The Dream Survives
- Thread starter e of pi
- Start date
Love this - I'd been meaning to ask this exact question about what a more successful Shuttle program (without radical changes) looks like, and here you are!
Buran at MSI is the cherry on top. Reminds me of seeing what may have been Mir mockup modules if not actual unflown hardware at Ripley's Believe It Or Not in Wisconsin Dells somewhere around the turn of the millennium.
Buran at MSI is the cherry on top. Reminds me of seeing what may have been Mir mockup modules if not actual unflown hardware at Ripley's Believe It Or Not in Wisconsin Dells somewhere around the turn of the millennium.
This was a lot of fun! Loved the attention to detail in the Shuttle mishaps and the fun concepts sprinkled throughout. I'm a total shill for the Rockwell X-33/RLV, so I'm glad to see it lived to become the booster for Phantom Express ITTL.
Somewhere, the NSF guys are smiling.
Timeline is off to a great start (and ending?). Subscribed (of course).
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Wonderful TL, great work from all of y'all as always. When e popped into my DMs in early March asking about the logistics of moving a shuttle-sized object to a Chicago museum, I should've known it was for this.
That being said, I'd be interested to see what Chicago's MSI would do with Buran - if TTL is at all like OTL, they blew a lot of money in the late '90s and early '00s bringing the Pioneer Zephyr and the U-boat inside. Could be the case that Buran lives up in Milwaukee until into the late 2010s, until the museum can cough up the dough to fully revamp their space wing and build a new hangar for her - for perspective, their space center is only being fully renovated for (afaik) the first time in over a decade now, in 2024, to accomodate Dragon 1.
That being said, I'd be interested to see what Chicago's MSI would do with Buran - if TTL is at all like OTL, they blew a lot of money in the late '90s and early '00s bringing the Pioneer Zephyr and the U-boat inside. Could be the case that Buran lives up in Milwaukee until into the late 2010s, until the museum can cough up the dough to fully revamp their space wing and build a new hangar for her - for perspective, their space center is only being fully renovated for (afaik) the first time in over a decade now, in 2024, to accomodate Dragon 1.
I loved how the updates were scheduled every five hours. Not only does it keep my impatient appetite for space TLs sated, but it thematically reflects how hectic and extraordinary a schedule the Shuttle operated in ITTL. An amazing April Fools Day treat!
Thanks. We have some additional comments about the reasoning behind this and some of the decisions coming (we're all sort of working on a thesis statement of what we think it means which we'll probably have up in a few days), but to reply to a first round of comments:
I think the question of how reusable spacecraft efforts of the 90s might be influenced by a more successful Shuttle is a really interesting one (it's one I've sort of poked at in advising a few timeline writers recently, who hopefully don't feel as though I've stepped on any toes in also using some of those thoughts myself). That said, Shuttle being cheaper doesn't make station hardware development cheaper, which is sort of one of the themes of the timeline and hence why there's not a 90s lunar program or a giant and earlier Freedom or something like that, and why the increases in our ISS here are mostly just an altered assembly sequence and accelerated timeline, and modules which were planned but never finished or launched in part due to power supply and Shuttle launch availability, at least other than Leasecraft.
Probably, though this is paralleling Mir Corp who certainty get a good look at the hardware before they paid for Mir and Soyuz launches.
It's hard to avoid the Soviet space legacy being eaten by vultures given the state of post-Soviet Russia. The only question is whether the vultures are in the US, or Moscow, and as OTL a lot of them will be in Moscow.
Yeah, there's some fun ones in there, stuff like that, commercial two payload dual-Centaur Shuttle-C, that kind of thing.
Thank you both.
This is a very good point - and worth bearing in mind for everyone getting excited about commercial space stations in the coming years. Their rides to space may be getting cheaper, but they'd better find less expensive ways to build them, and operate them, or it isn't going to get very far.
And so, yes, this was a note of strong plausibility in your timeline.
While we are still working on our collected thoughts, there is one post I would like to address:
As you may have noted, e of pi was the one to start the thread, and as a result, he is the only person who can add new threadmarks. For the first and third story posts that is easy because he was making the posts. For the second story post however, he was not available at 0500EDT to make the threadmark when the post went live. That is why it got added between bout 0900 and 1000EDT.
