The first American shuttle. History of the development of the Space Shuttle system
"Space Shuttle" ( Space Shuttle- space shuttle) is a reusable US manned transport spacecraft designed to deliver people and cargo to low Earth orbits and back. The shuttles were used as part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Space Transportation System (STS) program.
Shuttle Discovery ( Discovery, OV-103) began construction in 1979. It was transferred to NASA in November 1982. The shuttle was named after one of the two ships on which British captain James Cook discovered the Hawaiian Islands and explored the coasts of Alaska and northwestern Canada in the 1770s. The shuttle made its first flight into space on August 30, 1984, and its last from February 24 to March 9, 2011.
His “record” includes such important operations as the first flights after the death of the Challenger and Columbia shuttles, the delivery of the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit, the launch of the Ulysses automatic interplanetary station onto the flight path, as well as the second flight to Hubble for preventive and repair work. During its service, the shuttle made 39 flights into Earth orbit and spent 365 days in space.
(Atlantis, OV-104) was commissioned by NASA in April 1985. The shuttle was named after an oceanographic research sail vessel that belonged to the Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts and operated from 1930 to 1966. The shuttle made its first flight on October 3, 1985. Atlantis was the first shuttle to dock with the Russian orbital station Mir, and it made seven flights to it in total.
The Atlantis shuttle delivered the Magellan and Galileo space probes into orbit, which were then sent to Venus and Jupiter, as well as one of NASA's four orbital observatories. Atlantis was the last spacecraft launched under the Space Shuttle program. Atlantis made its last flight on July 8-21, 2011; the crew for this flight was reduced to four people.
During its service, the shuttle completed 33 flights into Earth orbit and spent 307 days in space.
In 1991, the American space shuttle fleet was replenished ( Endeavor, OV-105), named after one of the ships of the British fleet on which Captain James Cook traveled. Its construction began in 1987. It was built to replace the space shuttle Challenger that crashed. Endeavor is the most modern of the American space shuttles, and many of the innovations first tested on it were later used in the modernization of other shuttles. The first flight took place on May 7, 1992.
During its service, the shuttle completed 25 flights into Earth orbit and spent 299 days in space.
In total, the shuttles made 135 flights. The shuttles are designed for a two-week stay in orbit. The longest space journey was made by the Columbia shuttle in November 1996 - 17 days 15 hours 53 minutes, the shortest - in November 1981 - 2 days 6 hours 13 minutes. Typically, shuttle flights lasted from 5 to 16 days.
They were used to launch cargo into orbit, conduct scientific research, and service orbital spacecraft (installation and repair work).
In the 1990s, the shuttles took part in the joint Russian-American Mir - Space Shuttle program. Nine dockings were made with the Mir orbital station. The shuttles played important role in the implementation of the project to create the International Space Station (ISS). Eleven flights were carried out under the ISS program.
The reason for the cessation of shuttle flights is the exhaustion of the spacecraft's service life and the huge financial costs of preparing and maintaining space shuttles.
Each shuttle flight cost about $450 million. For this money, the shuttle orbiter could deliver 20-25 tons of cargo, including modules for the station, and seven to eight astronauts in one flight to the ISS.
Since the demise of NASA's Space Shuttle program in 2011, all shuttles have been "retired". The unflying shuttle Enterprise, which was located at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington (USA), was delivered to the aircraft carrier museum Intrepid in New York (USA) in June 2012. Its place at the Smithsonian Institution was taken by the space shuttle Discovery. The shuttle Endeavor was delivered to the California Science Center in mid-October 2012, where it will be installed as an exhibit.
The shuttle is scheduled to arrive at Kennedy Space Center in Florida in early 2013.
The material was prepared based on information from RIA Novosti and open sources
The Space Transportation System, better known as the Space Shuttle, is an American reusable transport vehicle. spaceship. The shuttle is launched into space using launch vehicles, maneuvers in orbit like a spacecraft, and returns to Earth like an airplane. It was understood that the shuttles would scurry like shuttles between low-Earth orbit and the Earth, delivering payloads in both directions. During development, it was envisaged that each of the shuttles would be launched into space up to 100 times. In practice, they are used much less. By May 2010, the most flights - 38 - were made by the Discovery shuttle. A total of five shuttles were built from 1975 to 1991: Columbia (burned up on landing in 2003), Challenger (exploded on launch in 1986), Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavor. On May 14, 2010, the Space Shuttle Atlantis made its final launch from Cape Canaveral. Upon returning to Earth, it will be decommissioned.
History of application
The shuttle program has been developed by North American Rockwell on behalf of NASA since 1971.
Shuttle Columbia was the first operational reusable orbiter. It was manufactured in 1979 and transferred to NASA's Kennedy Space Center. The shuttle Columbia was named after the sailing ship on which Captain Robert Gray explored in May 1792 inland waters British Columbia (now the US states of Washington and Oregon). At NASA, Columbia is designated OV-102 (Orbiter Vehicle - 102). The Columbia shuttle died on February 1, 2003 (flight STS-107) while entering the Earth's atmosphere before landing. This was Columbia's 28th space voyage.
The second space shuttle, Challenger, was delivered to NASA in July 1982. It was named after a seagoing vessel that explored the ocean in the 1870s. NASA designates the Challenger as OV-099. Challenger died on its tenth launch on January 28, 1986.
The third shuttle, Discovery, was delivered to NASA in November 1982.
The shuttle Discovery was named for one of the two ships on which British captain James Cook discovered the Hawaiian Islands and explored the coasts of Alaska and northwestern Canada in the 1770s. One of the ships of Henry Hudson, who explored Hudson Bay in 1610-1611, bore the same name (“Discovery”). Two more Discovery were built by the British Royal Geographical Society for the exploration of the North Pole and Antarctica in 1875 and 1901. NASA designates Discovery as OV-103.
The fourth shuttle, Atlantis, entered service in April 1985.
The fifth shuttle, Endeavor, was built to replace the lost Challenger and entered service in May 1991. The shuttle Endeavor was also named after one of James Cook's ships. This vessel was used in astronomical observations, which made it possible to accurately determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun. This ship also took part in expeditions to explore New Zealand. NASA designates Endeavor as OV-105.
Before Columbia, another shuttle was built, the Enterprise, which in the late 1970s was used only as a test vehicle to test landing methods and did not fly into space. At the very beginning, it was planned to name this orbital ship “Constitution” in honor of the bicentennial of the American Constitution. Later, based on numerous suggestions from viewers of the popular television series Star Trek, the name Enterprise was chosen. NASA designates the Enterprise as OV-101.
