Britain's Space Shuttle: The Multi-Unit Space Transport And Recovery Device Concept (Mustard) 

Oh, the MUSTARD was even more clever than that. Because the docking gear could be adjusted, stacks of up to five units could be clustered, and additional pure rockets added to put satellites into higher orbits or even linear trajectories. The "tank"units had parts commonality with the "cargo" units to bring down costs, and could be used with smaller rockets mounted on them to launch small payloads into low orbits on their own.

The MUSTARD would have been a masterpiece of Lower Earth Orbit

But will the two discarded units land safely?

That was the point of it. But like many incredible British projects it never saw the light of day due to cuts!

My work....

Add to this: the concept of fuel crossfeed is actually first developed by Mikhail Tikhonravov for R-3 missiles, and the same fuel pumping problem is quickly realized; thus, instead, they created the concept of carrying-packet, which is to optimize the rockets in the side packet to use only the fuel they carry and then drop off once done. This carrying-packet is what evolved into the R7.

UK industry actually working on this ... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_%28spacecraft%29

Three'som the Bri'ish way.

I think the swinging 60s got to the designers. lol

Are you talking about the Gatland book?

@@Setebos y'know, it's been a while, but it was thin, hard-covered, perhaps goldish in color. It had space rockets like Sputnik and mercury, anti-sub, Bomarc and Nike, and MUSTARD really stood out to me. I'm 52 and grew up army, dad was the nutritionist at fort Deitrich and Walter Reed. He was a nutritionist for some space missions, I have seen photos in their album of me on John Glenn's knee. I wanted to stay and live at the Smithsonian, and was heartbroken to move back to chicago in '76. All my fabulous toys and books were lost to my families alcahol and drug addictions. I dont miss the things. I miss my family. And I dont blame the drugs or alcahol, they were symptoms, not really causes. But it sure has been fun remembering what led me to where I am now.

@@2012listo I've experienced similar unfortunate circumstances in which I was obliged to jettison some of my favored items, so you have my sympathies. Fortunately, my collection of Bono/Gatland books have been spared, and (mainly thanks to library sales over the years) I've managed to build upon it (never underestimate the value of library and/or used book sales).

@@Setebos books, and vinyl! My Herb Alpert and the Tijuana brass band collection is complete. Church sales, library sales, estate sales all call to my family to take cash and the wagon and get some historic tidbits overlooked by corpulent couch-surfing grandchildren. Enjoy it now; our grandkids might not care, either!

@@2012listo My Mom had a complete Herb Alpert collection (with the exception of the "Whipped Cream & Other Delights" album which she wouldn't allow in her house, for reasons known to Alpert aficionados).

The three vehicles are the same design, theoretically interchangeable. The idea was to reduce costs by developing just one spacecraft, then using it either as a booster or an orbiter. Same maintenance procedures and facilities, same parts supply chain, etc. Good redundancy, a steady production rate with improvements incorporated on the production line, etc. If built now, I imagine each vehicle could be flown with or without crew. No need to risk people in the booster role, nor even the orbiter on all missions. Picture a collaboration between SpaceX and Sierra Nevada corporations. Merlin engines, etc. For the small to medium satellite market, a fully reusable system might be competitive. Or, to get really imaginative, a India-UK joint program aimed at recovering space junk.

@@johnmothershead1690 That lifting-body stuff goes all the way back to the 50’s, these Brits were clearly just cribbing right off that work, and of course they were free to do so as well. Wouldn’t it be great to get the chance to ask some SpaceX fellows if they actually considered this very concept? Having three stages (not two) surely makes everything easier, but then again, the landing gear and everything... maybe they could use airliner parts or something. It’d be an awesome hack job and I’d sign up to help them with it in a red hot second.

The space shuttle concept wasn’t fully-reusable, but this concept was. Now whether it would or could actually work in real life, like weight-wise namely, I just don’t know.

@@craigrmeyer Actually, the original Space Shuttle had a two-stage fully-reusable flyback design, but that was too expensive to develop.

@@HalNordmann You're right. I've learned that the Space Shuttle story is WAY more interesting than I thought. I wonder if there's any reason why a multi-part fly-back architecture would be easier/cheaper today. Probably not, but a boy can still dream.

They're defending Earth from the space nazis

And then they decided to invite Islam in, should have gone to space. Will never get an opportunity again

@@jimmyjigz No they decided to invite the bankers, sell off real industry, and the upper crust all became stock brokers, while the people went on the dole and England lost its heritage of being the leader in technology and exploration to the US.

