My hot take: maybe 90% of Shuttle's problems come from always flying crew. A lot of the other metrics like efficiency just don't matter that much if you can fly fast and cheap, and Shuttle really was picking up the pace on flights until its first failure. It would have been way easier to push the state of the art while assuring safety if the significant majority of flights were uncrewed and thus failure-tolerant.
One thing I don't see mentioned much regarding the plane-like Shuttle vs Starship is that the Shuttle needed a runway to land on. This severely limits your choice of landing sites. SpaceX wants to have craft that can go to the Moon and Mars, hence the tail-landing rockets make much more sense. And even if you DID build suitable runways on those planets, it means you are still limited to only those landing sites.
It's going to be a little hard to fly an aerodynamic vehicle on the moon as there's no atmosphere. Mars has a bit of atmosphere, but something like the shuttle would essentially just fall straight down.
@@EagerSpace Exactly! An aerodynamic craft only makes sense when you have an Earth level atmosphere. A small space-plane does make sense for sending crew to an orbital station and return, ala Dreamchaser, but for interplanetary missions you need something else. The relatively low gravity of our current targets also favours VTOL.
I would like to point out that the shuttle payload figures are in addition to a vehicle that carries 7 crew members and all the associated life support and other additional mass that entails. This makes comparisons to other vehicles very difficult because the shuttle was an extremely unique vehicle that gave us very unique capabilities. Downmass capacity we’ve never had before or since (yet), ability to support long duration missions in LEO, SPACEHAB, a platform for a manipulator arm on orbit, supporting construction of the ISS, etc etc etc. Like anything else, the STS was a huge conglomeration of compromises, and one could argue a fundamentally flawed design, but at the the end of the day it enabled an incredible amount of science through its operational career.
The ability to carry crew was quite useful. But because shuttle was inherently a crewed vehicle and it was the only game in town, that led to numerous missions that carried crew when crew wasn't inherently required. Shuttle C is somewhere in the range of 45-75 tons, which means NASA could have done ISS assembly in far fewer flights with far less risk to crew. So, yes, spacelab missions were useful, LDEF was quite useful, and they were both enabled by the uniqueness of shuttle. But many others would have been just fine on a big expendable rocket.
@@EagerSpace Imagine if the central truss could have been built in just three or four missions instead of ten. It would have made the station fully operational nearly four years sooner and at a much lower cost.
You perfectly summarise the main reasons why I hated the shuttle - it looks like they started with a solution and went backwards to see how it would work - decided to do a spaceplane no matter what, and made every possible compromise only to make it work. What was the problem to have just a reuseable lander and a first stage and expendable cargo section? Why do you need to boost 100tons + just for 20-30 tons of cargo? Heck , even the Buran looks better/safer/simpler with a self contained first stage. Btw is it just me or tail landers simplify everything? I remmember in KSP for me it was much easier to make an SSTO as a tail lander rather than a spaceplane because it was easier to ballance. Of course I had to use autopilot to land, since monkeybrains don't like taillanders.
@@concretedonkey4726 The money from the department of defense depended on meeting their requirements to launch a spysat and land immediately (thus cross range and thus large wings) and you can guess what they wanted with returning payloads. The shuttle design story is famous, plenty of videos about it.
@@concretedonkey4726 USAF mission of intercepting Soviet satellites or retrieve our own within 1 orbit mission was what got Shuttle built. Overly optimistic, even impossible mission profile. But serious, real money.
I Wonder if you could design a hydrogen powered starship (stage 2 only) in such a way that once on the way to mars, a portion of the hydrogen tank could be re-used as living space. Thus reducing the penalty of having larger tanks.
The problem with that is that tanks are just big empty spaces. You need insulation, radiation and micrometeoroid protection, power, lighting, ventilation, and other services. NASA looked at repurposing space shuttle main tanks in low earth orbit but couldn't come up with a way to make it feasible.
A very good and informative discussion coupled with good video production. Well done. I mention that you did not; however, address the main topic of your essay: Is Satarship actually Space Shuttle 2.0? Furthermore, I would argue that many if your assertions about NASA were not supportable facts but merely opinions. A comparison of sizes, volumes and specific impulse was what I hoped to see in your production based upon the title.