Shuttle Discovery takes off. STS-120 mission
General information
Country United States of America USA
Purpose Reusable transport spacecraft
Manufacturer United Space Alliance:
Thiokol/Alliant Techsystems (SRBs)
Lockheed Martin (Martin Marietta) - (ET)
Rockwell/Boeing (orbiter)
Main characteristics
Number of stages 2
Length 56.1 m
Diameter 8.69 m
Launch weight 2030 t
Payload weight
- at LEO 24,400 kg
- in Geostationary orbit 3810 kg
Launch history
Status active
Launch Sites Kennedy Space Center, Complex 39
Vandenberg AFB (planned in the 1980s)
Number of starts 128
- successful 127
- unsuccessful 1 (launch failure, Challenger)
- partially unsuccessful 1 (re-entry failure, Columbia)
First launch April 12, 1981
Last launch autumn 2010
Design
The shuttle consists of three main components: orbiter(Orbiter), which is launched into low-Earth orbit and which is, in fact, a spacecraft; large external fuel tank for main engines; and two solid rocket boosters that operate within two minutes of liftoff. After entering space, the orbiter independently returns to Earth and lands like an airplane on a runway. Solid propellant boosters are splashed down by parachute and then used again. The external fuel tank burns up in the atmosphere.
History of creation
There is a serious misconception that the Space Shuttle program was created for military purposes, as a kind of “space bomber”. This deeply incorrect “opinion” is based on the “capability” of shuttles to carry nuclear weapons (any sufficiently large passenger airliner has this capability to the same extent (for example, the first Soviet transcontinental airliner Tu-114 was created on the basis of the strategic nuclear carrier Tu-95) and on theoretical assumptions about “orbital dives”, which reusable orbital ships are supposedly capable of (and even carried out).
In fact, all references to the “bomber” mission of the shuttles are contained exclusively in Soviet sources, as an assessment of the military potential of the space shuttles. It is fair to assume that these “assessments” were used to convince senior management of the need for an “adequate response” and create their own similar system.
The history of the space shuttle project begins in 1967, when even before the first manned flight under the Apollo program (October 11, 1968 - the launch of Apollo 7), more than a year remained as a review of the prospects for manned astronautics after the completion of NASA's lunar program.
On October 30, 1968, two main NASA centers (the Manned Spacecraft Center - MSC - in Houston and the Marshall Space Center - MSFC - in Huntsville) approached American space firms with a proposal to explore the possibility of creating a reusable space system, which was supposed to reduce the costs of the space agency subject to intensive use.
In September 1970, the Space Task Force under the leadership of US Vice President S. Agnew, specially created to determine the next steps in space exploration, issued two detailed drafts of possible programs.
The big project included:
* space shuttles;
* orbital tugs;
* a large orbital station in Earth orbit (up to 50 crew members);
* small orbital station in orbit of the Moon;
* creation of a habitable base on the Moon;
* manned expeditions to Mars;
* landing people on the surface of Mars.
As a small project, it was proposed to create only a large orbital station in Earth orbit. But in both projects, it was determined that orbital flights: supplying the station, delivering cargo into orbit for long-distance expeditions or ship blocks for long-distance flights, changing crews and other tasks in Earth orbit should be carried out by a reusable system, which was then called the Space Shuttle.
There were also plans to create a "nuclear shuttle" - a shuttle with a nuclear propulsion system NERVA (English), which was developed and tested in the 1960s. The nuclear shuttle was supposed to fly between the Earth's orbit, the orbit of the Moon and Mars. The supply of the atomic shuttle with the working fluid for the nuclear engine was entrusted to the familiar ordinary shuttles:
Nuclear Shuttle: This reusable rocket would rely on the NERVA nuclear engine. It would operate between low earth orbit, lunar orbit, and geosynchronous orbit, with its exceptionally high performance enabling it to carry heavy payloads and to do significant amounts of work with limited stores of liquid-hydrogen propellant. In turn, the nuclear shuttle would receive this propellant from the Space Shuttle.
SP-4221 The Space Shuttle Decision
However, US President Richard Nixon rejected all options because even the cheapest one required $5 billion a year. NASA faced a difficult choice: it had to either begin a new major development or announce the termination of the manned program.
It was decided to insist on creating a shuttle, but to present it not as a transport ship for assembling and servicing the space station (keeping this, however, in reserve), but as a system capable of generating profit and recouping investments by launching satellites into orbit on a commercial basis. An economic examination confirmed: theoretically, provided there are at least 30 flights per year and a complete refusal to use disposable carriers, the space shuttle system can be profitable.
The project to create the Space Shuttle system was adopted by the US Congress.
At the same time, in connection with the abandonment of disposable launch vehicles, it was determined that the shuttles were responsible for launching into earth orbit all promising devices of the US Department of Defense, CIA and NSA.
The military presented their demands on the system:
* The space system must be capable of launching a payload of up to 30 tons into orbit, returning a payload of up to 14.5 tons to Earth, and have a cargo compartment size of at least 18 meters long and 4.5 meters in diameter. This was the size and weight of the then-designed optical reconnaissance satellite KH-II, from which the Hubble orbital telescope subsequently evolved.
* Provide lateral maneuver capability for the orbital vehicle up to 2000 kilometers for ease of landing at a limited number of military airfields.
* For launch into circumpolar orbits (with an inclination of 56-104º), the Air Force decided to build its own technical, launch and landing complexes at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
This limited the military department's requirements for the space shuttle project.
It was never planned to use shuttles as “space bombers”. In any case, there are no documents from NASA, the Pentagon, or the US Congress indicating such intentions. “Bomber” motives are not mentioned either in the memoirs or in the private correspondence of the participants in the creation of the space shuttle system.
The X-20 Dyna Soar space bomber project officially launched on October 24, 1957. However, with the development of silo-based and nuclear-powered ICBMs submarine fleet, armed with ballistic missiles, the creation of orbital bombers in the United States was considered inappropriate. After 1961, references to “bomber” missions disappeared from the X-20 Dyna Soar project, but reconnaissance and “inspection” missions remained. On February 23, 1962, Secretary of Defense McNamara approved the latest restructuring of the program. From that point on, Dyna-Soar was officially designated as a research program to explore and demonstrate the feasibility of a manned orbital glider maneuvering during reentry and landing on a runway at a given location on Earth with the required precision. By mid-1963, the Department of Defense had serious doubts about the need for the Dyna-Soar program. On December 10, 1963, Secretary of Defense McNamara canceled Dyna-Soar.
When making this decision, it was taken into account that spacecraft of this class cannot “hang” in orbit for a sufficiently long time. long time, to consider them “orbital platforms”, and the launch of each ship into orbit takes not even hours, but a day and requires the use of heavy-class launch vehicles, which does not allow them to be used for either a first or a retaliatory nuclear strike.
