The Post-Shuttle Era | Transterrestrial Musings

There’s a pretty good article on the history and the future over at Wired. This isn’t right, though:

It took the crash of Challenger in 1986, after which all surviving space shuttles were grounded for three years, to convince the military that it could not rely on the huge, complex craft for all its orbital missions. That was the beginning of the end of the Pentagon’s love affair with the shuttle, and in its autumn years, it did very little military work that we know of.

The Pentagon never had a love affair with the Shuttle to end — it always felt like it had been forced to use it, and (fortunately) fought to keep Titan, Delta and Atlas alive, despite the national policy that all was going to be launched on the Shuttle. This paid off after Challenger (though the other vehicles had failures as well — 1986 was probably the worst year for the space program since the early days).

7 thoughts on “The Post-Shuttle Era”

True. As evidence: the Titan IV program, initially known as the Complementary Expendable Launch Vehicle (CELV), the express purpose of which was to provided an alternate means of launching Shuttle payloads was underway well before the Challenger accident.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/t4.htm

“Development of the Titan IV program was in direct response to a National Security Decision Directive. The initial contract for development, qualification, and production of 10 Titan IVs with Centaur upper stages was awarded in February 1985. This contract included the activation and operation of a single Titan IV/Centaur launch facility at Cape Canaveral AFB, FL (CCAFS). “

Not entirely on topic, but probably of interest to Rand:

a conversation with a Shuttle astronaut in which our narrator is told that “tethers break.” Brief and interesting.

AHA! Now we know that Rand and Chris are the same person! The question is, who is John?

Tethers break??? So if you have two tethers with one under tension and the other stronger?

If they did break you could not predict the resulting direction other than it’s plane… so you would also mitigate for that as well.

It wasn’t until after the Challenger explosion that the Air Force stopped work on SLC-6 at Vandenberg. IIRC, they’d spent somewhere around $6 billion on the pad and all of the support facilities. They were still planning on controlling those military Shuttle missions from the Shuttle Operations and Planning Complex (SOPC) at (then) Falcon AFB, CO. After Challenger, they decided it was too risky to launch Shuttles out of Vandenberg and scrapped the project. From what I recall, there were issues with hydrogen accummulation around the launch pad and concerns about the weather in the area.

There was a period of about 8 months where we had an incredibly bad string of launch accidents. It started with the failed launch of a Titan 34 out of Vandenberg. That was around September of 1985. Then, starting in the following January, we lost Challenger, an Atlas, a Delta II and another Titan 34. For several months, our only operational booster was the Scout.