posted 02-07-2016 04:18 PM               

• The shuttle is the only meaningful new manned space program which can be accomplished on a modest budget.

• The space shuttle will make launching of payloads into earth orbit a virtually routine event.

• The shuttle will encourage far greater participation in space flight. With the shuttle's easy and routine access to space, scientists, engineers and astronauts will be able to go into orbit to supervise and check on their space experiments.

• You don't have to be an astronaut to ride the space shuttle. Healthy individuals will be able to withstand the mild forces of acceleration and deceleration experienced when the shuttle is launched and re-enters the atmosphere. In addition, the shuttle will be built and pressurized so that passengers such as scientists, engineers and others will be able to ride in ordinary clothing, as in an airliner.

• The space shuttle is expected to be ready to play its major role in space by the end of this decade. It will then be used to launch all but the very smallest and very largest payloads. It will send some spacecraft into orbit from which the spacecrafts own rockets would send them into higher orbits or toward the Moon and other planets.

posted 02-07-2016 10:14 PM               

For another thing, the goals are different. One could argue that payload specialists have nothing else to do on a seven-day flight once their satellites are deployed, but as noted, the primary job is to supervise and check on their space experiments. Not to go around the world a few hundred times and take photos.

posted 02-08-2016 01:59 AM               

In the booklet it says that NASA intended the shuttle to be run on a modest budget, for launches into orbit to be routine and for an average person with no astronaut training to be able to fly on the shuttle.

If what NASA had planned had actually occurred then is it not probable that by now a private company would have a working space tourism project where the average person (with enough money) could book a ride into space? The booklet was written 44 years ago.

Currently there are Virgin Galactic and SpaceX to name but a few who are working on space tourism projects and private individuals have been able to fly on the Soyuz to the International Space Station.

Billionaires rent out their private yachts to contribute to the running costs so is it so hard to consider that the same could have happened with the shuttle if flights have been economical and routine.

Initially NASA kept private spaceflight illegal but the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004 required NASA and the FAA to legalise private spaceflight. The greatest concern was the danger of going into space but if spaceflight could have been shown to be as safe as flying on a plane then who knows what could have happened.

posted 02-08-2016 10:35 AM            

It wasn't pursued for costs, apparently. Yet private U.S. companies today are showing NASA what could and should have been years after the shuttle programme's demise.

posted 02-08-2016 10:53 AM               

Today's space tourism efforts are, to some degree, an outgrowth of the expendable launch vehicle (ELV) market. Had the shuttle met all of NASA's early goals, then it is possible the military would have relied on the orbiter, rather than ELVs, to launch its payloads, which in turn would have had an dampening effect on the commercial launch market as well.

posted 02-08-2016 07:27 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Robert Pearlman:
On the other hand, had the shuttle been proven to be everything NASA hoped at the start, than it is possible that the early-1980s proposed passenger module could have flown in the payload bay.

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