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Comment by Crito | Hacker News Reader

> PS: It was also horribly compromised based on Airforce requirements yet never flew a single Airforce mission.

The shuttles flew a few DoD missions, including I believe at least one for the Air Force (a DSCS satellite during STS-51-J I believe? Maybe others, which DoD mission was for who isn't nicely broken down anywhere that I can find. It looks like most were for the NRO).

However none of the Shuttles ever flew a polar orbit mission; an ability that the Air Force demanded but never used. The large cross-range capabilities of the shuttle (necessitating such large wings) was for polar orbit missions, so those massive wings were dead weight caused by the Air Force.

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I should have been more clear.

The airforce had two mission profiles outside NASA's goals. Polar orbits AND capturing Russian satilites. Neither of those missions types where ever flown. The Airforce ended up having a huge impact on the design including much larger cargo bay etc but it was those two mission profiles that really fucked up the design.

If NASA had gotten it's way the shuttle would have been more reliable and cost less than 1/3 as much per mission at the cost of significantly lowered cargo capasity. Intact both shuttle disasters can be traced back to these compromises.

Not that I disagree with you, but capturing Russian satellites may be the kind of thing you want the ability, but are not actually planning to do it.

Funnily enough, Russia 'copied' the shuttle design for the Buran.

That ship was almost exclusively designed for millitary use. It was speculated that they planned to carry nuclear weapons up in the cargo bay.

I know, wouldn't a constellation of nukes in low earth orbit be amazing. It would only take 200 to 300 seconds to deorbit from LEO.

Ask the people of Palomares Spain how much they like that idea. They had a couple of nuclear bombs accidentally drop out of the sky there after a mishap in the 60's when the US had nukes in the air at all times.

From what I've read, the idea doesn't actually work very well. Since they're in orbit, you only have a relatively small window per orbit to get it to hit any particular place. If you want to be able to hit any particular place with that kind of notice, you need like dozens of them in the same orbit. Maybe a bunch of orbits, depending on how the cross-range capability is. You could well end up with a constellation of hundreds in orbit.

You're better off putting those weapons on surface-based ICBMs. It'll take a little longer to get to target than the idea case in orbit, but you can launch all of them at a small area at once if you need to. They're a lot easier to maintain and decommission on the ground too - worth considering, since I think we'd all rather not ever have to use the things.

First strike capability, especially hitting their ICBMs before they could make a decision and launch, was considered very important, and may have been considered worth the additional expense/complication. Probably would have been massively destabilizing to reduce lead time that much, though.

Thinking about some more in strategic terms, I think you'd get the most strategic difference by having a lot of weapons in roughly the same orbit. That would give you the ability to conduct an extremely rapid first strike, but only at the time that they happened to be in the right orbit. The downside is that they'd be a terrible second strike weapon, since it would be obvious where they were and they couldn't do much in the way of armoring them or having them avoid enemy weapons. So yeah, it would be pretty damn destabilizing to build a weapon system so massively good at first strike and so bad at second strike. It would tend to tempt the builder to use it or risk losing it in a tense situation, and the opposing nation would know this and perhaps be tempted to make their own first strike or build their own system.

It's probably better/more stabilizing to do what we did, which is to deploy lots of SSBNs - just okay at first strike, great at second strike since it's almost impossible to destroy them all at once. You're less likely to want to pull the trigger on your own first strike when you know you have a nearly unstoppable second strike capability. The enemy nation is less likely to make a first strike if they believe they can't stop your second strike.

Both sides feared their opponent might obtain first strike, but did not want it themselves.

Problem is that some actions that help prevent your opponent from obtaining first strike move you closer to first strike.

For example, having nuclear missiles in submarines makes it very hard for your opponent to take out most of your nuclear weapons in a first strike, but it also gives you the capability to fire from closer range, giving the opponent less time to launch their missiles before your missiles take them out.

This would be similar, as there would be less time between launch and impact.

You say amazing, I say horrifying and a violation of the treaties against militarisation of space. Also the world's worst maintenance liability.

Grave of Fireflies is the saddest movie I have ever seen.

Space is already militarized, and out of the entire population of HN you were the only one to complain about my comment. I didn't get a single downvote.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3oSS_FP-cA&src_vid=ZWSMoE3A...

Actually, in later years the internal reasoning has been published, so we no longer need to speculate. (This following quotes are taken from the book "Energiya-Buran, the Soviet Space Shuttle" by Bart Hendrickx and Bert Vis). And the actual reason is even more hillarious.

So, first, we now know the US space shuttle was the outcome of some bureaucratic processes in the US (NASA wants a new program to replace Apollo, the Air Force accidentally ends up in a super good negotiating position, Nixon does not want to be responsible for ending manned flight but also doesn't want to pay for a trip to Mars), so in the end it didn't end up a very sensible design. But the Soviets did _not_ known this, and assumed there must be some secret rational reason for building it:

> As TsNIIMash [Central Scientific Research Institute of Machine Building] director Yuriy Mozzhorin later said: "[The Space Shuttle] was introduced as a national program, aimed at 60 launches per year ... All this was very unusual: the mass they had been putting into orbit with their expendable rockets hadn't even reached 150 tons per year, and now they were planning to launch 1,770 tons per year. Nothing was being returned from space, and now they were planning to bring down 820 tons per year. This was not simple a program to develop some space system ... to lower transportation costs (they promised they would lower those costs tenfold, but the studies done at our institute showed that in actual fact there would be no cost savings at all). It clearly had a focused military goal".

So what might this secret military goal be? Apparently the Soviet speculations was that either it might be part of some nuclear fractional-orbit bombardment system, or it might be part of a plan to launch lots of laser weapons into orbit. In any case, we can't have a space shuttle gap, so:

> "[Central Committe Secretary for Defense Matters, Dmitri] Ustinov had made the following argument: if our scientists and engineers do not see and specific use of this technology now, we should not forget that the Americans are very pragmatic and very smart. Since they have invested a tremendous amount of money in such a project, they can obviously see some useful scenario which is still unseen from Soviet eyes. The Soviet Union should therefore develop such a technology so that it won't be taken by suprise in the future".

Let's build it now, and see what it is good for later! And then the Americans started speculating about what the secret military purpose of the Soviet shuttle might be! :D

Funny because wasn't the shuttle-c used for military missions and it has almost no wings.

What do you mean? The shuttle-c was never built.

I meant its punier newer incarnation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37

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