Why The Space Shuttle Only Launched Three Deep Space Missions 

I agree absolutely.

Sagan, the rationalist, was not - I suspect - someone who would care to have been described as anything other that "died". Not "passed". Just dead.

@@mickwilson99 lol you're probably right. but since he is DEAD.. and not just PASSED, I'm sure he can't actually care

@@mickwilson99 Dr. Sagan was still a romanticist as well. He was the one who insisted on the disks on the Voyagers.

It’s a “bio-composite”😂 Others have used wood as well, most often in heat shields iirc

Whatever works, right? But that's cool too. I love ingenuity on a budget.

Fascinating. If it works, it works!

amazing

If it works and its stupid, its not stupid

This IMO demonstrates the downside of skimping on development funding: it almost inevitably results in higher operational costs, and often in schedule slippages as well.

@@Globovoyeur what it demonstrates is NASA should of never thrown away all the Apollo hardware just as it was beginning to mature... for less than the cost of the shuttle they could of done a moon mission every other year had a skylab style space station and an ever improving super heavy booster in the form of a Saturn V... The SIB was an excellent LEO platform and both were becoming more efficient nearly every launch... Think about an up rated Saturn V with Atlas or even Titan style SRBs for boosting interplanetary missions... NASA basically threw it all away save some infrastructure...

@@chrisjohnson4666 Apollo infrastructure was not sustainable financially though, especially with the budget cuts of the early 70s

@@ignacydrozdowicz8107 my point is the budget cuts made no sense and in the end shuttle cost more per launch than moon missions...

I thought it was because we were waiting for Reagan's tax breaks for the rich to trickle back into the IRS via the working class. We're still waiting for that funding.

To be fair the purpose of the Shuttle was a completely different one than the one of Dragon and Starliner. Dragon and Starliner are made to fly to a Leo space station, while the Shuttle could build these stations, and could even return satellites to earth or refuel satellites in orbit. On the other hand a Dragon launch costs a fraction of a Shuttle mission. The Shuttle was expensive and occupied parts of the budget which can be spent now for other things

The shuttle was a joke.

@@bongscott3738 Sir I half to disagree. And please reply back explaining why you feel this way. I look forward to your educated and professional response. Thanks

@@bongscott3738 you could certainly argue it was given it's extremely high launch cost and comparably low cargo capacity but I would still describe it as an overall success given it's achievements. There is a reason the Russians tried to copy it and there is a reason they didn't follow trough with it...

@@bongscott3738 No, I disagree with that assessment. Yes, mistakes were made, in design and operations, but it was a highly capable spacecraft that could do stuff that nothing else, before or since, could do. Also, it was the only spacecraft that looked like a *spaceship*. It was large, could do complex stuff, was manoeuvrable and landed gracefully like an airplane. It just didn't deliver on safety, launch cadence and cost. Without the Freedom space station it also had nowhere to fly to until it flew to Mir and later the ISS. That was unfortunate, call it criminally optimistic if you will - bit it was no joke.

Indeed! 8:45 was, for me, the most astonishing part of this brilliant video, which is itself one of Scott’s most fascinating. He regularly finds new angles and incisive insight into known topics of interest, but in constructing this video he has touched on a whole interesting topic that had never even occurred to me. Also interesting to see that his work draws interest from pros from within the field, such as yourself, as well as quasi-physicists such as myself.

Concorde and the shuttle were both jaw-droppingly beautiful birds that looked like gifts from the future. One day, we'll make something that truly rivals them in aesthetics, but both forever have a special place in my heart.

I've never heard someone say they'd boop the snoot of a plane but I agree

Ultimately it was, unfortunately, a huge waste of money... an idea born in a time when enthusiasm (and thus funding) for spaceflight was seemingly endless brough into the cold hard reality of the post apollo budget cuts. The shuttle as conceived, a fully reuseable space plane, would have been amazing but in the end it became a huge flying compromise built to fulfill a huge list of unnecessary requiremenst and really not doing anything to justify the cost. I mean just look at what the soviets did at the same time: the Salyut stations, the Venera missions, Mir... they even had money left for Energia/Buran, which was simply a better version of the shuttle as it was ultimately built. In the end the Shuttle was a huge weight around NASA's neck, and the agency is definitely better off without it. I will not deny it was cool.

Even though it hasn't flown in a decade, its design is still iconic and will be for years to come. Not gonna lie its upsetting to see fictional spacecraft reference design elements from Space X's dragon and falcon 9 instead of the Shuttle. A big appeal for the Shuttles design to me is that it was purely function over form but still managed to be visually beautiful. Although Dragon is also amazing a lot of it's design feels like cosmetic "sci-fi" elements tacked on.