I have stoke on my list to talk about. They're ignoring my assertion that you can't do something big with a capsule, and that makes me happy. But it's not clear to me yet how well it will work. As for scalability, I have no idea right now...
Space shuttle 2 should’ve been a spaceplane with a nuclear engine and a few small methane ones for landing on the moon and solid rocket boosters for the first stage.
One important similarity is also the complexity. Both systems are over complex. And in the end this caused the shuttle accidents. And the Starship is even more complex, just have got a look at the way it is expected to land.
I think the things that irk me most about the way people talk about the Starship is very similar to how people used to talk about Shuttle. Lowering the cost to orbit drastically, letting regular people fly into space en mass, being safe and reliable, high launch rate. The cost to launch a kilo to orbit on Shuttle was estimated to be 22 times lower than it actually ended up being. Regular people did fly but not many. Early shuttle was about a 1 in 25 LOC, later ones more like 1 in 90. (Apollo was about a 1 in 9, and Crew Dragon a 1 in 270) Hindsight has this tricky ability to make you feel smarter than people in the past
I met an Apollo engineer personally who left the program when he saw the shuttle plans because he could tell it wasn’t sound. It was more than hindsight. There was clearly hubris in the design
@@JayVal90 One of the findings of the Challenger Disaster investigation was all those exact engineers leaving and their knowledge also going with them.
Shuttle was a "let's save NASA jobs, NASA centers, and contractor jobs" program. They did make projections about flight rate and cost that I would term "laughable", and it's not clear to me how many people believed it even at the time. But it accomplished the goals they cared about, and that's why congress supported in for 30 years. Same reason congress loves SLS. Early shuttle was 1 in 12 LOC for the first four flights, 1 in 10 after the pulled out the injector seats. We don't have real numbers on Apollo because NASA stopped doing PRA studies when the numbers they go back early were so pessimistic (and, in hindsight, quite wrong). I talked about that in my "you're gonna kill astronauts" video. It's certainly true that is a lot of irrational exuberance about Starship and a lack of real data around costs. And a lack of appreciation that "cost" does not mean "price". But the goals are different than congressional goals - SpaceX does not care about spreading the money around and they have a good track record.
I think there is a very key difference (and a few other important differences) that lend themselves towards Starship and not Shuttle. First and foremost, Starship does not require crew, and will most commonly fly without people. That is a straight savings just from the reduction in logistics, but the big deal there is that the Starship design can be iterated safely, and we've seen SpaceX's ability to iterate an alright design into an industry leading design with Falcon 9 (though the starting design does need to be solid enough, can't iterate Falcon 9 into Neutron, for example). Starship can prove its safety not with calculations, but by actually launching and landing time and time again with no risk to crew (because they aren't onboard). Other important differences include not being Shuttle. As in, SpaceX can look at Shuttle and take lessons learned (like not mounting your heat shield *next* to a debris creating structure). Also, SpaceX has every incentive to reduce cost and increase reliability and flight rate, in order to maximize revenue. NASA had no such incentive structure. Will Starship reach its goals? That is far from certain, but it is set up for success much better than Shuttle was. NASA may have had a good track record with the success of Apollo, but it did not have a track record for affordability, reusability, high flight rate, or a simple enough spacecraft ordinary people could fly to space. SpaceX has a good track record in all those things already with Falcon 9 (and to a limited extent Dragon, flying ordinary people). That bodes well.
@@bwjclego I agree with all of this. I talk about it in my other videos, but the key goal for shuttle was to keep NASA centers open, keep NASA managers employed, and keep money flowing to contractors. For that they needed a big program that would get a lot of stuff moving rather than a research program - more like an X plane - and that's why they did all the design and committed to building 4 shuttles before they had flown any. Shuttle *probably* could have flown without crew, though the early landing software wasn't very good. Buran did it. Unfortunately, that wouldn't make the astronauts happy and that would have reduced the uniqueness of shuttle and probably reduced support.
The Space Shuttle was more like a one and two half stage design. Yes, that is nonsense, mathematically. If it had been one and a half, the external tank would reach orbit. The OMS engines are the true upper (half) stage.
Also, the payload doors did provide *some* structural rigidity when closed. This was actually a concern with the design, as a failure in enough latching mechanisms could result in a loss of the vehicle either during reentry or during the flare maneuver just before landing. Because of that, NASA had contingency measures for astronauts to perform an EVA and latch them manually.
