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Originally Posted by ghrocketman
Yep...sooooo much more could have been done with the Saturn V..... instead we got the Shuttle, which never lived up to it's initial hype, and did almost nothing new.
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Yes and managed to kill not ONE crew but TWO; 14 good men and women gone.
Plus, just to perform 135 missions over 30 years (rather paltry given shuttle was "sold" originally with the idea of performing over 70 missions PER YEAR when it was up and running... they later rolled that back to merely "about 50", which is still one shuttle launch PER WEEK-- sheer insanity!) they managed to finish with 2/5 of the fleet having blown themselves to smithereens...
NOTHING shuttle did *NEEDED* doing anyway, or wasn't capable of being done by other spacecraft that could have been designed FAR more robustly and reliably... and shuttle's breathtaking expense took a HUGE toll on the space program overall, manned AND unmanned!!!
The ONLY thing shuttle could do that really wasn't in the cards for *anything else* was bringing back "large cargoes" in the payload bay. In fact, this "feature" basically was discovered to not be particularly useful. Shuttle was touted as being capable of "retrieving satellites from orbit for repair/refurbishment back on Earth" and while that sounded good as a "sales gimmick" the REALITY was that the costs, PARTICULARLY of having to "recover and RE-LAUNCH" said satellite *on the shuttle* made it completely cost-prohibitive. In short, it was simply cheaper to launch a NEW SATELLITE with the latest updated technology than to retrieve an old broken down one and bring it back for repairs and relaunch it, so you could get the functionality of your OLD satellite back... meanwhile technology had leapfrogged the thing and a NEW satellite could do WAY more WAY better than the old one anyway. In point of fact, MOST of the "satellite retrievals" that shuttle did were "fixing their own screw-ups" that happened BECAUSE those satellites were launched ON THE SHUTTLE rather than actually doing anything novel and worthwhile... (for instance, they retrieved a few satellites that failed due to malfunction of the booster rockets designed to push them from the shuttle's orbit to a USEFUL orbit, leaving them stranded in a "useless" orbit-- in short, shuttle fixing it's own screw-ups-- that's hardly "success" IMHO).
When you count the cost, shuttle was a HUGE mistake... It's development difficulties and huge cost overruns nearly cost us the Viking landings on Mars (which were scaled back to free up badly needed money for Shuttle), the Voyager missions to the gas giants and outer planets (which were nearly cancelled for money reasons, mostly due to shuttle cost overruns) and shuttle did more to hurt unmanned exploration than any other thing NASA has ever done. Hubble, for instance. While Hubble is touted as one of "shuttle's greatest triumphs" it's another case of "fixing it's own mistakes", because Hubble was hobbled by shuttle before it ever left the ground... Shuttle program cost overruns were a large impetus behind the "better, faster, cheaper" mindset that eliminated things like the testing of Hubble's mirror BEFORE it was launched, in the interests of saving money. Hubble itself was delayed by years due to the fact that it *MUST* launch onboard shuttle. Of course it took every last ounce of performance they could wring out of shuttle to stagger up into a 250 mile Low Earth Orbit to deploy and service Hubble... shuttle was absolutely INCAPABLE of putting Hubble up any higher, into a MORE SCIENTIFICALLY USEFUL orbit, like a highly elliptical orbit, geosynchronous orbit, or out orbiting at one of the Lagrange points. Those orbits would allow for long-duration, uninterrupted observations, unlike the silly LEO that Hubble is trapped in, where there's a BIG HONKIN' PLANET (Earth) in the way for nearly 45 minutes out of each 90 minute orbit, a choice that cut Hubble's practical observation time BY HALF from the moment the decision was made. It also required shuttle 'servicing missions' to not just fix the screw-ups caused on Hubble previously mentioned, but to REBOOST the thing to the highest orbit possible, to prevent it from reentering and burning up. In a high orbit, FAR BEYOND *ANYTHING* shuttle was capable of getting to, Hubble could have orbited for CENTURIES or even MILLENNIA without reboost, and had an uninterrupted view, since Earth would be a small orb in a different part of the sky most of the time. If we had kept Apollo, it was entirely feasible for Hubble to be serviced by an Apollo CSM and crew, having docked to a dedicated airlock and "repair pallet" with parts and a robotic arm for capture and maneuvering the telescope once they'd rendezvoused with it. Such a "repair pallet" could have been launched beneath the CSM on a Saturn IB in the space inside the LM panels atop the S-IVB, and could be left in orbit for subsequent use by other crews. Also, when one figures in the costs of the shuttle servicing missions, it's been PROVEN that it would have actually been CHEAPER to simply build a new version of Hubble and launch it into space on an UNMANNED rocket, one capable of putting it into a more useful orbit, rather than servicing the single hobbled Hubble... Can you IMAGINE the science return we'd have gotten from having SEVERAL Hubbles orbiting AT ONCE, even if they DID only function together for a short time before the "older ones" failed??
More to come... OL J R