As you may have noted, e of pi was the one to start the thread, and as a result, he is the only person who can add new threadmarks. For the first and third story posts that is easy because he was making the posts. For the second story post however, he was not available at 0500EDT to make the threadmark when the post went live. That is why it got added between bout 0900 and 1000EDT.
Came back to say that the idea of Iridium launching on Shuttle made me laugh out loud. It feels so out of place!
TimothyC's Author Note
I first would like to thank @e of pi and @Usili for allowing me to join in this endeavor. It was a crash project, but was a lot of fun. At the core, for me, there were a few things that I wanted to see the work explore. First, I wanted to look at what would, and wouldn’t change with a higher flight rate on the shuttle. As has been noted already, other than more flights (and a correspondingly larger astronaut corps), there simply isn’t a lot of extra spending on the part of the US government that isn’t being paid for by the sale of launch services. We estimate that the program is spending about 5B USD per year in the late 1990s, but at the same time, it is receiving over 2B USD is payments for satellites launched, and payload specialists flown. Fundamentally then, there isn’t any new money that gets unlocked in NASA’s budget. Expanding on this, other than ensuring continued US crew access to space, there are not any of the major issues in the historic US program of the last 15 years that get solved. JWST may go up earlier on a Centaur, but it is not likely to cost substantively less than it did in the real world.
As for another of the goals, I wanted to explore a world where I didn’t have to develop a plan for or a description of the death of a shuttle crew. It get tiring, and I had a lot more fun writing this story than I did dealing with the loss of OV-103 in Boldly or when I helped e of pi with the loss of Resolution in Black Gemini. That said, I did like the exploration of ways to put the orbiter at risk, without actually killing the crew, which included my personal favorite subsystem - the APUs and hydraulics.
Some of our readers have asked if the TPS gets fixed, and I don’t think it matters if it does or doesn’t. It might have been, and I would ask the reader, how many people that were not space fans or involved in the program knew about the TPS issue on STS-27R before STS-107? I would dare say it is a very small number. Given the existing length of the work, and our desire to not see it grow larger, we decided not to explore every possibility. Furthermore, because a TPS hit was one of the two methods that resulted in the loss of a shuttle in OTL, we knew there was a certain expectation on the part of our readers that something similar would happen. By not writing it, we allowed the risk to act as background tension, hopefully making the work a more enjoyable read.
On a final note, if you want to know how this changes pop culture? Well, I expect that “astronaut” is something less rare but still shown as prestigious in the media, and Space Camp is a hit, with maybe a direct-to-video sequel sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s.
As for another of the goals, I wanted to explore a world where I didn’t have to develop a plan for or a description of the death of a shuttle crew. It get tiring, and I had a lot more fun writing this story than I did dealing with the loss of OV-103 in Boldly or when I helped e of pi with the loss of Resolution in Black Gemini. That said, I did like the exploration of ways to put the orbiter at risk, without actually killing the crew, which included my personal favorite subsystem - the APUs and hydraulics.
Some of our readers have asked if the TPS gets fixed, and I don’t think it matters if it does or doesn’t. It might have been, and I would ask the reader, how many people that were not space fans or involved in the program knew about the TPS issue on STS-27R before STS-107? I would dare say it is a very small number. Given the existing length of the work, and our desire to not see it grow larger, we decided not to explore every possibility. Furthermore, because a TPS hit was one of the two methods that resulted in the loss of a shuttle in OTL, we knew there was a certain expectation on the part of our readers that something similar would happen. By not writing it, we allowed the risk to act as background tension, hopefully making the work a more enjoyable read.
On a final note, if you want to know how this changes pop culture? Well, I expect that “astronaut” is something less rare but still shown as prestigious in the media, and Space Camp is a hit, with maybe a direct-to-video sequel sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s.
