this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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74
TIL former director of NASA said the Shuttle is what kept us from being on Mars (archive.ph)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

There wasn’t the public interest or unlimited cash that the Apollo program had to work with, so this was never going to realistically happen in the 80s or 90s, shuttle or not.

Given the technology, there’s no way that we’d have gotten the relatively quick sugar rush like we did for the Moon landings; it’d have been a long, very hard, and very, very expensive slog to get people there.

There’s approximately a zero percent chance that the level of public enthusiasm for such an endeavor would have supported the amount of money and effort needed to make it happen.

Heck, we even cut the Apollo program short because the public quickly got bored with it once we had the big shiny.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago

There wasn’t realistically the public interest or unlimited cash that the Apollo program had to work with, so this was never going to realistically happen in the 80s or 90s, shuttle or not.

Given the technology, there’s no way that we’d have gotten the relatively quick sugar rush like we did for the Moon landings; it’d have been a long, very hard, and very, very expensive slog to get people there.

There’s approximately a zero percent chance that the level of public enthusiasm for such an endeavor would have supported the amount of money and effort needed to make it happen.

Heck, we even cut the Apollo program short because the public quickly got bored with it once we had the big shiny.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ah yes. Nothing like a little gross oversimplification to generate headlines.

If the shuttle didn't exist, there are still a thousand things that would have had to go in a different direction to get a viable Mars program in the 80s and 90s. Not the least of which being that without the shuttle, and before the ISS, we would have no CLUE how to actually live in space for long periods of time.

So if we take it that we can't go to Mars without learning how to live in space for extended durations. And we take it that in order to learn how to live in space we need to have a long duration presence there, like the ISS.

What exactly do people think was necessary to build the ISS.....

You're right boys and girls....it was the SPACE SHUTTLE.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

From Wikipedia:

Mir was the first continuously inhabited long-term research station in orbit and held the record for the longest continuous human presence in space at 3,644 days, until it was surpassed by the ISS on 23 October 2010

We could have managed without the shuttle.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Still required a shuttle, just not necessarily NASA's shuttle(s).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

What are you talking about? The only part of Mir not launched on a Proton-K was a docking module brought up by, yes, shuttle so that a shuttle could dock to the station and American astronauts could learn about long duration spaceflight from the Russians.

Shuttles weren't required for the construction of Mir, just as China is now constructing its space station without the use of a shuttle.

The idea that shuttles are or were required to learn about long duration space flight is simply wrong

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

To answer your question, I don't know what I'm taking about, clearly!

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Yeah i'd believe that. The more i read about the shuttle program the more it seems we were sending people to space in giant metal sarcophagi seemingly held together in duct tape.

Not that reusable spacecraft wasn't a marvel of engineering, but it quickly becomes apparent that NASA was missing out on the funding they had back during the Race.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago (1 children)

NASA wanted to do a lot more after Apollo but was told absolutely no way by Congress. The shuttles we got were a leftover fragment of the grand plan that would definitely have gotten us into the category of a spacefaring civilization. Assuming all went well, of course. It's possible we would have had Challenger/Columbia level disasters even if the money was there. Ad astra per aspera.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

There really aren't any simple counterfactual historical arguments to be made.

I have a fairly strong feeling that, of the various shuttle variants studied, the majority of them would have at least been vulnerable to a Columbia level disaster.

Plus, the shuttle was very much overweight and there were a lot of nasty compromises there, so I kinda wonder that if they'd gone for broke with the two stage reusable designs that they'd have ended up just getting cancelled because the more reusable things are, the colder the equations. So you can't even really treat the earlier proposals as something that might have worked out better. There are things that no amount of money can make work. Like faster-than-light travel without a fundamental reassessment of physics.

And then a lot of the things in the late-70s-early-80s vision wouldn't have worked out. There was a giant Microwave Radiometer Satellite project that they were cooking on with a giant antenna with a radius of 1150m. Eventually that survey was completed with a much smaller synthetic aperture radio that sat in the shuttle's cargo bay and today there are lots of tiny SAR survey satellites.

There was another giant geosynchronous dish antenna that was supposed to be a single cell phone satellite for all of the continental US. That was overall a bad idea, Iridium did a better version with less lag in lower orbits, and now we've got Starlink and some new competitors coming online and, overall, cell coverage is actually pretty great with conventional towers.

Then again, here's this paper from 1973. See, the shuttle ended up with a reusable second stage the conventional wisdom was that the second stage is always the expensive one so therefore make that reusable and the first stage can basically be a steel pipe with propellant poured into it and everything's fine and the bulk doesn't matter. Thus, only a madman would reuse the first stage. Which is why they were proposing putting parachutes on the Redstone rockets that Mercury used for reuse but never bothered. But, see, they were going to build this two-stage reusable rocket but wanted to preserve the option of launching large bulky cargo... yeah.