@@pseudotasuki I always assume that the latching requirement wasn't because of rigidity but because of aerodynamics - if the doors end up out in the airstream you would have a very bad day.
The external tank could reach orbit - NASA did a bunch of studies on what could be done with ETs in orbit and even offered them to commercial companies for free, but nothing came from it. and I would argue that it's the stage that makes the stage, now the engines it used. Mostly because that supports my perspective.
It's a external expandable tank such a bad solution? If its really cheap don't matter if you throw away each time, and simpler is better could apply to the current starship design, because obviously isn't as simpler than could be.
But what benefit would it be to a design like Starship? The Shuttle external tank was introduced to drive down the size of the orbiter and its wings, and the weight of the TPS, while at the same time keeping the engines onto the orbiter to be recovered (engines are always the most expensive component). You suggest a smaller Starship that only contains a payload bay and the engine/thrust section. It would still be a cylinder but shorter. You still need as many engines to bring it + the expendable tank to orbit, but now you have less TPS and less structural mass so you land on only one single raptor, which probably needs to throttle down more deeply. In addition, the expendable tank needs to be arranged not to increase drag during ascent, be in a convenient position for engine plumbing, and not interfere with payload or crew operations. Not to mention the issue of production rate, Shuttle could physically not fly more than 24 times a year because that's how many new tanks they could build (not that it ever came close to that) It sounds to me like an expendable tank would make starship MORE complicated on the contrary, for absolutely no tangible benefit EDIT: spelling
For SpaceX, their optimal lowest cost for a reused Falcon 9 launch they've given is $15 million, of which $10 million is the production of the second stage. Aerospace grade building is expensive, and if you're throwing chunks of it away every flight, that can become a serious limiter in how low you can get your cost.
@@zeevtarantov not so fun fact: adjusting for inflation, the shuttle external tank actually cost about as much to make as you would pay for a completely expended Falcon Heavy launch.
@@giuliodondi the external thanks for space shuttle was a logical choice because of the lower density of the hydrogen(that part of my comment was only about that statement that a external thank was somehow a obstacle for space shuttle being successful), but starship can be simpler than it is and don't have a external thank, should be shorter but wider and have heat shield beneath not on the side, and that would save mass because the current heatshild cover a humongous 750 square meters with ceramic tile, actually you only need one square meter for 500-1000 kg of spacecraft at re-entry from earth orbit in, so actually 14 meters diameter at base would be enough for 100+ tons vehicle, and without header thanks and flaps would have a simpler plumbing and design that current version , obviously that would be a different types of vehicle at least the upper stage, but you don't need the upper stage to be a long cylinder you can choose any other form that fit with the purpose, and the purpose is to make it better and cheaper.
I like many of your vids, but there are too many accolades for the Elon Musk/Starship buffoonery! Starship will never be a productive spacecraft the way it is currently configured. They are also well behind schedule and well over budget for the goals they have committed to and have been paid for. As you often allude, Starship weighs too much for the goal of reusability robustness, and then the added mass of the fuel needed for that robustness and its return to launch site is prohibitive. And NASA figured all that out 40-50 years ago. I am unimpressed with either the goals or the methodologies of SpaceX, and particularly with their Starship program. I think the facts as you lay them out justifies my opinion. The timelines from SpaceX have not aged well.
I generally delete comments that include name calling, so consider this a warning... *Nobody* ever hits their schedules even for projects where there is a lot of prior art, and starship is something that has little prior art, and is therefore very hard to schedule.
My hot take: maybe 90% of Shuttle's problems come from always flying crew.
A lot of the other metrics like efficiency just don't matter that much if you can fly fast and cheap, and Shuttle really was picking up the pace on flights until its first failure. It would have been way easier to push the state of the art while assuring safety if the significant majority of flights were uncrewed and thus failure-tolerant.
I’d argue Buran was shuttle v2, so maybe starship is v3?
I can see that...
One thing I don't see mentioned much regarding the plane-like Shuttle vs Starship is that the Shuttle needed a runway to land on. This severely limits your choice of landing sites. SpaceX wants to have craft that can go to the Moon and Mars, hence the tail-landing rockets make much more sense. And even if you DID build suitable runways on those planets, it means you are still limited to only those landing sites.