Many of the technical and technological developments of the Dyna-Soar program were subsequently used to create orbital vehicles such as the Space Shuttle.
The Soviet leadership, closely monitoring the development of the space shuttle program, but assuming the worst, was looking for a “hidden military threat”, which formed two main assumptions:
* It is possible to use space shuttles as carriers nuclear weapons(this assumption is fundamentally incorrect for the above reasons).
* It is possible to use space shuttles to abduct Soviet satellites and DOS (long-term manned stations) from V. Chelomey’s Almaz OKB-52 from Earth’s orbit. For protection, Soviet DOS were supposed to be equipped even with automatic cannons designed by Nudelman - Richter (OPS was equipped with such a cannon). The assumption of “abductions” was based solely on the dimensions of the cargo compartment and the return payload, openly declared by the American shuttle developers to be close to the dimensions and weight of the Almaz. The Soviet leadership was not informed about the dimensions and weight of the HK-II reconnaissance satellite, which was being developed at the same time.
As a result, the Soviet space industry was tasked with creating a reusable space system with characteristics similar to the Space Shuttle system, but with a clearly defined military purpose, as an orbital delivery vehicle for thermonuclear weapons.
Tasks
Space shuttle ships are used to launch cargo into orbits at an altitude of 200-500 km, conduct scientific research, and service orbital spacecraft (installation and repair work).
The Space Shuttle Discovery delivered the Hubble Telescope into orbit in April 1990 (flight STS-31). Four servicing missions were carried out on the shuttles Columbia, Discovery, Endeavor and Atlantis. Hubble telescope. The last shuttle mission to Hubble took place in May 2009. Since NASA planned to stop shuttle flights in 2010, this was the last human expedition to the telescope, since these missions cannot be carried out by any other available spacecraft.
Shuttle Endeavor with open cargo bay.
In the 1990s, the shuttles took part in the joint Russian-American Mir - Space Shuttle program. Nine dockings were made with the Mir station.
During the twenty years that the shuttles were in service, they were constantly developed and modified. More than a thousand major and minor modifications were made to the original shuttle design.
The shuttles play a very important role in the implementation of the project to create the International Space Station (ISS). For example, the ISS modules, from which it is assembled except for the Russian Zvezda module, do not have their own propulsion systems (PS), and therefore cannot independently maneuver in orbit to search for, rendezvous and dock with the station. Therefore, they cannot simply be “thrown” into orbit by ordinary Proton-type carriers. The only possibility of assembling stations from such modules is to use space shuttle type ships with their large cargo compartments or, hypothetically, to use orbital “tugs” that could find a module put into orbit by Proton, dock with it and bring it to the station for docking.
In fact, without shuttle-type spacecraft, the construction of modular orbital stations such as the ISS (from modules without remote control and navigation systems) would be impossible.
After the Columbia disaster, three shuttles remained in operation - Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavor. These remaining shuttles should ensure the completion of the ISS before 2010. NASA announced the end of shuttle service in 2010.
The space shuttle Atlantis, on its last flight into orbit (STS-132), delivered the Russian research module Rassvet to the ISS.
Technical data
Solid propellant booster
External fuel tank
The tank contains fuel and oxidizer for the three liquid-propellant SSME (or RS-24) engines in orbit and does not have its own engines.
Inside, the fuel tank is divided into two sections. The upper third of the tank is occupied by a container designed for liquid oxygen cooled to a temperature of −183 °C (−298 °F). The volume of this container is 650 thousand liters (143 thousand gallons). The bottom two-thirds of the tank is designed to hold liquid hydrogen cooled to −253 °C (−423 °F). The volume of this container is 1.752 million liters (385 thousand gallons).
Orbiter
In addition to the three main engines of the orbiter, two orbital maneuvering system (OMS) engines, each with a thrust of 27 kN, are sometimes used at launch. The OMS fuel and oxidizer are stored on the shuttle for use in orbit and for return to Earth.
Space Shuttle Dimensions
Dimensions of the Space Shuttle compared to the Soyuz
Price
In 2006, total costs amounted to $160 billion, by which time 115 launches had been carried out (see: en:Space Shuttle program#Costs). The average cost for each flight was $1.3 billion, but the bulk of the costs (design, modernization, etc.) do not depend on the number of launches.
The cost of each shuttle flight is about $60 million. To support 22 shuttle flights from mid-2005 to 2010, NASA budgeted about $1 billion 300 million in direct costs.
For this money, the shuttle orbiter can deliver 20-25 tons of cargo in one flight to the ISS, including ISS modules, plus 7-8 astronauts.
Reduced in last years almost up to cost, the price of launching a Proton-M with a launch load of 22 tons is $25 million. Any separately flying spacecraft launched into orbit by a Proton-type carrier can have this weight.
Modules attached to the ISS cannot be launched into orbit by launch vehicles, since they must be delivered to the station and docked, which requires orbital maneuvering, which the orbital station modules themselves are incapable of. Maneuvering is carried out by orbital ships (in the future - orbital tugs), and not by launch vehicles.
Progress cargo ships supplying the ISS are launched into orbit by Soyuz-type carriers and are capable of delivering no more than 1.5 tons of cargo to the station. The cost of launching one Progress cargo ship on a Soyuz carrier is estimated at approximately $70 million, and to replace one shuttle flight, at least 15 Soyuz-Progress flights will be required, which in total exceeds a billion dollars.
However, after the completion of the orbital station, in the absence of the need to deliver new modules to the ISS, using shuttles with their huge cargo compartments becomes impractical.
On its last voyage, the Atlantis shuttle delivered to the ISS, in addition to the astronauts, “only” 8 tons of cargo, including a new Russian research module, new laptop computers, food, water and other consumables.
Photo gallery
Space Shuttle on the launch pad. Cape Canaveral, Florida
Landing of the shuttle Atlantis.
A NASA crawler transporter transports the space shuttle Discovery to the launch pad.
Soviet shuttle Buran
Shuttle in flight
Shuttle Endeavor landing
Shuttle on the launch pad
Video
The final landing of the shuttle Atlantis
Night launch Discovery
In any online discussion of SpaceX, a person always appears who declares that, using the example of the Shuttle, everything is already clear with this reusability of yours. And now, after a recent wave of discussions successful landing Falcon's first stage onto a barge, I decided to write a post with a brief description of the hopes and aspirations of the American manned space program of the 60s, how these dreams were later dashed by harsh reality, and why, because of all this, the Shuttle had no chance of becoming cost-effective. Picture to attract attention: the last flight of the Shuttle Endeavor:
Lots of plans
In the first half of the sixties, after Kennedy promised to land on the moon before the end of the decade, budgetary funds began to rain on NASA. This, of course, caused a certain dizziness with success there. Not counting the ongoing work on Apollo and " practical application Apollo Program" (Apollo Applications Program), work was carried out on the following promising projects:
- Space stations. According to the plans, there were to be three of them: one in low reference orbit near the Earth (LEO), one in geostationary, one in lunar orbit. The crew of each would be twelve people (in the future it was planned to build even larger stations, with a crew of fifty to one hundred people), the diameter of the main module was nine meters. Each crew member was allocated a separate room with a bed, table, chair, TV, and a bunch of closets for personal belongings. There were two bathrooms (plus the commander had a personal toilet in the cabin), a kitchen with an oven, a dishwasher and dining tables with chairs, a separate seating area with board games, first aid station with operating table. It was assumed that the central module of this station would be launched by the super-heavy carrier Saturn-5, and to supply it it would be necessary to fly ten flights of the hypothetical heavy carrier annually. It would not be an exaggeration to say that compared to these stations, the current ISS looks like a kennel.
