The cargo bay is 7’x4’ so it seems like you could probably cram someone with a spacesuit in there if you really needed to.
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Where have I seen that before…
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IMHO the fatal mistake of the STS was to combine crews with your heavy cargo lifter. As you said, for crewed vehicles you want something super reliable (which can get expensive) and for heavy cargo you want cheaper. Reusibility is handy for crewed vehicles because of all the expensive hardware involved in making it safe. But if you’re just putting stuff INTO orbit, it is a bit of a waste to ALSO put the hardware to get it back to the ground safely if you don’t need to.
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That may have been me. Purest speculation on my part, but it IS something that you could use wings for, AND it would explain why they didn’t publish the orbital parameteters.
One of the design missions was be able to do a once around polar orbit in case space became a “non-permissive” environment. Say, if the Soviets started shooting down satellites. Or you wanted to steal a satellite and take it back to Earth. Taking off from Vandenberg (Because you can’t go straight North or South from KSC without dropping the external tank on either the US or Cuba) and then landing after one orbit so that you can’t be easily targeted requires bigger wings than some of the alternate shuttle designs. The main reasons that the USAF became disenchanted with the STS were the delays and the cost overruns.
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Speaking of rockets, it’s kind of remarkable how little news coverage the latest Artemis launch attempt is getting. It’s supposed to finally fly tonight and I’m hardly seeing any prominent stories about it. Although this reporter is definitely done with Artemis by now:
Livestream:
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Perhaps carrying experiments that need to be examined back on Earth?
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Part of its proposed “mission” is as a rescue craft, so it may not take much now to fit it up for that.
Allow me to plant this here. (“Marooned” 1969; still bugs me that openings were not plugged or covered over):
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Almost as bad as:
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it definitely distributes many dollars to defense contractors
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This is entirely for cost reasons. Capsules are a lot cheaper. The shuttle, and space planes like it, are incredibly complicated machines with incredibly elaborate maintenance schedules. Not to mention so many points of failure. Essentially what we learned in the shuttle era is that the limited reusability theoretically offered by something that can land itself just isn’t worth it. It was a good idea on paper, but we’ve learned it’s better to save the mass for payload and keep everything simple.
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At the time there were jokes about how the Lunokhod rovers were operated by really small KGB men.
Edit: tyop.
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My favorite part is that the DoD spent so much money building a shuttle launch facility at Vandenberg… only to realize that the sound of the launch reflecting off the nearby hills would probably do wonders to a shuttle that was going to be busy clearing the tower at that moment.
X-33 post-mortum: In late 2013, AFRL near Edwards AFB allowed an employee tour of what was left of the (1/2 scale of Venture Star) X-33 dev spacecraft. It was stored in a hanger near what would have been its EAFB launch site (configured for direct hangar-to-launch pad operation), sadly, with nothing left of the spaceframe but the skeleton of the boattail section and much of the innards (structural members; strain gages; wire bundles; and solenoid valves) associated with what would have been an installed XRS-2200 aka Aerospike engine. The impressive size of the 1/2 scale boattail made it difficult to imagine any aircraft-like spacecraft being twice the size of what we saw in that hangar. The Venture Star would have been absolutely huge.
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The advantage of a space-plane over a capsule is that space-planes typically have a much smoother (ie lower G forces) landing than capsules. Also, it’s somewhat easier to control where it lands, which might account for the entire of the military’s use of the X-37B. The last thing they want is their top-secret experimental payload landing somewhere unfriendly like Cuba or Ohio.
It was first intended as a civilian vehicle, but as the projected costs started adding up, NASA involved the USAF.
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Right? It’s the toxic masculinity answer to all things aesthetic: “Just put teeth on it!”
I have a permanent hand print on my face, because I’ve seen this phenomenon too many times.
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