>Why go through all the trouble to give the Shuttle large wings if it has no jet engines and the glide characteristics of a brick?
I believe the delta wings were mostly to assist with stability when the shuttle was hypersonic.
>Why build such complex, adjustable main engines and then rely on the equivalent of two giant firecrackers to provide most of the takeoff thrust
Anyone who has played Kerbal Space Program has come up with a similar solution in their attempts to escape the tyranny of the rocket equation— use your big brutish solid boosters to get off the ground, in conjunction with your less powerful but more efficient liquid ones. Since they burned for ~4x as long as the solids, I think the RS-25 engines actually did about the same amount of work while needing a lot less fuel
>What kind of missions would require people to assist in deploying a large payload
I would think it's less "deploying a payload" and more like retrieving one (which is actually alluded to later in this article). When the shuttle was being designed, the US was still taking satellite reconnaissance photos on film, which was then returned to Earth and scooped up by a plane. Being able to put more film in your satellite would save a lot of money, as would being able to develop film without having to send one of your half dozen retrieval pods back to Earth.
>the Air Force demanded that the Shuttle be capable of gliding over a thousand miles cross-range during re-entry
Was this requirement only from the Air Force? How far would they have need to go cross-range to support the shuttle's various abort modes? It's not like you have a lot of other options in the area if you can't make it to the runway on Ascension Island.
The large wings are specifically to support a particular Air Force mission profile. They wanted to be able to do a polar launch (requiring a bigger rocket than equatorial launches to start with), grab a Soviet satellite, then land the vehicle after just one orbit.
After one polar orbit, the Vandenburg base would have moved east about a thousand miles, so the Shuttle would have to fly a thousand miles cross-range to get back to it's runway. Hence the big delta wings.
The Air Force never managed to get the Vandenburg facility commissioned, so the Shuttle never few any polar missions. If those requirements had been ditched, the Shuttle could have been small enough have been built on a vertical stack with a lot more flexibility in abort modes.
Do you have more info than that? Most of the links in the article's sources are dead and I'm not familiar with that requirement. I didn't even realize that the USSR put things in polar orbits (as opposed to Mulniya). Speaking of the USSR, I think Bran's wings were even bigger than the shuttle's. Was that just a case of copy-and-paste design?
And did that cross range ability reduce the number of abort sites that NASA needed to maintain?
Molniya orbits put the satellite at a relatively high altitude when it's over the target area, compared to a low polar orbit. If you absolutely have to get the highest resolution close up photos possible of a whole bunch of Capitalist military sites all over the world, low polar is the way to go, or at least was back when the Shuttle was designed.
Molniya orbits are best thought of as an alternative to geostationary orbits, for applications requiring sustained coverage over large areas up north.
A lost decade-plus for manned spaceflight and rocket development. A bunch of very funny things in there, such as this about the ISS:
"Launched in an oblique, low orbit that guarantees its permanent uselessness, it serves as yin to the shuttle's yang, justifying an endless stream of future Shuttle missions through the simple stratagem of being too expensive to abandon."
The article suggests Nasa cynically kept the shuttle and ISS going, in order for each to justify the existence of the other.
> By the time Shuttle development began, it was clear that the original vision of a Shuttle as part of a larger space transportation system was far too costly and ambitious to receive Congressional support.
[...]
> Moreover, there was no way to launch a polar mission safely from Kennedy Space Center — it would mean overflying either heavily populated areas in the Carolinas or risking capture of a fuel tank by the wily Cubans. So the Air Force also demanded, and got, billions in funding to build a new Shuttle launch facility at Vandenberg Air Force base in California.
I wonder what this means for manned spaceflight that SpaceX is working on. Is it still a waste of money, or have things changed enough to make it worth it?
A good chunk of the costs of the space shuttle was because it didn't launch as often as it was originally supposed to, which made it harder to amortize R&D costs.
The rockets themselves were expensive, and refurbishing the "reusable" parts wasn't cheap. I think SpaceX is in a good position to dramatically lower the costs, as long as they can keep refurbishment costs down and share as much architecture as possible between their manned and unmanned launches. Being able to use a rocket from a manned F9 launch another 20 times (even if they're only certified to use it on unmanned launches) would do wonders for reducing costs.
Also: SpaceX doesn't have to manufacture in each congressional district; and while their contracts are mostly paid by the taxpayer, if they screw up they go under by themselves.
None of the political and military requirements that burdened the Shuttle, which the article details at length, apply to SpaceX. These design constraints lead the Shuttle to be much bigger and heavier than necessary for the missions it actually ended up flying, and this increased weight and size meant it was too big to launch on the top of a first stage booster. Hence the side-mounted design.
In addition to subsequent technological advantages, Starship can get away with being much lighter for the same payload than the Shuttle.
Finally one factor that isn't often mentioned is that automated vertical landing capability is a real game changer. early plans for vertical landing systems would have required manual pilot control, as early computer systems weren't up to the task. The automated systems capable of hoverslam landings that SpaceX has developed are dramatically more efficient than manual control would be, and I strongly suspect it's this difference that really makes it viable.
Manned space flight will be a "waste" of money for a long time to come because there is very little in space that we want that we can't do without humans. There are no economic reasons for wanting a Mars colony.
I believe the delta wings were mostly to assist with stability when the shuttle was hypersonic.
>Why build such complex, adjustable main engines and then rely on the equivalent of two giant firecrackers to provide most of the takeoff thrust
Anyone who has played Kerbal Space Program has come up with a similar solution in their attempts to escape the tyranny of the rocket equation— use your big brutish solid boosters to get off the ground, in conjunction with your less powerful but more efficient liquid ones. Since they burned for ~4x as long as the solids, I think the RS-25 engines actually did about the same amount of work while needing a lot less fuel
>What kind of missions would require people to assist in deploying a large payload
I would think it's less "deploying a payload" and more like retrieving one (which is actually alluded to later in this article). When the shuttle was being designed, the US was still taking satellite reconnaissance photos on film, which was then returned to Earth and scooped up by a plane. Being able to put more film in your satellite would save a lot of money, as would being able to develop film without having to send one of your half dozen retrieval pods back to Earth.
>the Air Force demanded that the Shuttle be capable of gliding over a thousand miles cross-range during re-entry
Was this requirement only from the Air Force? How far would they have need to go cross-range to support the shuttle's various abort modes? It's not like you have a lot of other options in the area if you can't make it to the runway on Ascension Island.