.....what's a Drafty?(oh dear I sound like a small child asking that)

@@jimmyjigz And some c;nt Richard Branson in our answer to our space program look what we become a third would country

The Space Shuttle was the result of too many agencies with different goals invading the design and engineering process.

@@BrokenLifeCycle I agree absolutely. When each new administration gets to undo what the previously did,the most basic projects become boondoggles. Not to mention the major ones. There's a reason we haven't been back to the moon in 50+ years,or to mars,which was supposed to happen in the 1980s. Killing people over oil is a much better expenditure of our national capital.

@@jefferyclark2114 The main reason why a fully reusable Space Shuttle was not built was because Congress would not allocate to NASA the budget required to develop and build such a vehicle.

@@EricIrl very sad indeed.

@@jefferyclark2114 They were reflecting the national mood at the time, as politicians tend to do. The public felt they had spent enough money on grand space gestures with Apollo and didn't want that level of spending to continue. Developing a fully reusable system would probably have cost as much as the Apollo programme did.

Sadly, inflation and a general.anntipathy towards aerospace engineers made Britain lose its lead with this. At the time of the seventh version, it would have cost as much to build a three-unit MUSTARD launcher as the UK governmemt took as cigarette tax for two years. Now, it would cost several billion, though the entire system would be recoverable. And as the head of Hawker Siddeley said in the 1960s- " Many people in governmemt claim the trouble with this country is that too many people are 'too clever by half'. I suspect the real trouble is that too many people in charge are too stupid by three quarters".

They could've beatin Skylon of its attempted SSToL, with a combo *SSTo3L* tactic, they would simply need a transition fuel *phase* vesus 'stage' break. By doing a Runway takeoff, *Jet-to-Ramjet-than pure*r ocket fuel sequsl. A slower start up to orbit, thus faster than any T-minus future weather scrubbs. As well, save massive fuel near the low thick air & greater mass ratio gravity altitudes of Trop, Strat & bottom Mesosphere.

Voyager 1 and 2 are reported as having impossible speeds ?

couldn't

Schrodinger's Mustard. Both cut and can't cut at the same time.

to be fair france and the Soviets had a better ideas about how the resources should've been spent, if the USSR hadn't collapsed they'd have the Energia and Zenit rockets still..

Spearka I just want to know if it could have worked. 3 stages is better than the conventional 2, but that’s also a lot of wings and wheels and heat shielding and stuff too.

Basically Zenith flyed up to 2017, when it finally was cut because of post-USSR Ukranians-Russians friendship. While Buran never was meant as something more than political stuff - these spaceplanes are too heavy at means of structure to be useful until You don't need to return tens of tonnes from orbit to Earth per week.

I bought it 3 years ago. Those books are awesome. I own the French Secret Projects Fighter Jets. The book is worth $900+ USED.

@@6lemans10 where can I buy them for cheaper or find a PDF?

They could just plant one shuttle on top of the the heavy booster. Problem solved. Or.. just use Starship which is dominant in every way.

@@EddyKorgo perfect. Add more complexity and so more things to go wrong AS WELL as more cost to developing a booster when just using a few of the exact same vehicle works fine. As the starship , I explained this is an earlier comment. Redundancy between different launch providers is essential. If we rely on just starship , then if something goes wrong with starship we're screwed. Also , having multiple groups in competition drives development.

Lolz! I know, they could've used convertion switch from jet porpulstion to full rocket converstion and saved fuel & craft mass. At a runway.. Now It was like a kid in a rocket wagon cart being pushed by two other kids & gets out to push an empty cart.

Lack of money was one factor, and the other was that a joint project with Europe was politically more favoured by the government of the day.

I've also been waiting for a video about this!

Outer units probably wouldn't transfer fuel, the inner unit would have a lower throttle for the duration of the trip. To be honest this design is quite limiting and grossly overcomplicated. The airframe is so massive and complex, it negates any weight savings a glide return would enable. Simple solution: more engines, higher specific impulse, booster that lands, 2nd stage that can be refuelled on orbit. Aka starship. It's also pretty close to being real 😉

@@cpowerbpower3339 unfortunately, it's also pretty close to being 60 years late - compared to this. (To be certain, the Starship/Super Heavy is a more capable design by far - but don't forget that even the Apollo Program had not begun when this was first being developed.)

@@Infinite_Maelstrom 60 years work, and nothing to show for it but a neat CGI clip.

