Over its lifetime the shuttle carried out a more diverse range of missions than any other launch system in existence. It also resulted in the most studied disaster in history.
With the rise of private spaceflight, it has become ‘fashionable’ to look back on the Shuttle only for its shortcomings. It is too easy to forget how far ahead of its time the Shuttle was when it first launched, and what it gave back to us. Unfortunately, this risky technology also got ahead of NASA’s ability to properly manage it.
Timestamps:
spoiler
00:00 Intro
03:45 Orbiter Requirements
09:55 RS-25. Beauty in Complexity
18:28 Solid Rocket Boosters…a suspiciously long chapter
45:41 Avionics. Innovation with well managed risk
51:54 Thermal Protection System. Innovation with poorly managed risk
01:05:38 Legacy
4:09 “We’re gonna skip over the years of political wrangling because it’s of no interest to me”
That’s the whole reason it was bad what are you doing fucking engineers istg
18:09 “The alternate option was to throw them away after each launch, and that’s a crazy thought isn’t it?” [with picture of SLS which does exactly that] Funny but also fails to mention the reusable EFT option from those “years of political wrangling” which could have made the Shuttle not need one perfect engine for the entire trip from Florida to orbit.
24:37 [After several minutes of defending the use of SRBs on crewed vehicles finishes revealing his own chart showing high survivability for the combination of liquid fuel and LES present and low for solid fuel and LES absent, with the high survivability column marked Soyuz(/R7). Apollo/Saturn, Shenzhou/Long March, and even Dragon/Falcon also fit into this column, which is the correct way to build space rockets.]
28:25 “NASA were forced to take the brave option” In spaceflight this means you have fucked up.
52:18 “There were more than 20 thousand of [the ceramic heat shield tiles] with considerable effort to glue into place, but they were reusable” Like the RS-25, this reusability was much less robust than expected because, due to that complexity, the system required significant refitting between flights.
55:26: “Option 1 would be an on orbit repair” Me, out loud: “No.” Absolutely deranged idea. Heat tiles from elsewhere on the shuttle?
1:03:40 “We know they couldn’t because they didn’t” Bizarre stembrain logic that just takes all political and organizational problems as givens
1:09:47 “It could carry 8 crew to orbit in one go along with that cargo, a feat still unmatched” Because that’s a shitty way to do things. Launch your cargo separately, focus crewed vehicles completely on crew safety.
1:09:50 “It could catch and return more from orbit than any other operational system” This was the Air Force’s bazinga satellite stealing plan which was a profoundly bad idea and greatly worsened the design of the Shuttle.
Bonus: count the instances of “Loss of crew and vehicle” which is nerd for it blows up and everybody dies
Damn you really hatewatched the whole thing huh? Impressive.
Comprehensively hating the shuttle is a special interest