posted 06-23-2011 03:06 AM               

What was the rationale behind making the first shuttle flight a manned mission? Though the Russian Buran made only one flight, they did follow what was then standard practice to make this an unmanned test flight.

posted 06-23-2011 04:09 AM               

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Originally posted by moorouge:
What was the rationale behind making the first shuttle flight a manned mission?

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Young, discussing the topic, in his 2006 interview with collectSPACE:

They wanted to fly the thing unmanned. I went to many, many meetings where they wanted to fly the thing unmanned, but finally the program manager up at Headquarters, John Yardley, he said he wasn't going to come across California with nobody in the spacecraft.

So, we got to fly it manned. It's probably the safe way to do it. We looked at California and there were all kinds of places you can land out there...

posted 06-23-2011 05:13 PM               

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Originally posted by tegwilym:
30 years ago, we weren't afraid of taking some risks.

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posted 06-23-2011 05:50 PM            

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Originally posted by tegwilym:
30 years ago, we weren't afraid of taking some risks.

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posted 06-23-2011 10:18 PM               

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Originally posted by Fra Mauro:
It was dangerous too. If you recall, there was an underestimation of the shock wave and Columbia was almost damaged.

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The shock wave did put a pressure load on the body flap as I recall, but thankfully it didn't fail. If it had, forget reentry as Columbia wouldn't have been able to orient itself properly during the early part. The shock wave also popped some tiles off on top of the orbiter (which we saw missing from the OMS pods).

The main bit of hidden damage Columbia sustained though was caused by an ever so slight mis-timing of when the SRBs fired put a slight side load on the shuttle. After the SSMEs ignite, the shuttle twangs like a door spring as it moves back and fourth. The firing of the SRBs is timed to take place when the shuttle is pure vertical.

When the SRBs on STS-1 fired slightly off vertical, it caused a flange on the foreward RCS module to get stretched from the side load, which in turn stretched a fuel line but it didn't break. Think of what happens to an Olympic power lifter doing a clean and jerk while not being pure vertical and you get the idea (he usually ends up dropping the weight due to the side load because he didn't lift properly and ends up injured).

An inspection prior to STS-2 caught the problem. Worst case scenario if the problem hadn't been detected is the line would have failed on STS-2's launch and the crew would have been forced to eject as the foreward RCS module burned due to leaking hypergolic fuel on ascent.

Concerning the question of putting men on rockets for the first launch, Shuttle was certainly something that likely won't be done again as NASA was pretty bold. The culture was they could do anything. It has taken two losses of shuttles to show them just how close to the ragged edge things could be and there were so many unknowns on STS-1. Granted there comes a time when you do have to fly the vehicle to collect the data and every good test pilot knows that. But it isn't just two pilots who had their lives on the line with shuttle, it was the livelyhood of thousands of Americans who designed and built it and a country who paid for it.

At the same time though, I don't necessarily think STS-1 would have been as successful if it had flown unmanned. The autoland software glitch on STS-3 I consider a hint in that regard. If a pilot (Lousma) hadn't been there to save the approach, Columbia probably would have ended up splattered on the Northrup strip in New Mexico. If it had the same problem on STS-1 with an automated landing and John Young wasn't there to fly her manual, well the first shuttle would have made a nice splatter in the Edwards dry lakebed I believe.

The Russians by comparison had tended to take a bit more measured approach to their first flights. Vostok, Soyuz and the N-1 booster (and the Proton lunar flyby launch) all had unmanned tests. And due to failures, they continued to test unmanned until they were confident with the design to try a manned flight. The one time they tried to rush with Soyuz 1, it costed the life of a cosmonaut. As such, I am not surprised they went with an unmanned test of Buran considering they had a lot of failures in the first tests of their rockets. Of course, I also believe the reason they flew Buran unmanned when they did was because the manned shuttle wasn't ready and it would have been probably another year delay to get it ready to fly. As such, I think the Soviets wanted to trump the US just one more time by flying their space plane at a time when the US program was grounded after Challenger and do it before STS-26 flew. The cosmonauts in the Buran program were in favor of a manned launch as I understand it, but were overruled by the engineers and the hardware wasn't quite ready.

posted 06-24-2011 02:25 AM               

Is it an 'urban myth' that Columbia lost a large number of tiles on this first flight because of the good luck messages stuck on under the heat protection tiles?