It's going to be a little hard to fly an aerodynamic vehicle on the moon as there's no atmosphere.
Mars has a bit of atmosphere, but something like the shuttle would essentially just fall straight down.
@@EagerSpace Exactly! An aerodynamic craft only makes sense when you have an Earth level atmosphere. A small space-plane does make sense for sending crew to an orbital station and return, ala Dreamchaser, but for interplanetary missions you need something else.
The relatively low gravity of our current targets also favours VTOL.
I would like to point out that the shuttle payload figures are in addition to a vehicle that carries 7 crew members and all the associated life support and other additional mass that entails. This makes comparisons to other vehicles very difficult because the shuttle was an extremely unique vehicle that gave us very unique capabilities. Downmass capacity we’ve never had before or since (yet), ability to support long duration missions in LEO, SPACEHAB, a platform for a manipulator arm on orbit, supporting construction of the ISS, etc etc etc.
Like anything else, the STS was a huge conglomeration of compromises, and one could argue a fundamentally flawed design, but at the the end of the day it enabled an incredible amount of science through its operational career.
The ability to carry crew was quite useful. But because shuttle was inherently a crewed vehicle and it was the only game in town, that led to numerous missions that carried crew when crew wasn't inherently required. Shuttle C is somewhere in the range of 45-75 tons, which means NASA could have done ISS assembly in far fewer flights with far less risk to crew.
So, yes, spacelab missions were useful, LDEF was quite useful, and they were both enabled by the uniqueness of shuttle. But many others would have been just fine on a big expendable rocket.
I'd call that an advantage if it was optional.
@@EagerSpace Imagine if the central truss could have been built in just three or four missions instead of ten. It would have made the station fully operational nearly four years sooner and at a much lower cost.
Great explanation, and nice placement of Starship in the context of how to do address the issues thatvthe shuttle faced!
Cool video but i want to point out that the shuttles maximum payload to LEO was 65,000 pounds which is something like 29.5 tonnes
You perfectly summarise the main reasons why I hated the shuttle - it looks like they started with a solution and went backwards to see how it would work - decided to do a spaceplane no matter what, and made every possible compromise only to make it work. What was the problem to have just a reuseable lander and a first stage and expendable cargo section? Why do you need to boost 100tons + just for 20-30 tons of cargo? Heck , even the Buran looks better/safer/simpler with a self contained first stage. Btw is it just me or tail landers simplify everything? I remmember in KSP for me it was much easier to make an SSTO as a tail lander rather than a spaceplane because it was easier to ballance. Of course I had to use autopilot to land, since monkeybrains don't like taillanders.
The shuttle was supposed to be able to bring payloads back. And launch and land after only a single orbit.
@@zeevtarantov that is very cool but I don't see why , the expected orbital station would not require it, and even that didn't happen
@@concretedonkey4726 The money from the department of defense depended on meeting their requirements to launch a spysat and land immediately (thus cross range and thus large wings) and you can guess what they wanted with returning payloads. The shuttle design story is famous, plenty of videos about it.
@@zeevtarantov thx , I've seen a lot , missed the part about the returning with the sat ... I guess the military screwed everything then.
@@concretedonkey4726 USAF mission of intercepting Soviet satellites or retrieve our own within 1 orbit mission was what got Shuttle built. Overly optimistic, even impossible mission profile. But serious, real money.
Excellent video! Something I always had in mind but you put in words perfectly!
I Wonder if you could design a hydrogen powered starship (stage 2 only) in such a way that once on the way to mars, a portion of the hydrogen tank could be re-used as living space. Thus reducing the penalty of having larger tanks.
The problem with that is that tanks are just big empty spaces. You need insulation, radiation and micrometeoroid protection, power, lighting, ventilation, and other services.
NASA looked at repurposing space shuttle main tanks in low earth orbit but couldn't come up with a way to make it feasible.
A very good and informative discussion coupled with good video production. Well done. I mention that you did not; however, address the main topic of your essay: Is Satarship actually Space Shuttle 2.0? Furthermore, I would argue that many if your assertions about NASA were not supportable facts but merely opinions. A comparison of sizes, volumes and specific impulse was what I hoped to see in your production based upon the title.
If you don't reuse.the tank no big issue because the tank is simple. however, shuttle was never good for cargo but good for crew and work.