e of pi's Author Note
So, there were a few things I wanted to explore with this TL. The first was some of the interesting possible failure modes for Shuttle which haven’t received as much attention because when people think of failure modes, they tend to think of the two that actually resulted in loss of crew. The Shuttle had a lot of near misses, and a lot of glitches that caused issues whose implications were not fully known outside the program (like STS-27, some of the fuel cell issues, and so on). But it also had near-misses with dodging by accident both STS-107 and STS-51L. If the weather had been different or the plug had stuck on 51-L, how long could the pre-Challenger flight rates have gone on? The capture feature was being ordered for FWC boosters, debated for new steel casings, and with the push of Shuttle to more aggressive orbits, I wonder if (as in this TL) the FWC boosters might not have become standard. The tile issues occurred on STS-107, but actually after the ramp which fell off had been deleted from new production tanks as aerodynamically unnecessary weight. Without that large mass, would the issue have been as large? There may be timelines not far from ours where Shuttle didn’t experience either issue. And if Shuttle hadn’t had a serious issue…what might a truly “successful” and safe version of the historic Shuttle have looked like? No major hardware changes, just insane luck and more time for problems to get fixed along the way instead of after accidents.
Shuttle is thought of as costly, but if it had safely hit 15 to 20 flights a year, or up to the like 24-30 that were the turnaround limits for the orbiters in practice, what might it have achieved? The cost-to-add-a-flight of ~$90m in the mid-80s and ~$100-150m in the mid-90s starts sounding cheap if it gets you a better-than-Falcon payload plus effectively a Dragon’s worth of additional crew on every single flight. The seats would get filled, if only on diplomacy, junkets, “outreach” like journalists and teachers, and maybe some limited space tourism through private brokers like NASA is allowing on ISS with Axiom. Averaging a $4 to $5 billion program across 24 plus flights, and you get like $160-200m average cost, and all NASA is paying is the fixed costs they paid in OTL anyway.
The flip side of that, the importance of utilization and flight rate (that is, both system capability to launch payloads and enough payloads to launch to use the capability) in making even “cheap” turnaround vehicles cheap in practice unless you can find somebody to subsidize all the fixed costs, also has applications today to the potential for future vehicles like Starship, New Glenn, and even more paper concepts like Skylon or the like. I'd like to thank @TimothyC and @Usili for research, writing, and edit help getting this to come together on time at very much the last minute.
Shuttle is thought of as costly, but if it had safely hit 15 to 20 flights a year, or up to the like 24-30 that were the turnaround limits for the orbiters in practice, what might it have achieved? The cost-to-add-a-flight of ~$90m in the mid-80s and ~$100-150m in the mid-90s starts sounding cheap if it gets you a better-than-Falcon payload plus effectively a Dragon’s worth of additional crew on every single flight. The seats would get filled, if only on diplomacy, junkets, “outreach” like journalists and teachers, and maybe some limited space tourism through private brokers like NASA is allowing on ISS with Axiom. Averaging a $4 to $5 billion program across 24 plus flights, and you get like $160-200m average cost, and all NASA is paying is the fixed costs they paid in OTL anyway.
The flip side of that, the importance of utilization and flight rate (that is, both system capability to launch payloads and enough payloads to launch to use the capability) in making even “cheap” turnaround vehicles cheap in practice unless you can find somebody to subsidize all the fixed costs, also has applications today to the potential for future vehicles like Starship, New Glenn, and even more paper concepts like Skylon or the like. I'd like to thank @TimothyC and @Usili for research, writing, and edit help getting this to come together on time at very much the last minute.
Usili's Author's Note
My own view and approach on this timeline is something of a thought I’ve had for a long while, and one that concerns the matter of the thin line in human spaceflight that can divide between what is seen as a ‘successful’ failure or issue and one that results in a loss of crew. Human spaceflight is something that can be seen as routine, but the danger does lie ever present, and so a significant thought lying here has been ‘what if it was an issue or failure that didn’t become a loss of crew?’
The Space Shuttle flew 135 missions of which 2 (STS-51-L and STS-107) resulted in the loss of crew. Yet at the same time it was a matter of chance that led to those events, 51-L suffering the highest winds at altitude for any flight in the program and then with 107 for the strike on the RCC as compared to the tiles underneath. Both which could have very nearly not happened. The Space Shuttle is a vehicle that can often be said as a disaster waiting to happen, yet many other close calls to the program historically didn’t see a loss of crew. STS-27R and STS-93 are the most well-known ‘close calls’ for the program, involving the TPS and SSME respectively. There were cases like STS-37 in which you had a set of circumstances which resulted in the Shuttle landing short at Edwards but depending on the conditions if at another site like Kennedy could’ve had more significant issues (please note this was written before the recent Scott Manley video) [1] or STS-76, where an inability to reopen the payload bay doors following the wave-off of the last landing opportunity of the day nearly led to Honolulu being used for an emergency landing as a result. And then from STS-37, STS-76, or STS-93, there was a flight software issue that was only discovered by chance of a draw from the RSLS abort on STS-41-D. The flight software issue was a case where depending on the timing delay, you could result in a case where the hardware output happened before the command computation, resulting in a failure of either SRB or ET separation; further, it was discovered that there was a limit on the BFS engage window following PASS attempting SRB separation because of the PASS requirement to disconnect power to the SRBs [2].
