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Original North American Rockwell Shuttle delta wing design, 1969: fully reusable, with a flyback crewed booster Maxime Faget's DC-3 concept employed conventional straight wings. During the early shuttle studies, there was a debate over the optimal shuttle design that best-balanced capability, development cost, and operational cost.
The initial design of the reusable Space Shuttle envisioned an increasingly cheap launch platform to deploy commercial and government satellites. Early missions routinely ferried satellites, which determined the type of orbit that the orbiter vehicle would enter.
The historic Space Shuttle reused its Solid Rocket Boosters, its RS-25 engines and the Space Shuttle orbiter that acted as an orbital insertion stage, but it did not reuse the External Tank that fed the RS-25 engines. This is an example of a reusable launch system which reuses specific components of rockets.
In the early 1990s, NASA engineers planning a crewed mission to Mars included a Shuttle-C design to launch six non reusable 80-ton segments to create two Mars ships in Earth orbit. After President George W. Bush called for the end of the Space Shuttle by 2010, these proposed configurations were put aside. [2] HLLV
The X-37 lands automatically upon returning from orbit and is the third reusable spacecraft to have such a capability, after the Soviet Buran shuttle [52] and the U.S. space shuttle, which had automatic landing capability by the mid-1990s, but never tested it. [53]
The partial reusability of the Space Shuttle was one of the primary design requirements during its initial development. [65]: 164 The technical decisions that dictated the orbiter's return and re-use reduced the per-launch payload capabilities. The original intention was to compensate for this lower payload by lowering the per-launch costs and ...
Unlike the design that eventually emerged, the DC-3 was a fully reusable launch vehicle two-stage-to-orbit spaceplane design with a small payload capacity of about 12,000 lb (5,400 kg) and limited maneuverability. Its inherent strengths were good low-speed handling during landing, and a low-risk development that was relatively immune to changes ...
Nuclear Ferry and Shuttle Orbiter docked to an Orbital Propellant Depot. The Space Transportation System (STS), also known internally to NASA as the Integrated Program Plan (IPP), [1] was a proposed system of reusable crewed space vehicles envisioned in 1969 to support extended operations beyond the Apollo program (NASA appropriated the name for its Space Shuttle Program, the only component of ...