Moon base. Here is an example of a NASA project from the late sixties. As far as I understand, it was intended to be unified with the space station modules.
Nuclear shuttle. A ship designed to move cargo from LEO to a geostationary station or to lunar orbit, with a nuclear rocket engine (NRE). Hydrogen would be used as the working fluid. The shuttle could also serve as an accelerating block for a Martian spacecraft. The project, by the way, was very interesting and would be useful in today’s conditions, and as a result, we have advanced quite far with the nuclear engine. It's a shame it didn't work out. You can read more about it.
Space tug. Intended to move cargo from a space shuttle to a nuclear shuttle, or from a nuclear shuttle to the required orbit or to the lunar surface. A greater degree of unification was proposed when performing various tasks.
Space shuttle. A reusable spacecraft designed to lift cargo from the Earth's surface to LEO. The illustration shows a space tug carrying cargo from it to a nuclear shuttle. Actually, this is what mutated over time into the Space Shuttle.
Mars spacecraft. Shown here with two nuclear shuttles serving as upper stages. Intended for a flight to Mars in the early eighties, with a two-month stay of the expedition on the surface.
If anyone is interested, it is written in more detail about all this, with illustrations (English)
Space shuttle
As we see above, the space shuttle was just one part of the planned Cyclopean space infrastructure. In combination with a nuclear shuttle and tug based in space, it was supposed to ensure the delivery of cargo from the earth's surface to any point in space, up to the lunar orbit.
Before this, all space rockets (RSRs) were disposable. Spacecraft were also disposable, with the rarest exception in the field of manned spacecraft - Mercury with serial numbers 2, 8, 14 and also the second Gemini flew twice. Due to the gigantic planned volumes of payload launches into orbit, NASA management formulated the task: to create a reusable system, when both the launch vehicle and the spacecraft return after the flight and are used repeatedly. Such a system would cost much more to develop than conventional rocket launchers, but due to lower operating costs it would quickly pay for itself at the level of planned cargo traffic.
The idea of creating a reusable rocket plane took hold of the minds of most people - in the mid-sixties there were many reasons to think that creating such a system was not too difficult a task. Even though the Dyna-Soar space rocket project was canceled by McNamara in 1963, this did not happen because the program was technically impossible, but simply because there were no tasks for the spacecraft - the Mercury and the then-created Gemini. coped with the delivery of astronauts to low-Earth orbit, but the X-20 could not launch a significant payload or remain in orbit for a long time. But the experimental rocket plane X-15 showed excellent performance during operation. During 199 flights, it tested going beyond the Karman line (i.e., beyond the conventional boundary of space), hypersonic reentry into the atmosphere, and control in vacuum and weightlessness.
Naturally, the proposed space shuttle would require a much more powerful reusable engine and more advanced thermal protection, but these problems did not seem insurmountable. The RL-10 liquid rocket engine (LPRE) had by that time shown excellent reusability on the stand: in one of the tests, this rocket engine was successfully launched more than fifty times in a row, and worked for a total of two and a half hours. The proposed shuttle rocket engine, the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME), as well as the RL-10, was supposed to be created using oxygen-hydrogen fuel pair, but to increase its efficiency by increasing the pressure in the combustion chamber and introducing a closed cycle scheme with afterburning of the fuel generator gas.
No special problems were expected with thermal protection either. Firstly, work was already underway on a new type of thermal protection based on silicon dioxide fibers (this is what the tiles of the Shuttle and Buran that were later created were made of). As a backup option, ablative panels remained, which could be changed after each flight for relatively little money. And secondly, to reduce the thermal load, it was planned to make the apparatus’s entry into the atmosphere according to the “blunt body” principle - i.e. using the shape of the aircraft, first create a front of a shock wave that would cover a large area of heated gas. Thus, the kinetic energy of the ship intensively heats the surrounding air, reducing the heating of the aircraft.
In the second half of the sixties, several aerospace corporations presented their vision of the future rocket plane.
Lockheed's Star Clipper was a spaceplane with a load-bearing body - fortunately, by that time, aircraft with a load-bearing body were already well developed: ASSET, HL-10, PRIME, M2-F1/M2-F2, X-24A/X-24B (by the way, the Dreamchaser currently being created is also a spaceplane with a load-bearing body). True, the Star Clipper was not completely reusable; fuel tanks with a diameter of four meters at the edges of the aircraft were jettisoned during takeoff.
The McDonnell Douglas project also had drop tanks and a load-bearing hull. The highlight of the project were the wings extending from the body, which were supposed to improve the takeoff and landing characteristics of the spaceplane:
General Dynamics put forward the concept of the "Triamian twin". The device in the middle was a spaceplane, the two devices on the sides served as the first stage. It was planned that the unification of the first stage and the ship would help save money during development.
The rocket plane itself was supposed to be reusable, but there was no certainty about the booster for quite a long time. As part of this, many concepts were considered, some of which teetered on the brink of noble madness. For example, how about this concept of a reusable first stage, with a launch mass of 24 thousand tons (Atlas ICBM on the left, for scale). After launch, the stage was supposed to plop into the ocean and be towed to the port.
However, three were most seriously considered possible options: cheap expendable rocket stage (i.e. Saturn 1), reusable first stage with liquid rocket engine, reusable first stage with hypersonic ramjet engine. Illustration from 1966:
Around the same time, research began in the technical directorate of the Manned Spacecraft Center under the leadership of Max Faget. He, in my personal opinion, had the most elegant design created as part of the development of the Space Shuttle. Both the carrier and the space shuttle were designed to be winged and manned. It is worth noting that Faget abandoned the load-bearing body, judging that it would significantly complicate the development process - changes in the layout of the shuttle could greatly affect its aerodynamics. The carrier aircraft launched vertically, worked as the first stage of the system and, after the separation of the ship, landed at the airfield. When leaving orbit, the spaceplane had to slow down in the same way as the X-15, entering the atmosphere with a significant angle of attack, thereby creating an extensive shock wave front. After entering the atmosphere, Fage's shuttle could glide for about 300-400 km (the so-called horizontal maneuver, "cross-range") and land at a very comfortable landing speed of 150 knots.
