This ambitious shuttle orbiter concept was a post-Apollo pipe dream we never got. (via thedrive)
, there’s no saying Rockwell’s shuttle and booster plan couldn’t have happened. Unfortunately, however, the idea was doomed from the beginning.After the moon landings began in 1969, the question of what we could do next was on everybody’s minds. The possibilities appeared endless. Going to the far reaches of our solar system, creating a permanent moonbase, and more all felt like distinct realities. Within the United States government, though, the will to fund these programs was drying up.
The Space Shuttle we wound up with was a hybrid and, due to a set of unavoidable constraints, not a very good one. The orbiter itself was reusable and only the relatively cheap liquid fuel tank would be totally destroyed as a part of the launch process; however, in order to secure funding, the project had to use existing, known-quantity technology. The result was low upfront costs but high ongoing maintenance costs.
This first orbiter design was based heavily upon a concept done by the aforementioned aerospace genius Maxime Faget. Its straight-wing layout later proved to be impractical for reentry; however, Rockwell created it anyway, allegedly in an attempt to curry favor with NASA leadership, where Faget had a fair amount of influence. Much of the later technical art was based on the more feasible delta wing version of this craft.
As Rockwell’s project boiled down a bit, the most realistic reason to have a giant piloted booster was so that the combined craft could ferry itself from one landing strip to another and because of the aforementioned cross-range flight distance, too.
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