@@cpowerbpower3339It was cancelled in '67. This is done by a fan. Sorry, I can't quite read your tone, hopefully I have answered appropriately.

@@Infinite_Maelstrom oh nothing aggressive, either way this would have been cool. space flight is spaceflight :)

Monty Python Space Agency (MPSA)

With all the landing strips on Mars this wins hands down.

I second that opine!! Really cool stuff.

Cool Runnings

Rasta rockets

Rocket gain thrust from burning weed

No, they aren't worthless! SpaceX is doing stuff to quickly, which led to the explosion-inplosion-explosion of the SN1, as they want to do stuff to quickly. And without concepts, no rocket would exist, the StarShip has been a concept for a long time.

@@Torukoseki using the word" "to" when it should be "too" is damned annoying.

Spacex isn't unique to having never realized concepts, ever heard of FalconX, FalconX Heavy, FalconXX, Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT), and Interplanetary Transport System (ITS)? and those are just a few of the publicly known concepts, internally they have many more concepts which were not pursued for better or for worst.

@@odysseyvoyager2354 Spacex is still doing much more than everyone else.

@@saltyfox7056 Blowing up stainless steel one after the other? I can show video footage of that. Show me a video of a succesfull SpaceX starship launch please ... You said they are doing it.

Me too, I think I only ever saw it in an old textbook once - like old enough the ISS was still only a concept...

@@widget3672 It was totally unknown to me and, being myself from the UK, I thought I had a good understanding of the complete history of our aerospace activities so far, what sparse efforts there were. Hopefully, if the Hebridean/far north spaceport pans out, we'll do more in the future. We always were hamstrung by lack of range access and safe launch corridors.

​@@noecarrier5035 Somebody who actually knows something about how difficult it is for the UK to launch anything from home. The only launch corridor is north or retrograde. However, if you've never heard of this, your knowledge isn't that good and most of what is around about the British Aerospace sector is complete bollocks anyway. Bar WWI, the British have never been world leaders in aerospace and have been at best on a par with anybody else for very short periods (basically introduction of the Jet Engine).

@@richardvernon317 The adults are talking. Be quiet.

A

Derek Mitchell Surely you’re right, but who says that’s the show stopper? The center machine also has the payload and the “full speed” heat shield and is therefore very different for that reason also, etc. Still I wonder if it’s just too heavy to work at all, given the Space Shuttle experience, even if each of the three craft ended up substantially different from each other.

I think that such issues would have been taken into consideration by the British Aircraft Corporation engineers in the nearly ten years the project was worked on. Just as people on average lived as long as we do now in the past, people back then, where on average just as smart and not a few were smarter than average.

I was thinking that exact same thing.

@@2dollarbill3 MOAR -BOOSTERS- PLANES

Even UR700 isn't that crazy...

So basically it's like the Falcon Heavy, except that the boosters are piloted back instead of being landed autonomously.

태선우TaeSunWoo with nozzle bell engines or possibly Aerospiked

Britain has some bloody great engineers and still does. Politicians ... Not so much. They seem to think spending more money getting the Americans to do things is a better idea than doing it ourselves.

@@admiralsoyuz9776 It seems we can waste money by the bucketload when we want to - but not on the future but on attempts to bring back the olden days.

Eh, with modern tech the boosters can all be pretty light. I'd say the design does indeed cut the mustard.

We could've had the first man in Space in the 1950s or 1949, through a rocket called Megaroc, which was ten years ahead of its time

This vehicle was designed by the British Aircraft Corporation in the mid '60s and cancelled in 1970.

Same thing with normal shuttle

"We don't have any boosters? Then strap another rocket to it!"

I don't know about that... KSP players generally don't go with anything so complicated as recoverable winged boosters, because it's too hard to control multiple vehicles at once. The game engine tends to encourage either massively-disposable side-boosters, or massive SSTO designs that can be recovered in one piece.

It’s a smart idea though.

Hahahahaha good one!

Well with America creating it's own Space Force you can bet that in the near future Britain will create it's very own "Royal Space Force".

Why does the first stage need heat shields?

@@mbgamer3189 . Excuse me but it is not: Britain; it is: Great Britain.

@@anthonypeterson5618 The three units were intended to be identical. In other words, a vehicle could be a booster on one mission, and theoretically the orbiter on the next. The idea was that developing one vehicle design would be more cost effective. It's really not that different than many Russian designs or Falcon Heavy/Delta Heavy/etc, except for the horizontal landing capability. If the idea were resurrected today, given modern drone technology I imagine each vehicle would be able to fly manned or unmanned. It's really not that far-fetched IMHO. Now, if you combine this concept with the X-33 design.....