What about STOKE aerospace approach? How scalable is that?
Yeah, good question...
I have stoke on my list to talk about. They're ignoring my assertion that you can't do something big with a capsule, and that makes me happy. But it's not clear to me yet how well it will work.
As for scalability, I have no idea right now...
Space shuttle 2 should’ve been a spaceplane with a nuclear engine and a few small methane ones for landing on the moon and solid rocket boosters for the first stage.
How would you deal with the very high radioactivity when it comes back to earth?
@@EagerSpace What if they put the engine in the cargo bay?
watching thia after IFT 2
I really like those hibrid russian space planes, MAKS the name i think
One important similarity is also the complexity. Both systems are over complex. And in the end this caused the shuttle accidents. And the Starship is even more complex, just have got a look at the way it is expected to land.
How starship lands doesn't add mechanical complexity, it reduces it.
By the final logic of this video, Falcon 9 is also Shuttle 2.0 in the same sense Starship is.
But Falcon 9 doesn't have a fully reusable second stage
@@iOhadRubin it's shuttle, but upside-down
I think the things that irk me most about the way people talk about the Starship is very similar to how people used to talk about Shuttle.
Lowering the cost to orbit drastically, letting regular people fly into space en mass, being safe and reliable, high launch rate.
The cost to launch a kilo to orbit on Shuttle was estimated to be 22 times lower than it actually ended up being.
Regular people did fly but not many.
Early shuttle was about a 1 in 25 LOC, later ones more like 1 in 90. (Apollo was about a 1 in 9, and Crew Dragon a 1 in 270)
Hindsight has this tricky ability to make you feel smarter than people in the past
I met an Apollo engineer personally who left the program when he saw the shuttle plans because he could tell it wasn’t sound. It was more than hindsight. There was clearly hubris in the design
@@JayVal90 One of the findings of the Challenger Disaster investigation was all those exact engineers leaving and their knowledge also going with them.
Shuttle was a "let's save NASA jobs, NASA centers, and contractor jobs" program. They did make projections about flight rate and cost that I would term "laughable", and it's not clear to me how many people believed it even at the time. But it accomplished the goals they cared about, and that's why congress supported in for 30 years. Same reason congress loves SLS.
Early shuttle was 1 in 12 LOC for the first four flights, 1 in 10 after the pulled out the injector seats. We don't have real numbers on Apollo because NASA stopped doing PRA studies when the numbers they go back early were so pessimistic (and, in hindsight, quite wrong). I talked about that in my "you're gonna kill astronauts" video.
It's certainly true that is a lot of irrational exuberance about Starship and a lack of real data around costs. And a lack of appreciation that "cost" does not mean "price". But the goals are different than congressional goals - SpaceX does not care about spreading the money around and they have a good track record.
I think there is a very key difference (and a few other important differences) that lend themselves towards Starship and not Shuttle. First and foremost, Starship does not require crew, and will most commonly fly without people. That is a straight savings just from the reduction in logistics, but the big deal there is that the Starship design can be iterated safely, and we've seen SpaceX's ability to iterate an alright design into an industry leading design with Falcon 9 (though the starting design does need to be solid enough, can't iterate Falcon 9 into Neutron, for example). Starship can prove its safety not with calculations, but by actually launching and landing time and time again with no risk to crew (because they aren't onboard).
Other important differences include not being Shuttle. As in, SpaceX can look at Shuttle and take lessons learned (like not mounting your heat shield *next* to a debris creating structure). Also, SpaceX has every incentive to reduce cost and increase reliability and flight rate, in order to maximize revenue. NASA had no such incentive structure.
Will Starship reach its goals? That is far from certain, but it is set up for success much better than Shuttle was. NASA may have had a good track record with the success of Apollo, but it did not have a track record for affordability, reusability, high flight rate, or a simple enough spacecraft ordinary people could fly to space. SpaceX has a good track record in all those things already with Falcon 9 (and to a limited extent Dragon, flying ordinary people). That bodes well.
@@bwjclego I agree with all of this. I talk about it in my other videos, but the key goal for shuttle was to keep NASA centers open, keep NASA managers employed, and keep money flowing to contractors. For that they needed a big program that would get a lot of stuff moving rather than a research program - more like an X plane - and that's why they did all the design and committed to building 4 shuttles before they had flown any.