Clouds are gathering over NASA
Here it is necessary to make a brief digression about America in the second half of the sixties, so that the further development of events becomes clearer to the reader. There was an extremely unpopular and costly war in Vietnam, in 1968, almost seventeen thousand Americans died there - more than the USSR lost in Afghanistan during the entire conflict. The black civil rights movement in the United States in 1968 culminated with the assassination of Martin Luther King and the subsequent wave of riots in major American cities. Large government social programs became extremely popular (Medicare was passed in 1965), President Johnson declared a "War on Poverty" and infrastructure spending - all of which required significant government spending. The recession began in the late sixties.
At the same time, the fear of the USSR diminished significantly; a global nuclear missile war no longer seemed as inevitable as in the fifties and during the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Apollo program fulfilled its purpose by winning the space race with the USSR in the American public consciousness. Moreover, most Americans inevitably associated this gain with the sea of money that was literally poured into NASA to accomplish this task. In a 1969 Harris poll, 56% of Americans believed that the cost of the Apollo program was too high, and 64% believed that $4 billion a year for NASA development was too much.
And at NASA, it seems, many simply did not understand this. The new director of NASA, Thomas Payne, who was not very experienced in political affairs, certainly did not understand this (or maybe he simply did not want to understand). In 1969, he put forward NASA's action plan for the next 15 years. A lunar orbital station (1978) and a lunar base (1980), a manned expedition to Mars (1983) and an orbital station for one hundred people (1985) were envisaged. The average (i.e. base) case assumed that NASA funding would have to be increased from the current 3.7 billion in 1970 to 7.65 billion by the early eighties:
All this caused an acute allergic reaction in Congress and, accordingly, in the White House too. As one of the congressmen wrote, in those years nothing was done as easily and naturally as astronautics; if you said at a meeting “this space program must be stopped,” your popularity was guaranteed. Over the course of a relatively short period of time, one by one, almost all large-scale NASA projects were formally abolished. Of course, the manned expedition to Mars and the base on the Moon were canceled, even the flights of Apollo 18 and 19 were canceled. The Saturn V rocket was killed. All giant space stations were canceled, leaving only the stump of Apollo Applications in the form of Skylab - however, the second Skylab was canceled there too. The nuclear shuttle and space tug were frozen and then cancelled. Under hot hand even the innocent Voyager (the predecessor of the Viking) was caught. The space shuttle almost came under the knife, and miraculously survived in the House of Representatives by a single vote. This is what NASA's budget looked like in reality (constant 2007 dollars):
If you look at the funds allocated to them as a % of the federal budget, then everything is even sadder:
Almost all of NASA's plans for the development of manned astronautics ended up in the trash, and the barely surviving Shuttle turned from a small element of the once grandiose program into the flagship of the American manned astronautics. NASA was still afraid of canceling the program, and to justify it, it began to convince everyone that the Shuttle would be cheaper than the then existing heavy carriers, and without the frantic cargo flow that had to be generated by the defunct space infrastructure. NASA could not afford to lose the shuttle - the organization was actually created by manned astronautics, and wanted to continue sending people into space.
Alliance with the Air Force
The hostility of Congress greatly impressed NASA officials, and forced them to seek allies. I had to bow to the Pentagon, or rather to the US Air Force. Fortunately, NASA and the Air Force have collaborated quite well since the early sixties, in particular on the XB-70 and the aforementioned X-15. NASA even went ahead to cancel its Saturn I-B(bottom right) so as not to create unnecessary competition with the heavy ILV Titan-III (bottom left):
The Air Force generals were very interested in the idea of a cheap carrier, and they also wanted to be able to send people into space - around the same time, the military space station Manned Orbiting Laboratory, an approximate analogue of the Soviet Almaz, was finally shut down. They also liked the declared possibility of returning cargo on the Shuttle; they even considered options for stealing Soviet spacecraft.
However, in general, the Air Force was much less interested in this alliance than NASA, since they already had their own used carrier. Because of this, they were able to easily bend the Shuttle design to suit their requirements, which they immediately took advantage of. The size of the cargo bay for the payload was, at the insistence of the military, increased from 12 x 3.5 meters to 18.2 x 4.5 meters (length x diameter), so that promising optical-electronic reconnaissance spy satellites could be placed there (specifically the KH-9 Hexagon and, possibly, , KH-11 Kennan). The shuttle's payload had to be increased to 30 tons when flying into low Earth orbit, and up to 18 tons when flying into polar orbit.
The Air Force also required a horizontal shuttle maneuver of at least 1,800 kilometers. Here's the thing: during the Six-Day War, American intelligence received satellite photographs after fighting ended, because the reconnaissance satellites Gambit and Corona, which were then used, did not have time to return the film to Earth. It was assumed that the Shuttle would be able to launch from Vandenberg on the west coast of the United States into a polar orbit, shoot what was needed, and immediately land after one orbit - thereby ensuring high efficiency in obtaining intelligence data. The required distance for the lateral maneuver was determined by the Earth’s displacement during the orbit, and was exactly the 1800 kilometers mentioned above. To fulfill this requirement, it was necessary, firstly, to install on the Shuttle a delta wing more suitable for gliding, and secondly, to greatly strengthen the thermal protection. The graph below shows the estimated heating rate of the space shuttle with a straight wing (Faget's concept), and with a delta wing (i.e. what ended up on the Shuttle as a result):
The irony here is that soon spy satellites began to be equipped with CCD matrices capable of transmitting images directly from orbit, without the need to return the film. The need for landing after one orbital revolution was no longer necessary, although this possibility was later justified by the possibility of a quick emergency landing. But the delta wing and the thermal protection problems associated with it remained with the Shuttle.
However, the deed was done, and the support of the Air Force in Congress made it possible to partially secure the future of the Shuttle. NASA finally approved as a project a two-stage fully reusable Shuttle with 12(!) SSMEs on the first stage and sent out contracts for the development of its layout.
North American Rockwell Project:
McDonnell Douglas Project:
Project Grumman. An interesting detail: despite NASA's requirement for complete reusability, the shuttle was nevertheless supposed to have disposable hydrogen tanks on the sides:
Economic justification
I mentioned above that after Congress gutted NASA's space program, they had to start making an economic case for the shuttle. And so, in the early seventies, officials from The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) asked them to prove the declared economic efficiency of the Shuttle. Moreover, it was necessary to demonstrate not the fact that launching a shuttle would be cheaper than launching a disposable carrier (this was taken for granted); no, it was necessary to compare the allocation of funds required to create the Shuttle with the continued use of existing disposable media and the investment of freed-up money at 10% per annum - i.e. in fact, the OMB gave the Shuttle a "junk" rating. This made any business case for the shuttle as a commercial launch vehicle unrealistic, especially after it was inflated by Air Force demands. And yet NASA tried to do this, because again, the existence of the American manned program was at stake.