(Convair was an absolute firehose of wildly ambitious and sometimes strange unbuilt spacecraft concepts, by the way--you could run a whole channel like this just on their stuff.)

That one looked more realistic until tiny wings shown up. Or they meant landing at subsonic speeds.

MUSTARD was based on the Douglas ASTRO concept but refine to use three identical vehicles instead of two dissimilar ones. The Convair came along after MUSTARD info had been published and ALLEGEDLY was carefully crafted to avoid infringing BACs patents.

The idea was that the two boosters would pump fuel into the orbiter during the takeoff phase. That way, the engines could be fired on all three stages, but the orbiter would still have a full fuel tank after booster separation. A very efficient method, in theory.

Different engines and different fuel types can have varying colors and brightnesses. Look at the Space Shuttle main engines, and compare it to the Saturn Engines, or even the Space Shuttle Boosters.

Fule was supposed to be LH2 + LOX

Reaction Engine & SKYLON enough said!! The reaction engine a hybrid jet/rocket engine that runs off hydro-zine (fixed Me163 Komet Fuel) that lowers the temperature of air entering the engine past Mach 2.3 (friction makes it to hot to combust) that has seen it tested to Mach 5 in the US in February. It is also claimed that the "engines freezers" are able to liquefy some of this air... and store it in the free space within the fuel tank left by the burnt fuel. In English, SKYLON will take off from a conventional runway and make it's liquid oxygen for space flight as it climbs through the atmosphere to to escape velocity. Gen John W Raymond of Trump's New Space Force, let slip in his first briefing the US had access to technology to build Mach 5 Hyper-Sonic/Space transports. Given bugger all money from the Government...again. Mr Bond formerly of the HOTOL project have since moved from Wharton outside of Manchester that is coincidentally where they built the Taranis Drone "that is apparently Global and can reach speeds of mach 5..." then BAE/Rolls Royce partners in both projects swept those statements under the table along with it's AI "hunter/killer" flight capabilities. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-kdNUFaNEDAc.html .the engine. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-r6vgdgif374.html .the lifting body....needs ZeroX from Thunderbird's as the into music.

Black Arrow actually flew its only successful fight after the project had been cancelled. Everything had been built and paid for, so it was flown.

@@richardvernon317 thats why i wrote, that the project was scrapped after one successful flight :)

@@petersvancarek No the project was terminated before it flew. The project was canned on 29 July 1971, the Rocket successfully and put a satellite in orbit 28 October 1971.

@@richardvernon317 Now I don't understand. Rocket managed to fly successfully to orbit and deployed the satellite. Then the project was scrapped. So it was cancelled after successful flight.

@@billkerman7733 interesting... I didn't know this detail

Yes from what I have seen there is some fuel transfer before break away. As engineers on this project were invited to work on the Space Shuttle the concept clearly impressed someone.

Brexit is good you can see all ready the greatness coming back to the UK

@@seansands424 lol 😂

TeaPartyActivist lol

I suppose there doesn't have to be connections between the fuel tanks. The two outside ones lift the triplet until they exhaust their fuel and the center one ignites it's rocket late in the launch. I like the concept that the re-usable "boosters" are capable of being used as "upper stage" orbital vehicles when needed. Only one vehicle to design, just build a bunch of them. Each one can be tested on sub-orbital flights before using them as boosters or orbiters. I see a bit of genius in this idea!

This can be don in kerbal space program

KayakerMagic - Ever hear the expression “putting all your eggs in one basket”? Let’s say the probability of one space shuttle Failing catastrophically is one in ten launches, a 90% probability of success. So the chance of three launching successfully is 0.9 x 0.9 x 0.9 = 0.729 or a 729% chance of success. And if any one of those blew up, because of the design they would all blow up. Bottom line, numbers a side, The more parts, any one which of that can cause catastrophic failure, the more likely that failure will occur.

@@TeaPartyActivist On the other hand, with MUSTARD you only have to test and prove one vehicle, whereas with the Shuttle, you had to test and prove the orbiter AND the tank AND the SRBs. MUSTARD had no SRBs (cause of one Shuttle loss) and no foam tank insulation (cause of the other shuttle loss). Would it have hit development problems? Probably. Would it have solved them? Possibly. We'll never know 'cos it was never funded, but in general, Space Is Hard for everybody.

That matches what I've read. I'll have to dig out my copy of Frontiers of Space again.