Shuttle *probably* could have flown without crew, though the early landing software wasn't very good. Buran did it.
Unfortunately, that wouldn't make the astronauts happy and that would have reduced the uniqueness of shuttle and probably reduced support.
The Space Shuttle was more like a one and two half stage design. Yes, that is nonsense, mathematically. If it had been one and a half, the external tank would reach orbit. The OMS engines are the true upper (half) stage.
Also, the payload doors did provide *some* structural rigidity when closed. This was actually a concern with the design, as a failure in enough latching mechanisms could result in a loss of the vehicle either during reentry or during the flare maneuver just before landing. Because of that, NASA had contingency measures for astronauts to perform an EVA and latch them manually.
@@pseudotasuki I always assume that the latching requirement wasn't because of rigidity but because of aerodynamics - if the doors end up out in the airstream you would have a very bad day.
The external tank could reach orbit - NASA did a bunch of studies on what could be done with ETs in orbit and even offered them to commercial companies for free, but nothing came from it.
and I would argue that it's the stage that makes the stage, now the engines it used. Mostly because that supports my perspective.
It's a external expandable tank such a bad solution? If its really cheap don't matter if you throw away each time, and simpler is better could apply to the current starship design, because obviously isn't as simpler than could be.
But what benefit would it be to a design like Starship?
The Shuttle external tank was introduced to drive down the size of the orbiter and its wings, and the weight of the TPS, while at the same time keeping the engines onto the orbiter to be recovered (engines are always the most expensive component).
You suggest a smaller Starship that only contains a payload bay and the engine/thrust section. It would still be a cylinder but shorter. You still need as many engines to bring it + the expendable tank to orbit, but now you have less TPS and less structural mass so you land on only one single raptor, which probably needs to throttle down more deeply.
In addition, the expendable tank needs to be arranged not to increase drag during ascent, be in a convenient position for engine plumbing, and not interfere with payload or crew operations.
Not to mention the issue of production rate, Shuttle could physically not fly more than 24 times a year because that's how many new tanks they could build (not that it ever came close to that)
It sounds to me like an expendable tank would make starship MORE complicated on the contrary, for absolutely no tangible benefit
EDIT: spelling
For SpaceX, their optimal lowest cost for a reused Falcon 9 launch they've given is $15 million, of which $10 million is the production of the second stage.
Aerospace grade building is expensive, and if you're throwing chunks of it away every flight, that can become a serious limiter in how low you can get your cost.
Indeed, I don't think it's the expendable external tank that made Shuttle so expensive.
@@zeevtarantov not so fun fact: adjusting for inflation, the shuttle external tank actually cost about as much to make as you would pay for a completely expended Falcon Heavy launch.
@@giuliodondi the external thanks for space shuttle was a logical choice because of the lower density of the hydrogen(that part of my comment was only about that statement that a external thank was somehow a obstacle for space shuttle being successful), but starship can be simpler than it is and don't have a external thank, should be shorter but wider and have heat shield beneath not on the side, and that would save mass because the current heatshild cover a humongous 750 square meters with ceramic tile, actually you only need one square meter for 500-1000 kg of spacecraft at re-entry from earth orbit in, so actually 14 meters diameter at base would be enough for 100+ tons vehicle, and without header thanks and flaps would have a simpler plumbing and design that current version , obviously that would be a different types of vehicle at least the upper stage, but you don't need the upper stage to be a long cylinder you can choose any other form that fit with the purpose, and the purpose is to make it better and cheaper.
I like many of your vids, but there are too many accolades for the Elon Musk/Starship buffoonery! Starship will never be a productive spacecraft the way it is currently configured. They are also well behind schedule and well over budget for the goals they have committed to and have been paid for. As you often allude, Starship weighs too much for the goal of reusability robustness, and then the added mass of the fuel needed for that robustness and its return to launch site is prohibitive. And NASA figured all that out 40-50 years ago. I am unimpressed with either the goals or the methodologies of SpaceX, and particularly with their Starship program. I think the facts as you lay them out justifies my opinion. The timelines from SpaceX have not aged well.
I generally delete comments that include name calling, so consider this a warning...
*Nobody* ever hits their schedules even for projects where there is a lot of prior art, and starship is something that has little prior art, and is therefore very hard to schedule.