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Old 02-11-2019, 09:49 PM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tbzep
What would have been awesome, but hugely expensive, would have been to keep the Saturn program alive and advancing, AND develop a shuttle. Since the Saturns would be available for large payloads, a smaller shuttle would have been easier to launch with a safer system and would have still been a very handy little piece of hardware.

The cool thing about a 3rd stage based large space station, is the launch system was darn near paid for already. We had leftover Saturn hardware and infrastructure to build more, which is a lot cheaper than designing a launch system from scratch. All they would need to do is develop the system to link those big "modules". Instead of strapping themselves to treadmills, they could have run in circles for cardio. Remember those Skylab videos?
In C.B. Colby's book "Beyond the Moon," he reproduced NASA's early 1970s plans for these very things. They envisioned a fully-reusable Convair B8G winged booster (the one with the V-tail) with a Rockwell straight-winged orbiter (NASA preferred these lighter and cheaper low-crossrange orbiter designs, but the USAF insisted on high-crossrange delta-winged ones in exchange for its financial and political support). As an alternative, NASA also liked the McDonnell Douglas swept-winged, canard-equipped booster carrying another straight-winged orbiter design, and:

The Shuttle would handle light-to-moderate-weight low Earth orbit payload lofting (and return), and personnel transport (to a space station, eventually housing up to 100 people). Other Shuttle payloads would include radio-controlled, reusable liquid propellant upper stages that would boost large communications and meteorological satellites into geosynchronous orbit (or geosynchronous transfer orbit). The Saturn V was to be retained as a heavy-lift launcher, and for lofting large planetary probes and parts of manned interplanetary spaceships. Also:

A small, Marshall Space Flight Center "DC-3" (the original TSTO straight-winged-type booster/orbiter Shuttle, meant to loft 15,000 pounds of cargo and several people into orbit) type Shuttle, built using modern materials, electronics, and engines, could be a practical and economical space transporter.
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