Re: Soyuz TMA-11 Comes Home, More or Less...

The original Faget two-component reusable design would have been hell to
turn around also.
In that case you would have had all the complexities of inspecting the
orbiter after every flight, plus the added burden of checking out the
big winged booster stage and its TPS after every flight also.

Pat

Somewhere, I still have a copy of "My Weekly Reader" from around 1971
or '72. The cover story was about the design competition for the
future space shuttle, and featured illustrations of 3 different
concepts; all of them huge, and all of them needlessly complex. All
these years later, and I still have the same question that I had in
the 6th grade...

"What happened to project Dyna-Soar?"

Small, reusable lifting bodies mounted on top of Titan-variant
boosters fueled by hypergolic propellants. Get in the truck, push the
START button and "Blast Off!" (well, no, not quite, but a lot closer
than anything we've got now). Leave all of the heavy lifting to the
big, dumb, disposable boosters, that's what they were designed for.

But in order to procure funding, everything was promised to everybody
and we wound up with the beautiful, exquisite mess that is the STS;
not quite the right machine for any mission. And although it sounds
harsh, from an operational standpoint perhaps the worst part is that
no one involved with the STS project seemed to have ever watched any
'50's TV Sci-Fi. If the Space Rangers lost a ship, it was certainly a
tragedy; but there were still 20 (or 50, or 100) more ships in the
fleet. By designing a shuttle large enough to carry IUS boosters into
orbit (oh, and a few passengers, too), we wound up with only a handful
of extremely expensive vehicles, the loss of one of which constituted
1/4 OF THE FLEET in addition to the loss of the crew.

When the X-38 project came along, I thought perhaps some degree of
sanity had prevailed. No such luck. That project apparently made too
much sense, so obviously it had to be cancelled (after all of the
development money was spent, of course). I think maybe you're right,
Pat, the real purpose is just to spend money. After all, they managed
to "downsize" the space station until the redesigns cost more than
building the original concept would have, right?
.

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