shuttles fly 500 sorties, as predicted, and cost $13 billion to build...
...All this mounting was supposed to be finished before Columbia left Rockwell’s factory...
...How could it...
...Would the public stand to lose a quarter of the fleet in a single day...
...The shuttle was to be nothing more than that-a space truck to lug things back and forth to orbit...
...Ditch it and you’ve got no engines...
...It just has men in the front seats...
...The Saturn V moon rocket, for example, weighed 3,050 tons at blast-off, and you got exactly seven tons back-that dinky little “command module” the men rode in...
...The reason...
...In such orbits, a spy satellite’s cameras see the same sun conditions every day...
...While all five engines are screaming, there will be acoustic vibrations reaching 167 decibels, enough to kill an unprotected person...
...Also listed in the calculation are six flights a year for communications satellites, like those made famous by Comsat, Inc...
...Thirty seconds out, you can raise the nose back up...
...The plan is, you die...
...The drydocked Columbia represents at once all the shuttle program’s problems...
...Lacking main-engine fuel, it would employ two small reaction rockets for maneuverability and to slow it down for reentry...
...Nose down at 24 degrees to the horizon, 30 degrees in some flights...
...the men are there to ride the thing back to the barn, and the horse has to be big and powerful and expensive because it carries men...
...If not, the chase pilots have a couple seconds to tell you to bail out...
...Mathematica estimated that, under certain conditions, an individual shuttle flight would have a direct cost (fuel, command salaries, sweeping the pad) of $22.4 million...
...When satellites get into trouble, they often suffer loss of stabilitythe gyros fail and the little robot starts tumbling wildly...
...There were no guffaws...
...That’s why everybody likes to be under the tent of tile delays...
...When something is 22,000 miles away, getting 200 miles closer isn’t much of a help...
...They’ve never bounced like a twig on the crazy rapids of “bias”-the bland physics term for unexplained variations in the earth’s gravitational and magnetic fields...
...You get one shot at a landing...
...But it’s still less than $69 million for those three Deltas...
...Not a chance,” says an informed NASA source...
...The investment cost leaps to $65 million per flight...
...The smaller ship would continue into orbit, drop its cargo, reenter the atmosphere, and also land like a plane...
...The Air Force, a partner in the shuttle project, is happy to be there under the tent...
...All three blew up...
...basically, it can only intercept things in its launch path...
...They’ve never been whacked by a sudden, nonprogrammed gust of jetstream wind...
...The Chiefs prevailed...
...a permanent moonbase...
...Much of what’s wrong with the shuttle will someday be fixed...
...The ship includes a 60-by-15-foot open space, narrow wings, and a large cabin where men must be provided that delicately slender range of temperatures and pressures they can endure...
...So DOD got funds to build a “thrust augmentation package”-yet another set of engines to be strapped to the shuttle conglomeration...
...What happens to the cost of shuttle flights at the end of three years...
...The schedule couldn’t possibly have been met...
...Flown during landing, at least...
...Once back in the air, it would glide toward a landing field, setting down like an airplane but “deadstick”-without any power to compensate for miscalculations...
...being launched are sent out to geosynchronous orbits-22,000 miles up, where, relative to a spot on the rotating earth, they hang in the same place all the time...
...Estimating a cost of $5 billion to $6 billion, NASA got its launch-commit for this design in 1972...
...Gettingit up there was the drama...
...The only way to find out about something as big and balky as Columbia, Cooper says, is to launch the thing and see what happens...
...Some satellites are parked in low orbits, within Columbia’s reach...
...The cost is $10 million a shot, NASA says-there go those costs, picking up speed again-and it will not be reusable...
...It would be “the dawn of a new age” (Nixon), a “breakthrough” (Ford), the first “commuting to space” (Carter...
...Every year NASA sticks it back in the budget under a different name, and every year it gets killed again...
...A Titan 111, the Clydesdale of space horses, will heave 29,000 pounds into due-east, low orbit...
...The tiles break so often, and must be remolded so painstakingly, the installation rate is currently one tile per technician per week...
...The tiles should be okay...
...The Columbia has yet to fly, It’s several years behind schedule, with no imminent prospect, despite official assurances, that it will fly at all...
...It’s right here in the cost-cutting plan, right under “C”-“Commuting to space...
...At first NASA asked for an all-reusable shuttle...
...That’s almost all of the payload...
...Its components would be so heavy, NASA’s entire budget would be required to pay for the launch rockets-to say nothing, as space proponents are wont to do, of building or servicing it...
...Design of the horse was referred to committee, where a compromise was found...
...With a fleet of these...
...It gets killed because people don’t want their satellites back...
...Here’s the plan...
...For $33 million, you can get the more powerful Atlas-Centaur, which could kick a small payload out of earth orbit altogether...
...Without DOD, there would have been no reason to make the shuttle so big...
...It’s a horse trained to gallop in a circle...
...By the time all four shuttles are built, the bill for development and manufacture will come to $13 billion, GAO estimates...