But the Space Shuttle isn’t the only vehicle that is known to have had these close calls involving humans aboard. The Apollo Program’s close call on human spaceflight is known about for Apollo 13, but there were many other near-misses that were present in the program that didn’t happen. Apollo 16 had a significant issue with the SPS backup gimbal motor control electronics following undocking of the LM from the CSM, which could have necessitated an abort prior to landing, and only realized following the end of the mission that both primary and backup gimbal control cables went through the same cable bundle and one can only imagine if there had been issues after landing [3] [4]. Then aside from Apollo 16, you had a significant issue present on Apollos 8, 10, and 11, in which during reentry, the Service Module did not skip out as expected (to prevent recontact with the Command Module) and which forced modifications in order to avoid the chance of a recontact from the SM with the CM [5].
And at least from how I approached this, is that you simply have the dice roll ‘right’ for a lack of a better term, and then for the cases where you could’ve had the Loss of Crew and Vehicle (LOCV) events… they simply don’t happen. It in effect goes to toe the line, and so for where there could have been a LOCV event, it simply does not happen and the crew comes out fine. It is such a big thing to consider where that happens and you don’t see the death of spacefarers.
But the case of where an LOCV event doesn’t happen doesn’t mean that the underlying programmatic issues are resolved or removed. They are still present and arguably festering within the program, able to cause lingering issues until they can be dealt with over time as the efforts to deal with them are resolved. In the case of the Space Shuttle, the biggest aspect on this prior to STS-51-L was the matter of the spare parts program which had been underfunded from the start, and became even more of a growing concern from the lack of underfunding because of higher budgetary concerns within the strict OMB caps set by the Reagan Administration (not even counting the matter of federal hiring freezes and the impact that had). And I think by not having a LOCV event happen, it also helps to showcase issues that were of significant concern during the history of the program that are not as well known about that could’ve had serious circumstances if it had actually happened during flight, with two examples being the PASS Set Split as we discussed earlier in this timeline, or a bird strike on ascent which posed significant concern during the program [6].
I think overall something to always remember with the matter of human spaceflight is that it is dangerous. There’s no necessary guarantee that it can be routine, and for each and every human spaceflight comes with its own risks, risks that are known and risks that are simply unknown, lurking and waiting to appear.
[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19920012134 https://web.archive.org/web/2024031...ress.com/2024/03/10/putting-atlantis-at-risk/
[2] The Legacy of Space Shuttle Flight Software: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20110014946
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20211005012525/http://www.spacefacts.de/mission/english/apollo-16.htm
[4] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/static/history/alsj/a16/A16_MissionReport.pdf https://historycollection.jsc.nasa....histories/MattinglyTK/MattinglyTK_11-6-01.htm
[6] The matter of a bird strike during SimSup training is mentioned in Before Lift-Off: The Making of a Space Shuttle Crew by Henry S.F. Cooper Jr. as one example of the concern it had in the program.
The Space Shuttle flew 135 missions of which 2 (STS-51-L and STS-107) resulted in the loss of crew. Yet at the same time it was a matter of chance that led to those events, 51-L suffering the highest winds at altitude for any flight in the program and then with 107 for the strike on the RCC as compared to the tiles underneath. Both which could have very nearly not happened. The Space Shuttle is a vehicle that can often be said as a disaster waiting to happen, yet many other close calls to the program historically didn’t see a loss of crew. STS-27R and STS-93 are the most well-known ‘close calls’ for the program, involving the TPS and SSME respectively. There were cases like STS-37 in which you had a set of circumstances which resulted in the Shuttle landing short at Edwards but depending on the conditions if at another site like Kennedy could’ve had more significant issues (please note this was written before the recent Scott Manley video) [1] or STS-76, where an inability to reopen the payload bay doors following the wave-off of the last landing opportunity of the day nearly led to Honolulu being used for an emergency landing as a result. And then from STS-37, STS-76, or STS-93, there was a flight software issue that was only discovered by chance of a draw from the RSLS abort on STS-41-D. The flight software issue was a case where depending on the timing delay, you could result in a case where the hardware output happened before the command computation, resulting in a failure of either SRB or ET separation; further, it was discovered that there was a limit on the BFS engage window following PASS attempting SRB separation because of the PASS requirement to disconnect power to the SRBs [2].
