The shuttle isn't really designed to put basic stuff in space so it's not quite a fair comparison. Better comparison would be other, similar rockets.
The shuttle was absolutely designed to "put basic stuff in space". By being partially reusable it was meant to be cheaper than all other "expendable" US rockets and replace them all even even for simple satellite launches.
The fact that the original goals couldn't be met was only made clear after the Challenger disaster.
Also context, consider cost complexity: manned space flight >> space flight >> aerospace >> automotive.
Each increase in risk implies considerably more expense, and the difference between space flight that includes humans, and flight that doesn't is quite massive. They are different programs entirely.
So if you're putting something in space with 'humans going along' - it will always be way more expensive, no matter what.
The shuttle was supposed to be cheaper than multiple manned rockets, but not cheaper than regular satellite launches.
So for putting out complex things like Hubble, or 'fixing it' 'retrofitting' etc. - the Shuttle might make sense.
But it was never going to be cheaper than regular rockets for putting relatively straightforward satellites in space.
Fixing Hubble was one of the most complex operations the Shuttle ever did. Although only the shuttle could do things like repair and retrieval, the large majority of the satellites that ever entered the Shuttle cargo bay were simply launched and released.
More specifically, of the 105 satellites the Shuttle interacted with, only 4 were repaired-and-redeployed (including Hubble) and only 5 were recovered back to Earth.
http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/dev/hillger/Shuttle-related....
> The shuttle was supposed to be cheaper than multiple manned rockets, but not cheaper than regular satellite launches.
Do you have cites to support this? It's not consistent with my impression of the expectations for the Shuttle when it first started flying. Your other comments here give the strong impression that you are arguing based on your intuitive knowledge of spaceflight costs that no reasonable person could have thought launching dumb satellites on the Shuttle would have been cost effective. However, I think that's hindsight, and in fact many people at the time expected the Shuttle to cheaply deploy basic satellites, and that this was part of its official mandate. Indeed, Wikipedia says
> the plan was for all future U.S. space launches—space station, Air Force, commercial satellites, and scientific research—to use only the space shuttle. Most other expendable boosters would be phased out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_design_process
EDIT: And from another link in this thread (written at the time):
> NASA plans to terminate all throw-away rocket launches as soon as the shuttle is working.
http://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.htm...
https://www.americaspace.com/2018/12/09/dying-all-tensed-up-...
Say what? I didn't know they had interns up there.
There's also "Space Shuttle Decision, 1965-1972 (History of the Space Shuttle, Volume 1", but I think Volume 2 is far more interesting from an engineering point of view.
This isn’t how it was sold to the public.
> I interned on the the space station
Thank you. Without the ISS, we wouldn’t have SpaceX.
Manned space flight is known to be way more expensive than cheap, rocket satellite launches. There never was a comparison.
The Shuttle was going to be cheaper than manned rockets, and frankly, probably was. I can't imagine who much it would cost to put up a manned rocket to do some of the retrofitting of Hubble, for example. I don't even think their is proper vehicles for that in existence! So it would be out of the question in terms of cost.
The shuttle did mostly what it was supposed to, it just got old. And there is the space station to do science.
Soyuz + any international heavy launch candidate duplicates the Shuttle’s capabilities at a fraction of the cost.
Thats how we ended up with thee uterly insane SLS, Orion, Gateway architecture.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle#Re-entry_and_lan...
It only became official after the Challenger disaster, but it was quite clear to everyone who followed the project even before the first shuttle launched.
http://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.htm...
> And, according to The Washington Monthly's sources, flying the shuttle will cost more, not less, than flying those old disposable rockets.
It is explained in the sections titled "Economy at any Cost" and "Turn Down the Volume".
The main argument, which was shown to be correct, is that NASA inflated the launch volume in order to amortized their huge fixed costs on an unrealistic number of flights.
The recommendations and conclusions sections is a relatively short and easy read. I get the impression (though it could be my bias) that it is written skeptically.
It withstood the test of time.
* But they developed lots of cool tech is not a good defense. Failing to deliver did not bring the tech. It was inevitable.
* But there were missions that only Shuttle could do is not right either when you think it over.
I can think of two admittedly unlikely mission profiles that only STS or Buran could have pulled off:
* Recovering a satellite already in orbit safely back to Earth.
* Orbital bombing. While you could launch an orbital missile platform, it would have a predictable enough orbit to be vulnerable to ASAT. You would have to execute multiple burns for evasive maneuvers and that’s easier with a manned spacecraft. This, specifically, was the capability the Soviets feared enough to design Buran. This is also a violation of international law, not that such things matter in a scenario where you are dropping hydrogen bombs from orbit.
Shuttle was used for recovery only four times. It would have been cheaper to ditch all those satellites and build and send new ones compared to recovering them.
> Orbital bombing
ICBM's do it better.
I didn't say it was a valuable use case, nor did I say you were recovering your own satellites.
> ICBM's do it better.
ICBM's follow a predictable ballistic trajectory and are more vulnerable to countermeasures. Again, this might not be a good use case, but it is one.
In the words of cosmonaut Oleg Kotov: "We had no civilian tasks for Buran and the military ones were no longer needed. It was originally designed as a military system for weapon delivery, maybe even nuclear weapons. The American shuttle also has military uses....A shuttle is particularly useful for this because it can change its orbit and trajectory – so an attack from it is almost impossible to protect against." Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20664-cosmonaut-sovie...
Mass is mass. It’s a perfectly fair comparison. If we were talking about people, sure, that would be unfair.
