[mbenjaminsmith]

I think it's generally agreed upon that the Space Shuttle program was needlessly wasteful and more PR- than science-driven. A heavy space plane has zero advantages over a capsule for most work done in LEO. It's good to see this renewed focus on more practical designs.

(If that's incorrect and you're qualified to correct me please do.)

Having said that, the name Starliner writes a check that a manned capsule won't ever be able to cash. This is the first time I've heard of Boeing's Starliner and it got me really, really excited until I pulled up a picture of it. They really should have picked a less grandiose name.

[grinich]

Shuttle flew a decent number of missions for the National Reconnaissance Office, conducting secret experiments and deploying spy satellites. Most of the missions are still classified, but many folks have said the military needs drove the design of the Shuttle program. There are pretty obvious advantages to a spaceplane if your goals include capture of enemy satellites. http://www.space.com/34522-secret-shuttle-missions.html

It turns out a lot of science space research is heavily driven by military space presence. For example, Hubble has a 2.4m mirror because there was already a factory making that size for dozens of spy satellite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen

And ever heard of "The Dish" at Stanford? It's a 150-foot radio telescope the US Air Force funded during the Cold War to ostensibly "study the chemical composition of the atmosphere." Total BS. The Air Force built it to intercept signals from Soviet radar systems after they bounced off the moon.

(Thankfully Stanford got to keep it and it's been used for hundreds of projects since then.)

[kabdib]

Regarding Hubble, the intelligence community knew of significant design flaws in Hubble based on their experience with similar hardware, and did not communicate the problems to the Hubble team, for security reasons. This was much more about solar array flex and the Southern Magnetic Anomaly (high radiation zone that is often transited by Hubble, and which tends to crash the processors running the scope); the mirror flaw wasn't known by the TLAs.

The book _The Hubble Wars_, which describes most of this, made me pretty angry that an important scientific instrument was nearly crippled by the "national security" mindset.

[creshal]

Retrieval of objects in space and bringing them back to Earth is about the only mission where the Space Shuttle was superior to capsule designs. This was also used in a handful of science missions for studying long-term exposure of various materials.

But the vast majority of the Shuttle's 130 flights would have been better served by an Apollo or Gemini derived design.

[peteboyd]

Keep in mind it was NOT an all or nothing proposition for using the Shuttle. We launched satellites while the shuttle was running using Titan, Atlas, and Delta rockets. I would imagine if it was more cost efficient to use those rockets, they would have done so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Titan_launches and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V

[maxerickson]

There's a difference between the shuttle being used for certain missions and the shuttle being necessary for those missions.

(and then going up a level, whether those missions were necessary to establish those capabilities or if different missions would have been used in the absence of the shuttle)

[akiselev]

> (If that's incorrect and you're qualified to correct me please do.)

You're not wrong but there are some nuances. The original design for the shuttle was very different from what was ultimately built because when the Shuttle program funding was in jeopardy the Air Force was brought in and they forced the design to change to meet their needs. The shuttle got bigger and added the external fuel tank, almost entirely crippling the shuttle's reusability.

By far the most negative impact on the shuttle was the massive reduction in space flights from the he original proposal due to budget cuts and Congressional politicking. The average cost per flight was something on the order of $1.8 billion but most of that was fixed overhead and a lot of that overhead was the consequence of the Air Force redesign. If the shuttle were funded independently as originally planned, it would have cost a lot less to fly and with enough flights it would have been significantly more cost effective. Whether NASA could make it as cheap as rockets is unclear but it's not impossible that they could have brought it within a factor of two.

However, it's also unclear to me whether we could have pulled off something like the Hubble telescope repair with a rocket and pods.

[msl]

One thing that the Space Shuttle had going for it was that it could be used as a Canadarm[1] platform. Bringing the arm back home in one piece was handy, and the orbiter's huge mass probably made it easier to reason about the physics involved.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadarm

[Retric]

It's important to note the space shuttle was a poor design in large part because it added a lot of cargo on a man rated system. 1 failure to achieve orbit in 135 missions is an outstanding record, but very wasteful when sending cargo. A capsule seems better in large part because it does not.

Further, if the shuttle was only sending people to orbit it's design could be both reusable and vastly simpler because of vastly lower rentry temperatures and more redundancy.

[PerfectDlite]

> I think it's generally agreed upon that the Space Shuttle program was needlessly wasteful and more PR- than science-driven.

Soviets decided to replicate it. So even if it was PR, it was a good PR - it managed to trick USSR to waste quite an effort.

[mikeash]

Considering that the Buran program was much less active and only had a single launch, the ROI on that wastage seems like it would have been rather low.

[mynameisvlad]

Maybe *liner will be the new naming scheme for Boeing?

[klausa]

Two next Boeing aircrafts don't have such names, although they are essentially modifications of existing ones (737 MAX and 777X).