Reject capsule, return to flying brick!

Sure, you could've kept the Saturn V around and launched multiple Skylab-sized modules to create a nifty gi-hugic station.

ISS 16 modules took 10 years and 30 missions to assemble and carries 6 crew typically whilst the Chinese Tiangong has three modules that was assembled over 18 months and supports 3 people. Definitely don't need a shuttle to build these modular stations.

One advantage of the Shuttle was that it could bring up modules built by other countries without requiring them to have complicated automatic docking systems. Another advantage of the Shuttle was providing efficient work crews. Astronauts could be trained for specific assembly and repair tasks, with training conducted all the way up to shortly before the mission. The crew would then fly up, bringing needed tools, supplies, equipment and in many cases new modules with them, and as a team execute nearly perfectly choregraphed EVA's. And all of this with little to no disruption to ISS crew members who could continue with their scheduled duties. Without the Shuttle, ISS astronauts receive general training, and are sometimes trained for tasks that they might be called on to do during their six-month tour of duty on ISS. It works, but it's a more difficult and less efficient way to do it than it was with the Shuttle. Not saying that the automated method for assembling the U.S. side of the station wouldn't have worked as well or better, just pointing out some advantages of the Shuttle.

don't forget the Shuttle downmass capabilities

@Wolfman I agree that robots and probes can do some things better, but not everything. If you have ever been to a car factory you will have noticed that part of the process lends itself to robotics, mainly everything to do with the body such as stamping out body panels, welding them together, dipping them into baths of corrosion protection, painting them, even installing windshields. But then you notice that when it comes to installing the interior pieces, such as trim panels, carpeting, wiring etc. this is still done by human workers. If these tasks could be easily automated I'm sure the car manufacturers would do so, but when you watch the workers install all of these pieces in an enclosed space you can easily see why those tasks are more easily (and apparently more cheaply) done by humans. It's the same thing with commercial airliners. Contrary to the popular belief that planes can now fly themselves, pilots are still needed. The automated systems are good at some things like keeping the plane flying straight and level for hours at a time, and monitoring the various systems in the plane. But human pilots are better at other things such as managing navigation, dealing with constantly changing ATC requirements, reacting to various types of delays including holding patterns, communication, decisions regarding weather, and maintaining situational awareness of other traffic in the area, not just being aware of their presence (which a computer can also do) but to understand the potential intentions and actions of surrounding traffic and how it might affect your aircraft. But most important is the ability to deal with unforeseen circumstances, which is the bane of any automated system. The story of Qantas Flight 32 is a perfect example. Or US Airways Flight 1549. I think space travel will continue to be a mix of human and automated systems working together. Remote operations of equipment can be very effective, the problem is the time delay between Earth and Mars for example makes this very difficult. One interesting idea is to build a small space station in Mars orbit, where astronauts can remotely control rovers and probe (and helicopters) and other robotic equipment on the Mars surface with miniscule time delay. Flying to Mars is relatively safe, it's landing on Mars that is dangerous. Using this method astronauts would only land on Mars when their presence is needed.

Stories? Anecdotes? And any "dirty laundry" is welcome : )

The problem is they made it and stopped. No incentive to improve or evolve the system. Even when they lost one and needed a replacement they made no effort to evolve or improve the design. That's one of the results of the cost plus system and legacy contractors. Complacency. Now private companies, who have to compete, are motivated to evolve innovate and change things.

Because they were both products of national pride combined with insufficient funding, is the short answer.

The 1970s was the end to push aeronautical and space tech to its limits.

Great optics/ambitions, but the technology just wasn't there yet. All of this is about to change with StarShip!

@@scoremat sigh

And with faster data transfer for better frame rate video cuz the antenna wouldn't have been damaged going back and forth from storage. (I don't know if that's true, but it's always insinuated)

@@petevenuti7355 Season 14 episode 21 of PBS Nova is "Rocky Road to Jupiter." Broadcast 7 April 1987, it covers the problems of the Galileo mission. I'm not sure whether it's available online.

@@Globovoyeur All of Nova is available online, but you may need browser that includes a VPN/Anonymizer to find the peer to peer magnet links... particularly useful for those of us geoblocked

Actually it was just a free flying satellite that Challenger would have released, it would have taken measurements of Halley from Earth orbit, then be retrieved by the crew prior to return to Earth.