But the Space Shuttle isn’t the only vehicle that is known to have had these close calls involving humans aboard. The Apollo Program’s close call on human spaceflight is known about for Apollo 13, but there were many other near-misses that were present in the program that didn’t happen. Apollo 16 had a significant issue with the SPS backup gimbal motor control electronics following undocking of the LM from the CSM, which could have necessitated an abort prior to landing, and only realized following the end of the mission that both primary and backup gimbal control cables went through the same cable bundle and one can only imagine if there had been issues after landing [3] [4]. Then aside from Apollo 16, you had a significant issue present on Apollos 8, 10, and 11, in which during reentry, the Service Module did not skip out as expected (to prevent recontact with the Command Module) and which forced modifications in order to avoid the chance of a recontact from the SM with the CM [5].
And at least from how I approached this, is that you simply have the dice roll ‘right’ for a lack of a better term, and then for the cases where you could’ve had the Loss of Crew and Vehicle (LOCV) events… they simply don’t happen. It in effect goes to toe the line, and so for where there could have been a LOCV event, it simply does not happen and the crew comes out fine. It is such a big thing to consider where that happens and you don’t see the death of spacefarers.
But the case of where an LOCV event doesn’t happen doesn’t mean that the underlying programmatic issues are resolved or removed. They are still present and arguably festering within the program, able to cause lingering issues until they can be dealt with over time as the efforts to deal with them are resolved. In the case of the Space Shuttle, the biggest aspect on this prior to STS-51-L was the matter of the spare parts program which had been underfunded from the start, and became even more of a growing concern from the lack of underfunding because of higher budgetary concerns within the strict OMB caps set by the Reagan Administration (not even counting the matter of federal hiring freezes and the impact that had). And I think by not having a LOCV event happen, it also helps to showcase issues that were of significant concern during the history of the program that are not as well known about that could’ve had serious circumstances if it had actually happened during flight, with two examples being the PASS Set Split as we discussed earlier in this timeline, or a bird strike on ascent which posed significant concern during the program [6].
I think overall something to always remember with the matter of human spaceflight is that it is dangerous. There’s no necessary guarantee that it can be routine, and for each and every human spaceflight comes with its own risks, risks that are known and risks that are simply unknown, lurking and waiting to appear.
[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19920012134 https://web.archive.org/web/2024031...ress.com/2024/03/10/putting-atlantis-at-risk/
[2] The Legacy of Space Shuttle Flight Software: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20110014946
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20211005012525/http://www.spacefacts.de/mission/english/apollo-16.htm
[4] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/static/history/alsj/a16/A16_MissionReport.pdf https://historycollection.jsc.nasa....histories/MattinglyTK/MattinglyTK_11-6-01.htm
[4] Apollo 11 Mission Anomaly Report No. 3 Service Module Entry: 'https://web.archive.org/web/2022110...anomaly-report-no.-3-service-module-entry.pdf' https://www.nasa.gov/history/alsj/a11/a11tcdb.html
[6] The matter of a bird strike during SimSup training is mentioned in Before Lift-Off: The Making of a Space Shuttle Crew by Henry S.F. Cooper Jr. as one example of the concern it had in the program.
I was thinking how it had become a "trend" to come up with more and more original ways to have shuttle failures in 80s/90s space AH and this timeline certainly takes the cake! And without any fatality!
Wonderful timeline, definitely on the optimistic side (the least believable part is Hermes flying with crew in 2001!) but delightful nonetheless. This felt a long time coming seeing the various writings of the authors.
Wonderful timeline, definitely on the optimistic side (the least believable part is Hermes flying with crew in 2001!) but delightful nonetheless. This felt a long time coming seeing the various writings of the authors.