A feasibility study was commissioned from Mathematica. The often mentioned figure for the cost of launching the Shuttle in the region of $1-2.5 million is only Muller’s promises at a conference in 1969, when its final configuration was not yet clear, and before changes caused by Air Force requirements. For the projects above, the cost of the flight was as follows: 4.6 million dollars 1970 model. for the North American shuttles Rockwell and McDonnell Douglas, and $4.2 million for the Grumman shuttle. The authors of the report were at least able to put an owl on the globe, showing that supposedly by the mid-eighties the Shuttle looked more attractive from a financial point of view than existing carriers, even taking into account 10% of OMB requirements:
However, the devil is in the details. As I mentioned above, there was no way to demonstrate that the Shuttle, with its estimated development and production cost of twelve billion dollars, would be cheaper than expendables when factoring in OMB's 10% discount. So the analysis had to make the assumption that lower launch costs would allow satellite manufacturers to spend significantly less time and money on research and development (R&D) and satellite production. It was declared that they would prefer to take advantage of the opportunity to cheaply launch satellites into orbit and repair them. Further, a very large number of launches per year was assumed: the base case scenario shown in the graph above postulated 56 Shuttle launches each year from 1978 to 1990 (736 in total). Moreover, even the option with 900 flights during the specified period was considered as an extreme scenario, i.e. start every five days for thirteen years!
Cost of three different programs in the base case - two expendable rockets and a Shuttle, 56 launches per year (millions of dollars):
| Existing RKN | Promising rocket launcher | Space Shuttle | |
| Expenses for RKN | |||
| R&D | 960 | 1 185 | 9 920 |
| Launch facilities, shuttle production | 584 | 727 | 2 884 |
| Total cost of launches | 13 115 | 12 981 | 5 510 |
| Total | 14 659 | 14 893 | 18 314 |
| PN expenses | |||
| R&D | 12 382 | 11 179 | 10 070 |
| Production and fixed costs | 31 254 | 28 896 | 15 786 |
| Total | 43 636 | 40 075 | 25 856 |
| Expenses for RKN and PN | 58 295 | 54 968 | 44 170 |
Of course, OMB representatives were not satisfied with this analysis. They quite rightly pointed out that even if the cost of a Shuttle flight were indeed as stated (4.6 million/flight), there is still no reason to believe that satellite manufacturers will reduce reliability for the sake of production costs. On the contrary, existing trends indicated an upcoming significant increase in the average life of a satellite in orbit (which ultimately happened). Further, officials no less correctly pointed out that the number of space launches in the base scenario was extrapolated from the level of 1965-1969, when a significant share of them was provided by NASA, with its then gigantic budget, and the Air Force, with its then short-lived optical reconnaissance satellites. Before all of NASA’s bold plans were cut, it was still possible to assume that the number of launches would increase, but without NASA’s expenses it would certainly have begun to fall (which also turned out to be true). Also, the increase in expenses that accompanies all government programs was not taken into account at all: for example, the increase in expenses of the Apollo program in the period from 1963 to 1969 amounted to 75%. The OMB's final verdict was that the proposed fully reusable two-stage Stattle was not economically feasible compared to the Titan-III at a 10% rate.
I apologize for writing so much about financial details that may not be of interest to everyone. But all this is extremely important in the context of discussing the reusability of the Shuttle - especially since the figures mentioned above and, frankly, made up from thin air, can still be seen in discussions about the reusability of space systems. In fact, without taking into account the “PN effect”, even according to the figures accepted by Mathematica and without any 10% discounts, the Shuttle became more profitable than the Titan only starting from ~1100 flights (real shuttles flew 135 times). But don’t forget - we are talking about a Shuttle, “bloated” by Air Force requirements, with a delta wing and complex thermal protection.
The shuttle becomes semi-reusable
Nixon did not want to be the president who completely shut down the American manned program. But he also did not want to ask Congress to allocate a ton of money for the creation of the Shuttle, especially since after the conclusion of officials from OMB, congressmen would still not agree to this. It was decided to allocate about five and a half billion dollars for the development and production of the Shuttle (i.e., more than half what was needed for a fully reusable Shuttle), with the requirement to spend no more than a billion in any given year.
In order to be able to create the Shuttle within the allocated funds, it was necessary to make the system partially reusable. First, the Grumman concept was creatively rethought: the size of the shuttle was reduced by placing both fuel pairs in an external tank, and at the same time the required size of the first stage was reduced. The diagram below shows the size of a fully reusable spaceplane, a spaceplane with an external hydrogen tank (LH2), and a spaceplane with both an oxygen and hydrogen external tank (LO2/LH2).
But the cost of development still greatly exceeded the amount of funds allocated from the budget. As a result, NASA also had to abandon the reusable first stage. It was decided to attach a simple booster to the above tank, either in parallel or at the bottom of the tank:
After some discussion, the placement of boosters in parallel with the external tank was approved. Two main options were considered as boosters: solid propellant (SFU) and liquid-propellant rocket boosters, the latter either with a turbocharger or with a displacement supply of components. It was decided to focus on TTU, again due to the lower cost of development. Sometimes you can hear that there was supposedly something mandatory requirement using TTUs which supposedly ruined everything - but, as we see, replacing TTUs with boosters with liquid propellant rocket engines could not fix anything. Moreover, liquid-propellant rocket boosters splashing into the ocean, albeit with a displacement supply of components, would actually have even more problems than with solid-fuel boosters.
The result was the Space Shuttle that we know today:
Well Short story its evolution (clickable):
Epilogue
The shuttle was not such an unsuccessful system as it is usually presented today. In the eighties, the Shuttle launched 40% of the total payload mass delivered in that decade into low-Earth orbit, despite the fact that its launches accounted for only 4% of total quantities ILV launches. He also carried into space the lion's share of the people who have been there to date (another thing is that the very need for people in orbit is still unclear):
In 2010 prices, the cost of the program was 209 billion, if you divide this by the number of launches it will come out to about 1.5 billion per launch. True, the main part of the costs (design, modernization, etc.) does not depend on the number of launches - therefore, according to NASA estimates, by the end of the 2000s, the cost of each flight was about 450 million dollars. However, this price tag is already at the end of the program, and even after the Challenger and Columbia disasters, which led to additional safety measures and an increase in launch costs. In theory, in the mid-80s, before the Challenger disaster, the launch cost was much lower, but I don’t have specific figures. I'll just point out the fact that Titan IV Centaur's launch cost in the first half of the nineties was $325 million, which is even slightly higher than the above-mentioned Shuttle launch cost in 2010 prices. But it was the heavy launch vehicles from the Titan family that competed with the Shuttle during its creation.