I'm not disagreeing with the Falcon 9 being incredibly cheap, and the SpaceShuttle being outrageously expensive - I agree with both statements. I just think the direct price comparison is bad.
Most of the Shuttle’s payloads were aggregates of smaller payloads. For big stuff, sure, the Shuttle retains its mantle. But it simply wasn’t launching that much big stuff.
Just most parts of the ISS
Without the shuttle we couldn’t have the ISS, MIR wasn’t much larger than Skylab.
https://i.stack.imgur.com/v13FW.jpg
The Shuttle is what allowed us to launch a station the size of the ISS and construct it in orbit.
So to a first approximation the ISS could have been over 2000 tons if NASA had just stuck with and scaled up the Saturn V architecture, which history has shown was both more capable and cheaper.
So no, the Shuttle isn't what allowed us to construct the ISS. Except in the narrow sense that the better launch vehicle had been cancelled, so it was the only project left to do the job.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_of_the_International_...
We have no way to do any major service to the ISS now without the shuttle and the ISS retrofit was the main reason for the deferral in the Shuttles retirement.
By comparison the Saturn V has a 140 ton mass to LEO, 7x what the Proton-K could carry, and more importantly could have carried modules double the diameter of what the shuttle could put into LEO.
The unique selling point of the shuttle was the ability to return payloads from orbit to the ground for servicing, but as it turns out that was much more expensive than having a cheaper launcher and just launching another module.
Let's not draw the wrong conclusions from history. The shuttle was a failed launch system by any reasonable criteria. History has shown that plain old boring boosters were the right choice. The Soviets/Russians have been able to launch things to the ISS after the US lost its wings.
The only reason we have "no way to do any major service to the ISS" is not because the shuttle was so great, but because it was a dead end. The US has had to play catch-up with the COTS program with SpaceX et al.
MIR wasn’t only 4 times smaller than the ISS in terms of tonnage but it’s design was the same as the Salyut and Skylab the ISS was the first thing we can say we actually constructed in orbit.
The only thing that could have been somewhat complicated without Shuttle capabilities was returning the Mir solar panels, for detailed analysis of their faster-than-expected degradation.
https://www.americaspace.com/2012/12/20/what-do-mirs-solar-a...
That payload is small enough that it could have been put on a reentry capsule if it wasn't for the Space Shuttle.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy-lift_launch_vehicle
Most ISS components were less than the Falcon 9's capacity. Given Falcon 9 launches payloads an order of magnitude cheaper (cost per kg) than the Shuttle did, cost savings would almost certainly be realized. The remaining payloads would be more expensive to launch on other platforms, but that extra cost for a few projects is outweighed by the savings across the bulk of what the Shuttle did.
For heavy-lift launches, Titan IV and Proton beat it. For manned launches, Soyuz beat it. Today, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are better options, though they are built (in part) on the lessons of the Shuttle.
I want to see the attempt of building the ISS with a Falcon 9. Some assembly launches would be within lift capacity (especially on the expendable configuration). Some payloads would actually fit in the fairing. But when you have it in orbit - what then? The Space Shuttle not only lifted the modules into space, it berthed them to the station, and carried the crew together with the payload to execute the assembly operations and be able to react in time.
As much as I agree that the Space Shuttle was way too expensive, it was irreplaceable for building the ISS, and had it existed back then, the Falcon 9 wouldn't have changed that.
Plus, since this seems to get forgotten a lot, size matters. I find the best size comparison between the ISS and MIR is with the Space Shuttle attached: ISS [1] vs Mir [2].
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width_f...
[2] https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0210/shuttlemir_nasa_big.jp...
Sure, you might need some such platform to construct something in orbit. That's basically a space forklift with thrusters.
It isn't an argument for Space Shuttle system as a whole, i.e. propulsion system, heat shield, solid rocket boosters & external tank, being needed.
For what it cost to launch the shuttle such a platform could have been entirely expendable with astronauts returning in capsules, and they'd still have saved money, and been able to take up 3-4x the amount of cargo up on each trip.
If you're talking about the one aiming to be best in the field to describe how good it is performing, you usually don't compare it to the broken clock of the group.
It's a fair comparison if the real product of the space shuttle program is compared with the real product of the Falcon Heavy program.
Comparing what the space shuttle could hypothetically have been with what Falcon Heavy actually is would not be a fair comparison.
They are totally different configs, for totally different purposes.
It's like comparing a drone to a jet or to a cargo plane.
For every “send things to the ISS” and “put thing in orbit” mission, the two are directly comparable. The Space Shuttle simply wasn’t using its maximum capacity that often for big packages. The Space Shuttle was a boondoggle.
For crew launches, the per-person cost of the Shuttle still compares unfavourably to SpaceX’s projected crew launch costs. But projected isn’t actual, so we’ll let the Shuttle keep its spot for now.
(Special repair projects and ISS boosting are two things the Shuttle can do that SpaceX currently cannot.)
That alone puts it in a completely different category than Falcon.
FYI many (most?) drone missions that the US does right now would not be carried out by manned aircraft for a whole host of reasons.
Making a manned, multi-purpose vehicle like the Shuttle really starts to get expensive when you just want to launch a big satellite. Sure, they perform a bunch of science up there but that's as secondary goal to getting the main payload into orbit. The Shuttle had good goals in mind but turns out its just cheaper in the long run to make something that won't last more than one launch.
What sounds like a more attractive option, owning and operating a semi to make round-trip deliveries cross country where the driver goes sight-seeing along the way or to buy and ship a shipping container that makes a one-way trip?
This is simply not a true statement.