dietz%usc-cse%USC-ECL%SRI-NIC@sri-unix.UUCP (12/15/83)
First tiles fell off, then the SRB nozzle almost burned through, and now there's a hydrazine fire/explosion right after touchdown! Anyone want to lay odds that a shuttle is going to prang in the next couple of years? On another subject: NPR's All Things Considered (a daily evening news/current events program) had a piece a few days ago on "space cruisers". They interviewed some DOD types who talked about the Air Force's proposed one-man mini-shuttle, and some other person who is proposing to build fairly cheap "space cruisers" capable of being carried aloft by the shuttle (up to 10 per shuttle bay) and reaching any point in cislunar space. The primary mission of the space cruiser would be delivery, maintenance and repair of sattelites in GEO. Each would carry one crew member. The design sounded suspiciously like some recently proposed orbital tugs that use aerobraking in the upper atmosphere to make radical braking/orbital plane change maneuvers with low fuel expenditure. The interviewee thought that private enterprise could finance the things if NASA didn't want to, since they would not be as technically sophisticated as vehicles capable of reaching orbit from Earth. I sure hope so. An immediate spinoff of any orbital tug technology would be greatly improved prospects for further lunar exploration, since the energy needed to go to GEO from LEO is about the same as to low lunar orbit. The space cruiser and a LEO space station would compliment one another rather well. The space station would become a kind of orbital hanger/fuel-depo/hotel/warehouse, while the space cruisers would carry workers to build and maintain new generation sattelites in GEO. These new sattelites would be much larger and more complicated than current sattelites, so some repair capability would greatly reduce their cost.