This said, I find it incredible that the decision to man this first flight if, according to Young, it was just because California was populated. There must have been other considerations surely other than this and budget savings.

Nobody has yet ventured an answer to my second query. I may be well off the mark here, but I wonder if the loss of the vehicle and crew besides the delay to the programme might have caused a rethink of the whole idea. Might it have hastened the development of something like Constellation? Perhaps, in the long term, the US might now have a lunar capacity.

posted 06-24-2011 03:43 AM               

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Originally posted by tegwilym:
30 years ago, we weren't afraid of taking some risks.

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posted 06-24-2011 04:21 AM               

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Originally posted by moorouge:
Is it an 'urban myth' that Columbia lost a large number of tiles on this first flight because of the good luck messages stuck on under the heat protection tiles?

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posted 06-24-2011 11:27 AM               

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Originally posted by Max Q:
It seems to me that the Buran was technically a superior craft as the shuttle wasn't equipped for unmanned flight at the beginning of the shuttle program.

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As has been pointed out indirectly by many great replies in this thread, the US Space Shuttle was/is a far superior vehicle that the Buran. After all, the Buran was just a poor copy of the Shuttle by the Soviet government. Their lack of comparable technology did not allow them to copy it all. The most obvious physical difference is the lack of “main engines” on the Buran. This difference was because the Soviets could not build the engine. In fact, they first thought the engines were just US propaganda, because they did not believe anyone was capable of building engines with the near theoretically perfect performance of the SSMEs.

posted 06-24-2011 01:50 PM               

Nonetheless, there are still known situations with many space vehicles where it seems that you had to cross your fingers and hold your breath and trust that the engineers and manufacturers got it right and that the commander has the skill to get you through the few moments "on the edge."

One that comes to mind is the final few seconds of the LM's descent to the lunar surface. There was a known dead-man's zone where an abort was impossible if anything went wrong.

More familiar to us is the first two minutes of the Shuttle's flight. Even well before Challenger, I remember the admonition that "once the solids are lit, there's nothing you can do until they burn out, so you'd better hope nothing goes wrong." Young and Crippen knew that, but so does the crew of STS-135, and that situation hasn't fundamentally changed throughout the life of the Shuttle. I also understand that it's a rare CDR who can fly the Shuttle sim back to KSC in an RTLS abort. You have to trust that the SSMEs will get you to orbit, or at least far enough to do one of the trans-Atlantic aborts.

I wonder: would Young and Crippen have flown STS-1 without ejection seats?

posted 06-24-2011 10:46 PM               

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Originally posted by ilbasso:
Regarding the taking of risks, any astronaut will tell you that s/he would not fly a vehicle unless they were assured that the major risks were known and appropriately mitigated.

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I'd like to see it broadened, either here or in a new thread, to an exploration of what (to an astronaut) constitutes "acceptable" risk... and perhaps more specifically to the fact that the oft-discussed concept of "human-rating" launch vehicles is farcical and always has been.

Young and Crippen are rightly lauded for their courage in riding a system untested in flight, but the first 26 American space voyagers went aloft atop ballistic missiles that were intended to carry inert payloads or nuclear warheads, not crewed spacecraft.. .and their reliability records at the time were far from stellar.

What engineering alchemy was performed on the Redstone, Atlas, and Titan II boosters that made NASA's leadership confident that they were less likely to immolate themselves with the All-American Boys aboard than at any other time? None. We used them because that's what we had.

The most powerful launch vehicle ever built was entrusted with human cargo on just its third "all-up" flight... and tasked not just with getting them into orbit but with sending them to the Moon. And this even after a far from flawless second launch!

I realize that the sense of urgency and purpose that compelled those risks is unlikely to be repeated. But the next astronauts to ride a US-built launch vehicle into space--regardless of its origins, design, or manufacturer--will accept essentially the same bargain that Young, Crippen, and everyone who came before and after them does: "Tested in flight" and "human-rated" are, respectively, impractical and meaningless. All they can do is trust in the engineering expertise, diligence, and professional judgement of those responsible for conceiving, designing, and building the hardware. There won't be any meaningful failure rate or statistical yardstick anytime soon for any rocket that will supplant that faith.

posted 06-25-2011 12:19 AM               

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Originally posted by BNorton:
After all, the Buran was just a poor copy of the Shuttle by the Soviet government.