...We’ve had to put up what amounts to a manufacturing facility there,” says Walter Kapryan, who retired as the Cape’s shuttle project director last spring...
...Air Force Secretary Hans Mark recently told Congress: “It is important to exploit the shuttle...
...That DC-9, the one that makes 48 your knuckles white on commercial flights, comes in at three degrees...
...But jet engines got killed in the cost-cutting...
...Then our direct-launch price will go up to reflect true costs,” Lee says...
...Sounds fine...
...For $23 million, for instance, you can buy the services of a Delta, a rocket that will toss 2,750 pounds of whatever you have into the 22,000-mile geosynchronous orbit used by communications satellites...
...IUS will float away from the shuttle and fire satellites into the high altitudes that shuttles can’t reach...
...Maybe 20, insiders say, with the largest share devoted to launching defense satellites...
...Only Columbia will have ejection seats...
...We’ll be lucky if we hit 30,000 due-east,” says Kaplan...
...That works out to an investment cost of $26 million per flight...
...Jack Mahon, NASA’s Expendable Launch Director, says they are now called “ELVs”-Expendable Launch Vehicles...
...Strapped to it would be two booster rockets, powered by reliable solid fuel...
...The Spruce Goose remains today in the hangar where it came to rest 33 years ago...
...But even NASA officials had to admit that being on the moon didn’t amount to much...
...They would be fished out of the sea and used again...
...The highest it could reach, unloaded, would be 600 miles...
...After all, reporters clustered around Howard Hughes for years, begging to know when the Spruce Goose would fly and scribbling down the predicted dates...
...The shuttle’s main engine is also lurking under the tent...
...Or they can shut down spontaneously...
...performance underruns...
...There is something noteworthy a rocket can do that the shuttle cannot...
...Suddenly, like a rocket veering off course, NASA’s numbers are shaking...
...They almost never fail, and by the time they wear out, after seven to ten years, they’re obsolete...
...First you have to get the horse,” said Dr...
...Scotty, Beam Us Out Technical problems are just that: technical...
...The shuttle, on the other hand, orbits at 200 miles...
...People don’t appreciate that the shuttle, as a technical goal, is much more ambitious than the moon program,” says Eugene Covert, an MIT professor and rocket-propulsion expert...
...The duration of the flight is so short,” he explained, pointing out that it will ordinarily last only four to seven days, “there’s way too little time to carry out any meaningful experiments...
...They were slightly asymmetrical and thus had a little lift for control, but basically they fell like well-aimed stones...
...Cape Kennedy observers say the “back end” of that schedule is “possible...
...Remember how he called to his wife, “Come quick, dear, I’ve invented the expendable launch vehicle...
...The prospect makes the old rockets seem kind of nice...
...Jerry Gray, former NASA scientist and now public policy director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, “then you decide where to ride him...
...Marshall Kaplan, a Penn State physicist...
...At 12,000 feet, the plummeting begins...
...You test everything like mad, but once it’s checked out, you take your chances...
...In all, shuttle construction is budgeted at $1.8 billion in fiscal 198 1 -$800 million more than NASA said it would need, according to the Congressional Research Service...
...to make the gases flow as liquids...
...Only the economy of a reusable shuttle could make the space station affordable...
...Few existing satellites are in orbital inclinations the shuttle uses...
...Even the 65,000-pound target pales compared to the 250,000 pounds a Saturn V could hoist...
...Computer-simulators, used to stage mock failures in the flight trainer, weren’t working...
...The day the corner would be turned was never specified...
...a manned fly-by (approach without landing) of Mars or Venus...
...Warp Spend NASA has been casting about for other reasons to stage shuttle flights...
...Cassidy of the House space subcommittee acknowledges this is “a flaw in the system...
...One Year and Holding The people struggling with the tiles serve a useful function...
...DOD campaigned long and hard to get its own shuttle launchers, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California...
...If enough are, you have a choice between Plan A and Plan B. Plan A is hope they can get a rescue shuttle up in time...
...The record for most expensive flying machine has long since been surpassed...
...before you splat into the water, you’re okay...
...Fifty flights a year...
...After reentry, it cascades through the air without power, finally thunking down onto the runway at 220 m.p.h...
...It can’t...
...Columbia must be fitted out with 33,000 of these tiles, each to be applied individually, each unique in shape...
...acoustic vibrations from one would destroy the next...
...December 1979...
...When the shuttle was being planned, there was supposed to be a “space tug...
...Yet the shuttle’s main engines will have internal pressures three times greater than those of any previous large engine, NASA saysand the goal is to use them on 55flights before an overhaul...
...Eighteen miles from the runway, you finally slow to subsonic speed...
...Oh, the shuttle will definitely cost more than equivalent expendable rockets,” said Kaplan plainly...
...The price per flight keeps climbing beyond $40 million, as the number of plausible missions decreases...
...Right...
Vol. 12 • April 1980 • No. 2
