Yes, and even if you could make it go further, by not dropping the EFT and refueling it in orbit somehow, it would still be a stupid fucking idea to push around all that useless wing and heat tile mass in space.
That’s why the original plan for the STS before Nixon cut it to the bone was for the shuttle to dock at a low earth orbit station where crew and supplies would transfer to a completely different vehicle, a nuclear engine wingless lightweight vehicle never intended to enter an atmosphere, which would take them to a station in lunar orbit, where they would transfer again to a dedicated lander vehicle.
Also, the Shuttle was supposed to have smaller wings, a fully reusable EFT, and no solid boosters. The recognizable Shuttle profile we see in For All Mankind was directly a consequence of the cuts to the Shuttle program because NASA had to go to the DoD for funding to complete the project at all, and the Air Force demanded enough wing area to glide back to US territory after a single polar orbit in order to snatch Soviet satellites out of space, as well as a much larger cargo space than NASA had originally designed for.
And the SRBs were a grift giveaway to one Congressman who had the SRB manufacturer in his district. They should never have been part of a human-rated launch system.
So seeing the familiar Shuttle design in the For All Mankind timeline is already incoherent, but seeing that familiar design in lunar orbit is completely ridiculous.
Dream Chaser is what the shuttle should have been all along, and if our government hadn’t gutted its own ability to do things in the 1970s and 80s we could have replaced the Shuttle in the 90s or 00s with something like it.
Yes, and even if you could make it go further, by not dropping the EFT and refueling it in orbit somehow, it would still be a stupid fucking idea to push around all that useless wing and heat tile mass in space.
That’s why the original plan for the STS before Nixon cut it to the bone was for the shuttle to dock at a low earth orbit station where crew and supplies would transfer to a completely different vehicle, a nuclear engine wingless lightweight vehicle never intended to enter an atmosphere, which would take them to a station in lunar orbit, where they would transfer again to a dedicated lander vehicle.
Also, the Shuttle was supposed to have smaller wings, a fully reusable EFT, and no solid boosters. The recognizable Shuttle profile we see in For All Mankind was directly a consequence of the cuts to the Shuttle program because NASA had to go to the DoD for funding to complete the project at all, and the Air Force demanded enough wing area to glide back to US territory after a single polar orbit in order to snatch Soviet satellites out of space, as well as a much larger cargo space than NASA had originally designed for.
And the SRBs were a grift giveaway to one Congressman who had the SRB manufacturer in his district. They should never have been part of a human-rated launch system.
So seeing the familiar Shuttle design in the For All Mankind timeline is already incoherent, but seeing that familiar design in lunar orbit is completely ridiculous.
Dream Chaser is what the shuttle should have been all along, and if our government hadn’t gutted its own ability to do things in the 1970s and 80s we could have replaced the Shuttle in the 90s or 00s with something like it.
The North American DC-3 is what the shuttle should have been all along. Fully reusable, no solid boosters, reasonable size wings.
And most importantly, intended to be only one part of a larger space infrastructure so it’s not a bus to nowhere.
Yeah that’s the most realistic one, although I want to live in the universe where we got the VentureStar.
Earth SSTOs are bazinga bullshit tbh. Even skyhooks are more plausible.
Nonsense! You just need a large enough fuel tank!
That VentureStar engine has a lower Isp than the SSME
What’s an EFT?
External fuel tank, the big red bottle of rocket fuel the shuttle is strapped to