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Why do you have to bring Soyuz into the mix? That is like saying shuttle was destined to fail since the orbiters were built by NAA Rockwell and NAA developed the capsule that killed the Apollo 1 crew. Of course, we all know that the orbiters by themselves did not fail in both missions that had fatalities. One got shredded by aeroloads at altitude during the breakup and the other got a hole punched in its heatshield by a foam block.

The arguments about Soyuz are invalid as the ballistic reentries aren't "incorrect". They have always been a backup to the normal more controlled reentry and the g forces of one, while higher than a normal reentry are not so high as to kill the occupants. It has been a part of that design from day one as the Soviets did just as much centrifuge testing with their human subjects as NASA did with American ones to know what forces that human bodies can tolerate. If anything, the Soviets put more work into backups than primary stuff, which is one reason why each Soyuz has a nice set of survival gear, clothing and a gun in case the crew does land off course.

The possibility of a ballistic reentry is the primary reason why flight crews are measured for exact dimensions to fit into their custom designed seat liners since a better fit means the body can tolerate higher gee loads with less likelihood of injury. The only real injuries to come from Soyuz landings have been due to something happening with the impact, either due to a retro rocket problem or something else.

The two fatal mishaps on Soyuz flights were unrelated to one another except that in a sense both were due to careless workmanship in different spots. They had nothing to do with any problems on reentry. Soyuz 1 was mainly due to workers spraying the ablative heatshied coating on the capsule in areas where the parachutes were supposed to be packed instead of just the covers. So the fit of the chutes was too tight when they were installed. Soyuz 11's fatalities were caused by a check ball in a valve popping out of place and opening the valve to space when the pyros for the orbital module fired due to it being improperly torqued to the right specs. Of course, it didn't help matters that the Soyuz didn't have a backup tank of oxygen in the descent module after it was cut loose from the other modules (so the crew would have been unable to re-pressurize the craft even if they had stopped the leak) and the crew weren't wearing pressure suits. But, the designers corrected both oversights before the next manned launch. As with anything else in the space business, you have to learn from your mistakes and the Russians know that as well as Americans do.

posted 06-25-2011 12:48 AM               

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Originally posted by moorouge:
Nobody has yet ventured an answer to my second query.

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If the loss had happened during reentry, again it would have depended on the type of loss (and one figures the crew would not have survived). Most of the debris would have ended up in the ocean, unable to be recovered. NASA and the Air Force did have plenty of air assets up for data gathering (such as the ARIA aircraft), so a picture of what happened likely would have been formed. Again NASA likely would press ahead to try and learn from the mistakes and so would the companies that built the vehicles. Again, the next orbiter would be built and it would likely test the system, unmanned, to make sure it worked before a crew was flown the next time.

Sure there would have been the debates in Congress about risking human life on such endeavors. But I think the program still would have resumed for two reasons, one is the cold war with the Soviets and two is Ronald Reagan as president:

The Cold War meant that space was still considered to be an extension of the Earth in terms of being a possible battleground, even after the ASTP mission of 1975. Relations had cooled by 1981 due to the more hardline Soviet stance and the invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviets had flown one Almaz military Salyut after ASTP and were working on their own unmanned intelligence gathering assets. The DoD was also still heavily invested in shuttle and wanted to see a return on its investment at that time as the shuttle was to be the ONLY launcher of both civilian AND military payloads. In 1986 it was different because the USAF had 24 missions of shuttle experience to look back on and their own investment had been partially paid for already, so those in charge felt it was more prudent to cut their losses and develop Titan IV rather than continue.

posted 06-25-2011 01:48 AM               

Yes - the shuttle programme would have been delayed. However, I wonder if a loss of STS-1 would have started alarm bells ringing and that a more cautious approach would have resulted. Might it have prevented the Challenger loss as more notice was taken of the O-ring problem. Another possible result might have been no 'Teacher in Space' programme, crews being selected totally from the astronaut corps.

posted 06-25-2011 04:12 AM               

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Originally posted by Jay Chladek:
I wouldn't exactly say Buran was a poor "copy" of shuttle.