Of course, the Shuttle was not cost-effective from a commercial point of view. By the way, the economic inexpediency of it greatly worried the leadership of the USSR at one time. They did not understand the political reasons that led to the creation of the Shuttle, and came up with various purposes for it in order to somehow connect its existence in their heads with their views on reality - the very famous “dive to Moscow”, or basing weapons in space. As Yu.A. Mozzhorin, director of the Central Research Institute of Mechanical Engineering, head of the rocket and space industry, recalled in 1994: “ The shuttle launched 29.5 tons into low-Earth orbit, and could release up to 14.5 tons of cargo from orbit. This is very serious, and we began to study for what purposes it is being created? After all, everything was very unusual: the weight put into orbit using disposable carriers in America did not even reach 150 tons/year, but here it was planned to be 12 times more; nothing was descended from orbit, and here it was supposed to return 820 tons/year... This was not just a program for creating some kind of space system under the motto of reducing transportation costs (our studies at our institute showed that no reduction would actually be observed ), it had a clear military purpose. And indeed, at this time they began to talk about the creation of powerful lasers, beam weapons, weapons based on new physical principles, which - theoretically - make it possible to destroy enemy missiles at a distance of several thousand kilometers. It was precisely the creation of such a system that was supposed to be used to test this new weapon in space conditions". A role in this mistake was played by the fact that the Shuttle was made taking into account the requirements of the Air Force, but the USSR did not understand the reasons why the Air Force was involved in the project. They thought that the project was initially initiated by the military, and was being done for military purposes. In fact , NASA desperately needed the Shuttle to stay afloat, and if Air Force support in Congress depended on the Air Force demanding that the Shuttle be painted in green color and decorate it with garlands - they would do it. In the eighties, they already tried to attract the Shuttle to the SDI program, but when it was designed in the seventies, there was no talk of anything like that.
I hope the reader now understands that judging the reusability of space systems using the example of the Shuttle is an extremely unsuccessful idea. The cargo flows for which the shuttle was made never materialized due to NASA spending cuts. The Shuttle's design had to be changed in major ways twice, first due to Air Force demands for which NASA needed political support, and then due to OMB criticism and insufficient appropriations for the program. All economic justifications, references to which sometimes come across in discussions of reusability, appeared at a time when NASA needed to save the shuttle, which was already heavily mutated due to the requirements of the Air Force, at any cost, and are simply far-fetched. Moreover, all participants in the program understood this - Congress, the White House, the Air Force, and NASA. For example, the Michoud Assembly Facility could produce at most twenty-odd external fuel tanks per year, that is, there was no talk of fifty-six or even thirty-something flights per year, as in the Mathematica report.
I took almost all the information from a wonderful book, which I recommend reading to anyone interested in the issue. Also, some text passages were borrowed from uv’s posts. Tico in this topic.
Born December 25, 1909 Gleb Lozino-Lozinsky- patriarch of domestic aerospace technology, creator of the reusable spacecraft Buran. On this occasion, we decided to recall the five most unusual space shuttle projects
"Buran"
Gleb Lozino-Lozinsky, winner of the Lenin Prize (1962) and two State Prizes (1950 and 1952), general designer of NPO Molniya, is almost unknown in Russia. Meanwhile, without any stretch of the imagination, it can be placed on the same level as Sergei Korolev- both in terms of the scale of the design gift and the talent of the organizer.
In the 1940s, Lozino-Lozinsky headed the work at the Mikoyan Design Bureau to comprehensively improve the efficiency of jet power plants. The result was the MiG-19, the world's first mass-produced supersonic fighter. In 1971, Lozino-Lozinsky was appointed chief designer of the supersonic interceptor, which the whole world recognized as the MiG-31; in 1972, he presented the MiG-29 project.
But the pinnacle of Lozino-Lozinsky’s design success was the creation of the “Soviet shuttle” - the Buran spacecraft, capable of lifting 30 tons of payload 200 kilometers and returning 20 tons from orbit. There were no analogues in domestic rocket and space technology equal in complexity to the Buran: its design included 600 units of on-board equipment, more than 50 on-board systems, more than 1,500 pipelines, and about 15,000 electrical connectors. More than 1,200 enterprises and research centers in the country—a total of more than one and a half million people—worked on the project.
The result was a triumphant two-orbit unmanned flight of the Buran with automatic landing November 15, 1988. The flight lasted 206 minutes, then the ship entered the atmosphere at a speed of 27,330 km/h over the Atlantic at a distance of 8,270 km from Baikonur. At 9 hours 24 minutes 42 seconds, ahead of the estimated time by only a second, the Buran, overcoming stormy gusts of side wind, touched the landing strip at a speed of 263 km/h and after 42 seconds, having run 1620 m, froze in its center with a deviation from center line only 3 m!
"Spiral"
Lozino-Lozinsky himself considered the main work of his life to be the creation of a compact space rocket plane that could launch not from Baikonur, but from the supersonic strategic bomber Tu-95. Such a rocket plane could destroy American shuttles and ballistic missiles in space. In 1965, practical work on orbital and hypersonic aircraft was entrusted to Mikoyan OKB-155, where it was headed by the 55-year-old chief designer of the OKB Lozino-Lozinsky. The topic of creating a two-stage aerospace system was called “Spiral”. The manned combat single-seat reusable ship was envisaged in several versions: reconnaissance, interceptor or attack aircraft with an Orbit-to-Earth class missile.
As part of the Spiral project, 1:3 scale models of the combat vehicle were built, called BOR-4. It was an experimental device with a length of 3.4 m, a wingspan of 2.6 m and a mass of 1074 kg in orbit. In the period from 1982–84, six launches of such devices were carried out by Cosmos launch vehicles from the Kapustin-Yar cosmodrome on various trajectories.
In total, more than 75 million rubles were spent on the Spiral program, but things did not go further than launching models into space - the program was curtailed.
Project Dyna-Soar
This project is the first American attempt to build a manned reusable orbital spacecraft. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first artificial Earth satellite into orbit. And less than a week later, the US Air Force combined several aerospace projects into a single program called Dyna-Soar (from Dynamic Soaring - acceleration and planning)
A full-scale mock-up of the shuttle was presented to the Air Force and NASA in Seattle on September 11, 1961. A typical single-orbit flight would involve Dyna-Soar launching on a Titan IIIC rocket from the Cape Canaveral Launch Complex and reaching orbit 9.7 minutes after launch at an altitude of 97.6 km and a speed of 7457 m/s. Dyna-Soar orbits the Earth, reenters the atmosphere, and lands at Edwards Air Force Base 107 minutes after launch.
