“If all the Shuttle is used for is to deploy satellites…”

I think the original premise for this debate has fallen by the wayside.

My sliver of the debate regards whether the Shuttle could be called a heavy lifter. I say no, because the end result in space after the orbiter flies home is mass of such size that Delta IV Heavy or Proton could have put it there (~25 tons). If all you want to do is put mass in space, then the Shuttle is not a heavy lifter.

If you want to put people into space, the Shuttle maxes out at 6 passengers and 2 crew. We don’t know the crew requirements for the next gen capsules (0, 1, 2, etc.), but we do know that they can serve as lifeboats in addition to doing the transportation. All the Shuttle can do is swap out personnel, it can’t really add any to the ISS (except for less than two weeks).

Where the Shuttle has a clear advantage is as a mini space station while in orbit, and in the ability to bring along a huge amount of equipment for the mission. This capability will be sad to lose, but the ISS is a much better platform for performing any future work of this kind.

I think our perceptions of the Shuttle will end up changing once we start launching lots of commercial cargo & crew flights. Once that flexibility is realized, then the inflexibility of the Shuttle will become more apparent…

My $0.02

Not really. The key here is that for the other launchers, the paying customer has almost complete flexibility in determing what the payload is. For the shuttle, if you count the orbiter as payload, the customer no long had that flexibility. They got the orbiter, even if they didn’t want it.

The reduction in flexibility has a cost that is not properly accounted for when simply totaling up “payload” capacity.

If all the Shuttle is used for is to deploy satellites (and that hasn’t happened in a long time), then it is reasonable to count only the satellite as payload. But on a crew rotation mission you would otherwise have had to launch a separate crew module. You might say that the combined launch vehicle + spacecraft is itself a vehicle with only the crew as payload. But it wouldn’t be fair to compare just a launch vehicle with the Shuttle, which is part launch vehicle, part spacecraft. Of course, for some roles this combination isn’t cost-effective compared to separate vehicles. And when the Shuttle delivers the PMM it is doing crew rotation and delivery of a module in one launch , something which would otherwise have required two. Still not cost-effective, but a relevant difference.

The only asinine suggestion is that anyone has proposed such a thing. Can you point to any post in which someone has? If not, then ‘fess up to proposing a straw man. The FAA regulates private launch.

We won’t hold our collective breath.

“Used as a crew transporter (or cargo return vehicle) or mini space station (including repair missions) it is perfectly legitimate to count the orbiter as payload.”

I don’t see it that way.

The Shuttle orbiter is nothing more than an airplane carrying cargo and passengers to a remote location, where it disgorges cargo, and then returns with it’s passengers. That people sleep and work in it does not change it’s function.

If you look at the specs for a airplane, you will see how much weight (fuel + cargo + passengers) it can carry, but the aircraft itself is not listed as part of the possible “payload”. Even if I stick JATO rockets on it, the plane is still not payload.

Not as asinine as suggesting that for profit industry can regulate itself any better than the government. You are begging the question since there is no market for anything in space except telecommunications satellites.’

Tourism is doomed; not enough rich people to sustain a market. Half those “reservations” being cited are B.S. What else? The ISS and government payloads. That is it besides sats.

I would say you are the one braying.

“A new Hubble each time?? Talk about a waste. The telescope was designed to be serviced, and if needed, returned to earth. On-orbit servicing was a lot cheaper than building four or five new HSTs.”

There is a general rule of thumb for consumer products that if it costs close to 50% of the original price to repair something, it’s better to replace it.

Hubble was I like to call a “learning moment”. When it was originally funded in 1978, it was supposed to cost $36M. Subsequent changes, schedule slips, and things like the Challenger accident eventually raised the cost to over $2.5B. However, the first of any product is always the most expensive, and it is very likely that follow-on telescopes could have been serially manufactured and launched on existing commercial launchers (it only weighs 12 tons) for a much lower overall program cost than what eventually took place.

Now you may look at the situation from an emotional standpoint Matt, but I look at it from a dollars & cents one – how much does it cost to accomplish a goal?

Those five servicing missions Hubble needed cost us at least $4B just for the Shuttle, and that could have paid to put new Hubble’s in orbit at least twice during that same period of time.

Unfortunately Hubble was the first of it’s kind, and now we know not to do that again. But if we could go back in time, it would have been far less expensive to build and launch a series of Hubble telescopes than to build one and keep fixing it using the Shuttle.