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Obviously it was not an exact copy, but it is/was a copy. It was not an exact copy because the Soviet Union did not have the capabilities of the US. (Like the shuttle, the Soviet’s stole technical information and tried to copy the Concorde, but not exactly because they could not. In the case of the plane, they got the engines wrong for one thing, which is why its flight history was so short. It had no range.) It has been successfully argued that the Soviets built their copy because they feared the military applications of the US Space Shuttle. The Buran was/is in no way the technical superior or even equal to the US vehicle. It is what it is, a poor copy.

Soyuz is mentioned because of comments in this thread (and elsewhere on this site), that imply the Soviets/Russians have higher safety standards than the US. They are not without fault resulting in vehicle lose, which others seem to forget. Their past and recent safety problems clearly show that they have no superiority claim when it comes to safety. Furthermore, their record shows that blunt body vehicles are not inherently safer than lifting body vehicles. Soyuz, by the way, also was operated with much ground control.

posted 06-25-2011 04:32 PM               

The Soviet establishment was highly suspicious that the US Shuttle had some hidden military use and thus created an exact copy just in case. No matter what anyone thinks their decision to use liquids on the main and strap-on boosters made it the superior design.

posted 06-26-2011 08:40 PM            

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Originally posted by dom:
They only decided to create a copy of the US design because they couldn't figure out why the Americans had designed such an odd vehicle.

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posted 06-27-2011 12:12 PM               

In my opinion it was what the US Shuttle should have been with a little bit more thought - and money!

I admit that the Russians "copied" the brilliant US orbiter design (for an imagined future military use) and matched it with their own excellent Energia booster to create a design that was safer and superior in many ways.

posted 06-27-2011 01:22 PM               

After Apollo 1, the Administration and Congress had the attitude that they didn't want to quit before the moon landing goal was accomplished, so they pressed on.

After Apollo 13, we had already accomplished two moon landings, so why continue open ended risk for a few more rocks? That was probably the attitude of the Administration and many in Congress at the time. The Apollo 13 accident probably contributed to the cuts to the number of moon landings and the ultimate end of the Apollo program.

posted 06-27-2011 08:29 PM               

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Originally posted by dom:
Buran was quickly cancelled after its first mission when the Soviets realised a huge shuttle made no sense financially...

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posted 06-28-2011 03:51 AM               

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Originally posted by JohnPaul56:
I'm curious whether or not the Buran was a superior spacecraft. I'm no rocket scientist, but I'm wondering if the fact the it was launched with liquid fuel engines automatically made it safer.

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People always tend to cite a problem with an SRB as being it can't be turned off. When at the same time though, if a liquid engine is turned off prematurely, the vehicle is going to drop like a rock after a question mark pops over its head like Will E. Coyote falling off a cliff (remember the second N-1 booster launch?). With a solid, given there are much less moving parts, provided there is no defect in the casing, the thing is going to keep burning and burning until it is out of fuel. Any loss of a first stage motor though, be it solid or liquid is going to be tough to survive in a winged vehicle like shuttle or Buran. A shuttle failure would likely mean a fireball. Buran Energia's failure would be a smoking hole in the ground.

posted 06-28-2011 12:45 PM               

The book 'Energiya-Buran' by Bart Hendrickx & Bert Vis - definitely the "bible" on the subject - makes a mention of four small solid rocket motors in Buran's nose that were designed to get the orbiter off Energia in a hurry. I don't think they were installed in the end.

And secondly to BNorton. Yes, obviously the heroic Americans came to the rescue when the Russians were down but even if they hadn't I'm pretty sure Mir would have limped along for a few more years until Putin's oil-rich Russia put a "Mir 2" into orbit.

posted 09-21-2011 09:19 PM               

He talked about the damage to the main flaps by the SRBs in launch and how they later found out it could have led to a condition that would have made the shuttle incapable of re-entry or landing. He said had he even know that was happening, he wouldn't have taken the chance on continuing the mission.

I can't recall his description of how he'd have handled that, but I clearly remember him saying he would have "seen how good those Blackbird ejection seats really worked," I assume after he'd detached the orbiter from the engines. I remember him talking of flying it down to a safe altitude, then punching out and letting the Columbia become a lawn dart.