However, on December 10, 1963, the US Secretary of Defense McNamara closed the Dyna-Soar project. One of the reasons for this decision was that the manned vehicle was single-seat, which did not suit the military. Dyna-Soar was only three years away from its first flight. On Scientific research$410 million had been spent, and another $373 million was needed to bring the project to actual space flight.
"Space Shuttle"
The history of the Space Shuttle program began in the late 1960s, at the height of the triumph of the American national space program. On June 20, 1969, two Americans - Neil Armstrong And Edwin Aldrin landed on the moon. By winning the “lunar” race, America proved its superiority in space exploration. We needed new goals and new technical means for access to space for people, and on October 30, 1968, two main NASA centers (the Manned Spacecraft Center - MSC - in Houston and the Marshall Space Center - MSFC - in Huntsville) approached American space firms with a proposal to explore the possibility of creating a reusable space system.
In March 1972, on the basis of the Houston project MSC-040C, the appearance of the shuttle that we know today was approved: launch solid rocket boosters, a disposable tank of fuel components and an orbital vehicle with three main engines. The development of such a system, where everything except the external tank is reused, was estimated at $5.15 billion.
Production of the first two shuttles began at the US Air Force plant in Palmdale in June 1974. The OV-101 was launched on September 17, 1976 and was named Enterprise after the starship from the science fiction television series Star Trek. In January 1979, the shuttle flotilla was replenished with four ships: Columbia, Challenger, Discovery and Atlantis. After the death of the Challenger in 1986, another shuttle was built, the Endeavor.
The Space Shuttle program turned out to be more expensive than planned: its cost increased from 5.2 billion dollars (in 1971 prices) to 10.1 billion dollars (in 1982 prices), and the launch cost increased from 10.5 million dollars to 240 million dollars. During development, it was envisaged that the shuttles would make 24 launches per year, and each of them would make up to 100 flights into space. In practice, they were used much less frequently - by the end of the program in the summer of 2011, 135 launches had been made, with Discovery making the most flights (39).
Private shuttle SpaceShipTwo
Virgin Galactic, founded by British billionaire Sir Richard Branson in 2004, proposed private passenger flights into space. To do this, she began to develop her own space shuttle. Five years later, the company’s specialists presented the SpaceShipTwo ship.
On October 10, 2010, the first test flight of a rocket plane took place at an airfield in the Mojave Desert. The device was lifted by the WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft to an altitude of 15 km, and after separation from the carrier and a 15-minute free flight, it landed. And on April 30, 2013, tests were carried out jet engine. Separating from the carrier at an altitude of about 14 km, SpaceShipTwo turned on the engine, and after 16 seconds it reached a speed of Mach 1.2 and an altitude of 17 km. This means that there is nothing left before suborbital passenger flights.
Once SpaceShipTwo is completely ready, the carrier aircraft will carry it to an altitude of 15.24 kilometers, after which it will undocking, the spacecraft will accelerate to 4023 km/h and rise to an altitude of 100 kilometers. It is expected that a ticket on board the space shuttle will cost 200 thousand dollars. To date, more than 550 people have expressed a desire to become space tourists.
Humanity has learned to build very powerful and high-speed objects that take decades to assemble in order to then reach the most distant goals. The Shuttle in orbit moves at a speed of more than 27 thousand km per hour. A number of NASA space probes, such as Helios 1, Helios 2 or Vodger 1, are powerful enough to reach the Moon in a few hours.
☛ This article was translated from the English-language resource themysteriousworld.com and, of course, is not entirely true. Many Russian and Soviet launch vehicles and spacecraft overcame the barrier of 11,000 km/h, but in the West, apparently, they got used to not noticing this. And there is quite a bit of freely available information about our space objects; in any case, we were never able to find out about the speed of many Russian spacecraft.
Here is a list of the ten fastest objects produced by mankind:
✰ ✰ ✰
10Rocket cart
Speed: 10,385 km/h
Rocket carts are actually used to test platforms used to accelerate experimental objects. During testing, the trolley has a record speed of 10,385 km/h. These devices use sliding pads instead of wheels to achieve such lightning-fast speeds. Rocket carts are propelled by rockets.
This external force imparts an initial acceleration to experimental objects. The trolleys also have long, more than 3 km, straight sections of track. The rocket cart tanks are filled with lubricants, such as helium gas, so that this helps the experimental object reach the required speed. These devices are commonly used to accelerate missiles, aircraft parts and aircraft recovery sections.
✰ ✰ ✰
9NASA X-43A
Speed: 11,200 km/h
The ASA X-43 A is an unmanned supersonic aircraft that is launched from a larger aircraft. In 2005, the Guinness Book of World Records recognized NASA's X-43 A as the fastest aircraft ever made. He develops maximum speed 11,265 km/h is about 8.4 times faster than the speed of sound.
NASA X-13 A uses drop-launch technology. First this supersonic plane hits a higher altitude on a larger plane and then crashes. The required speed is achieved using a launch vehicle. On final stage, after reaching a predetermined speed, the NASA X-13 runs on its own engine.
✰ ✰ ✰
8Shuttle Columbia
Speed: 27,350 km/h
The Columbia shuttle was the first successful reusable spacecraft in the history of space exploration. Since 1981, it has successfully completed 37 missions. The record speed of the space shuttle Columbia is 27,350 km/h. The ship exceeded its normal speed when it crashed on February 1, 2003.
The shuttle typically travels at 27,350 km/h to remain in Earth's lower orbit. At this speed, the spacecraft crew could see the sun rise and set several times in one day.
✰ ✰ ✰
7Shuttle Discovery
Speed: 28,000 km/h
The shuttle Discovery has a record number of successful missions, more than any other spacecraft. Since 1984, Discovery has made 30 successful flights and its speed record is 28,000 km/h. This is five times faster than the speed of a bullet. Sometimes spacecraft must travel faster than their normal speed of 27,350 km/h. It all depends on the chosen orbit and altitude of the spacecraft.
✰ ✰ ✰
6Apollo 10 lander
Speed: 39,897 km/h
The Apollo 10 launch was a rehearsal for NASA's mission before landing on the moon. During the return journey, on May 26, 1969, the Apollo 10 apparatus acquired a lightning speed of 39,897 km/h. The Guinness Book of World Records has set the Apollo 10 lander's speed record as the fastest manned vehicle speed record.
In fact, the Apollo 10 module needed such speed to reach the Earth's atmosphere from lunar orbit. Apollo 10 also completed its mission in 56 hours.