The data compression was almost an entire project within a project. Not only did JPL need to devise different types of data compression based on the each type of data, but they need to commandeer the redundant backup spacecraft computer to run the new data compression algorithms. They in essence completely re-architected the spacecraft while in flight to Jupiter while communicating to the spacecraft with a data rate in the kilobit per second data rate. It also needed to be completed and tested before it arrived at Jupiter. Talk about technical and time constrains!!

I thought it was simply 1.07x the nominal thrust. Something like an afterburner, which you can do for a limited time only, before overheating and overloading the components, not at a sustained level. But I really don’t know, you could be right.

It was a lot easier to do that then to rejigger all of their tables and calculations to correspond to the new 100% thrust levels.

The thing is all of the deep space launches were planned for the Shuttle pre-Challenger, and were in fact (as Scott explained) severely kneecapped by the post-Challenger tightening of safety constraints that ruled out Centaur-G.

@@00andJoe Yes but I believe all of them were planned after the o-ring issues were discovered in the late 1970s? From what I remember being told they still built out SLC-6 at Vandenberg for the DoD missions with the hopes that the o-ring issues could be resolved but it was never used.

Sad that a known ring issue was ignored in favor of time line. Once again after Apollo the bean counters and money stealers ruined NASA’s proper engineering programs.

That is true. The shuttle was just one part of the Space Transportation System, which consisted of various stations, ferries, and the Shuttle, to altogether form the beginnings of an actual space infrastructure. Of course Congress would only fund the Shuttle, which is how it came to inherit the STS name. There is a lot of lost potential behind those 3 letters.

damn thats crazy!

+1 to this. I heard about it for the first time 5 years ago, yet no launch of it so far :(

I also asked for this a while back. He mentioned briefly in a video once but a whole video would be amazing!

and the orbit was even designed to bring it back close Earth and, with further corrections, to high Earth orbit and people even gathered everything starting with documentation from NASA and ending with fpga emulating old antenna coding hardware to do that and they managed to communicate with the spacecraft! but propellant tanks are dead :(

You remember correctly!

Although as implied in your message, Spartan Halley would have only observed Halley from Earth orbit, it was not designed to fly to Halley's comet like the spacecraft from other countries. This was also true of the Astro-1 observatory which was scheduled to fly on STS-61-E which would have been the Shuttle mission immediately following Challenger, but that mission was cancelled after the Challenger accident.

If you're talking about what I think you are... these are pre-launch protective covers that are lightweight steel, painted bright candy red so they aren't accidentally left on.

@@GeneCash thanks for that!

Titan IV was just a piece of cobbled together garbage. Let's fling a Centaur and it's payload, with an old ballistic missile strapped between the two highest perfoming solid booster motors ever built. That doesn't make the Shuttle any better.

Unfolding the antenna with the astronauts nearby was the original pre-Challenger plan. The problem was that the post-Challenger Venus-Earth-Earth trajectory took Galileo too close to the sun. It would have overheated. Part of the solution was to add a small sunshade on top and keep the antenna folded behind it. That sacrificed any possibility of astronaut assistance, which as you pointed out would have been nice to have.

@@sealiesoftware That makes a lot of sense! Shame they didn't take the opportunity to do what the shuttle was _really_ good at and launch two shuttle missions with some on-orbit assembly for an extra boost phase engine. It would probably only have doubled the entire price of the Galileo mission. /s

There was also a concern with the Shuttle Centaur/Planetary missions that a loss of vehicle event (explosion) on the pad might exceed the safety margins of the RTG's in the space probe and release radioactive material over the Cape.

Just get a Vulcan or Ariane6 or SLS, if you're really in a hurry, hydrolox upper stage already included

Hydrolox is the only way

Depends how much each costs to build but generally, a dedicated transfer stage would get you more performance. Why would you want to carry 120 tons of extra mass for your 5< ton probe? You have that huge payload bay to carry tons of propellant in lighter tanks for your transfer stage. If you were going to expend a Starship; why not have it throw a probe and a transfer stage together?

@@edki669 SLS is $2 billion, NASA's own figure. The build time is very slow, both are reasons that NASA cancelled plans to launch Gateway components on it and cancelled plans to launch interplanetary probes on it.

The Vinci expander cycle engine from Arianne 6 is what you want for a hydrolox upper stage on Starship, or for that matter SLS. It has about 3 times the thrust of an RL-10, it's not far short of the maximum thrust possible for an expander cycle (there's a limit based on how much the hydrogen can expand).