Review of Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle | Hacker News Reader

Review of Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle

thespacereview.com

33 pointsHooke16 comments

> The book speeds through the actual flight history of the shuttle, including the Challenger and Columbia accidents.

Which people who are critical of the shuttle love to do because it allows them to ignore all the great research, study, and orbital practice we built up using the shuttle.

We docked with Mir. We built the space station. We launched and captured satellites. We did untethered astronaut operations. We repaired several satellites including Hubble. We did zero g medical and electrophoresis experiments. We did tons of space habitation experiments.

While it's possible we could have developed a better vehicle the shuttle provided a premiere research and study platform for the entirely _new_ space industry we were trying to create. We didn't know what we were going to need until we did the work. The shuttle did that work wonderfully and provided several capabilities and massive amounts of electrical power that were unusual and massively aided our space program and our understanding of what the future would hold.

It annoys me that people focus on the unusual and ultimately flawed design of the shuttle and then use it as a means to judge the space program or NASA as a whole. We did huge, insane, and novel things with that absolutely beautiful machine. It set the stage for the next generation of space exploration and the program should always be cherished for what it was able to become.

To translate:

- the engineering team delivered on many goals along with 2 serious downtime incidents

- the product team had too many people to please and produced insane requirements that ultimately failed to achieve most (all?) of the goals of the platform versus just using rockets.

> failed to achieve most (all?) of the goals of the platform

This is precisely the attitude I would argue against. The "goals of the platform" are meaningless predictions made by people before the thing even existed. This is a standard of measurement that's appropriate for bean counters and congress people who ultimately wanted and expected just a cheap commodity space bus.

Cheaper launch system means you can afford more missions, or do the same missions for less money. A smaller budget probably means less risk of Congress cutting your funding.

On the other hand, the space shuttle was the coolest thing imaginable in the 80s. It was crazy that it could launch like a rocket and land like an airplane.

My opinion now is that it was an unnecessarily complex, highly inefficient launch system.

The issue that I have is that there should have been no requirement to carry cargo on the shuttle. Launch cargo on big dumb rockets, and launch and return people using a fancy space plane. The space plane would be smaller and likely not need booster rockets.

Just imagined some historical fiction where the real reason the shuttle was built was to retrieve nuclear armed satellites we put into space in the 1960s.

They always said the thing about being able to retrieve satellites with it but never really did… that they talked about.

Are you sure? https://www.space.com/34522-secret-shuttle-missions.html

Yes, Hubble was supposed to be brought back to the Earth periodically for upgrades, but of course that never happened. Shuttle fans like to point to the Hubble servicing missions as proof of the spaceplane's value, but those servicing missions were probably more expensive than just launching a new space telescope to replace Hubble.

Well that is some “the journey is the reward” thinking.

We designed, funded and built the thing to do something specific. It didn’t really do that.

A goal is not a meaningless prediction. Outcomes matter.

>Which people who are critical of the shuttle love to do because it allows them to ignore all the great research, study, and orbital practice we built up using the shuttle.

And people who are defenders of the shuttle both love to strawman the criticism, and love to pretend that all the great research, study, and orbital practice we built up using the shuttle could ONLY have been done by the shuttle, vs continued evolution of Apollo and concepts like Sea Dragon or the less well known Nova [0].

The fact of the matter is that the Space Shuttle was objectively, fundamentally a shit design. That's simply the physical truth. Putting the vehicle with all your valuable personnel and cargo on the SIDE of the enormous column of cryogenic explodey vroom is madness, which is why nobody ever did before and nobody will ever do it again. It adds major complexity and entire new realms of failure modes that simply do not exist, period, with a normal stack. It's near impossible to have proper escape modes the entire flight, and indeed the Shuttle did not. Both our lost shuttles with all crew would simply never have happened with other crewed rockets. Normally ones sitting on top can escape from failures below, and have [1]. Ice or insulation falling off a rocket during launch simply cannot hit the thing sitting up above it at all. Adding primary engines on is even worse, messing with many of the benefits of staging and adding huge worthless dry mass. Same with the huge delta wings, which not just further hurt $/kg but meant a hair raising high risk landing using a fat unpowered glider with a subsonic glide ratio of just 4.5:1 (a 737 for contrast is 18:1).

Then on top of all of that was all the political BS that it was able to fuel. The congressional pork that genuinely compromised the design further. And of course the effect of America taking its foot off the gas for a good long period vs continuing to evolve what worked.

The ultimate result sucked up enormous amounts of limited money and resources on fundamentally worthless activities as well as killing lots of people. We could have done much, much much better. The Shuttle was cool but also an albatross that badly set back US space potential. Thank goodness for SpaceX, and now a whole new crop of promising hungry startups at long, long last.

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0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_(rocket)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_MS-10

> could ONLY have been done by the shuttle

I'm certainly not one of those people and I actually have never met one. It's ironic that you flag the issue of strawmen then seemingly immediately create one yourself in order to argue an issue that has already been conceded to.

We actually did spacewalks to inspect and practice repairing tiles. We had known prior to Columbia that strikes could happen and displace entire tiles. We had contingencies upon contingencies for this and we just completely dropped the ball on that flight. It was a combination of management and program failures on top of a compromised vehicle design. If you walk away from that tragedy with your only observation being the design of the vehicle was flawed then I fear you have completely failed to study the situation appropriately.

I also think people forget what the prospect of conducting medium term orbital operations in the 1970s and 1980s was like. We didn't have deep space networks. We didn't have TDRS. We didn't even have GPS. We just _barely_ started putting stuff into geosynchronous orbit. Spy satellites used to drop film canisters into atmosphere to return imaging to Earth.

The orbiter was a highly compromised design born out of an absolutely strange era between military and civilian use of outer space. It absolutely had problems; however, this hindsight view that if we had just built a different vehicle we could have done so much more or had more impactful of a scientific and civilian space program is not grounded in reality or the logistics of the program as a whole.

> sucked up enormous amounts of limited money and resources on fundamentally worthless activities

Here you are carried away and go too far. The 1980s were some of the most efficient NASA budgeting years and the total budget for NASA has been an absolute fraction of the entire nations budget. We consistently spend more on _worthless_ wars than on NASA.

To say that these activities were "fundamentally worthless," again, is _precisely_ the attitude which annoys me so greatly. It's a foolish position that I feel can only be born out of absolute ignorance of all the things we did with that vehicle. NASA and our astronaut core worked as hard as they could to squeeze every possible benefit out of those launches and the testament of that work stands to this day.

> Thank goodness for SpaceX

You don't have to hate the history of the shuttle to appreciate SpaceX. Although for some people it does seem to be true.

> The 1980s were some of the most efficient NASA budgeting years

Strange and funny stuff.

Somewhere between when NASA estimated the cost of a shuttle flight would be less than ten million dollars and when it became apparent they cost well over a billion dollars, the country should have chosen a different approach.

I wonder what they will say about stacks for material cargo the day the first linear accelerator starts working in tibet. Madness, to glue a container to fireworks.

> It annoys me

Do you realise this is the only time you used the personal pronoun? The rest of your comment is "we" and "our". The funny thing is that I didn't do any of the things you claim "we" did, but I do empathise with your annoyance.