Nov 022011
The Shuttle and external tank, boosted by a manned glideback version of the Saturn V S-IC first stage.
6 Responses to “1971 McDonnell Douglas Shuttle Concepts”
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The Shuttle and external tank, boosted by a manned glideback version of the Saturn V S-IC first stage.
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So why wasn’t this configuration used? It looks straightforward enough.
The story as related to me by Ralph Nansen is that it *was* chosen (the Boeing take on the concept, anyway). It was even announced at, IIRC, Johnson Space Center. But a few hours later word came in from NASA HQ, after having gotten a talking-to from the Nixon White House, that the *real* choice was a pair of SRBs.
Ah, politics.
I noticed the Pan Am logo at the bottom. What was their connection to this?
Looks like the booster might be crewed? The orbiter appears to be rotated 180 from it, so I guess there might be some times when one of the crews is upside down and the other is right-side up!
Managing the aerodynamic forces on that beastie at max-Q is something I don’t even want to think about.
Yes, the booster was crewed for fly-back and reuse. As for Pan-Am logos, they probably wanted to make some version of the Orion shuttle from 2001 a reality and tossed a few bucks at anything that looked viable.
http://up-ship.com/blog/blog/?p=5792
There’s a lot of mass flying around in this design. The vertical stabilizer alone on the F-1 stage is almost as big as the Shuttle orbiter. Would the savings on new engines each launch really offset the cost of a superhuge booster and the risk to two crews?