by In his withering (but accurate) attack on spaceplanes, especially small ones, Mr. Bell has uncovered the growing split between those extremist engineers who want to put wings on everything and those equally extreme engineers who want wings on nothing. Mr. Bell falls in the latter of the two categories along with Moomaw and Bob Truax, the father of the Atlas (and the Sea Dragon concept.)

True, any top-mounted mini-spaceplane is doomed to fail, but this need not be true of any winged vehicle. The biggest myth that we in the spaceflight community must combat is the widely held belief shared by those who support EELV-launched capsules and those who support mini-spaceplanes. This is the myth that crew and cargo must always remain separate. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If a runaway Progress re-supply craft was a horror to the MIR crew, imagine a much larger ~15 ton ATV crashing into ISS should a circuit fail.

For safety's sake alone there should be human eyes on both re-supply craft and the space-stations they must approach and dock with. Human hands should be at the controls else sunspots cut off comm-links and what-not.

This requirement demands a craft of some size for ISS will need many dozens of tons of supplies, and trash takes up much more space in the form of discarded packaging than it did in the form of wrapped goods on ascent. Killing the ISS is simply not an option and would be wasteful.

So the one thing no one wants is the one thing we all need--another shuttle.

Yes, I can hear all the boos and hisses now, but it is MY turn to spew venom for a change.

The capsule people suffer--they suffer from the madness that threatens to overcome even the best F-14 pilot who, on final approach towards his super-carrier, thinks:

"Why should I land on that small runway when I have gazillion square-miles of perfectly good ocean to ditch in?"

Fortunately, most pilots fight this madness the capsule people have embraced. There was more to the botched capsule return of Astronauts Bowersox and Pettit than the simple lack of Russian quality control.

Capsules on any kind lack great cross-range and low-g loading any sick or de-conditioned individual needs in order to be able to land nearest medical help. This way, you only ditch if you must-not as a matter of course. No capsule ride is ever pleasant.

For someone to call a winged vehicle a "flying Ming vase" while also calling for the re-use of already flown Apollo hardware actually in museums next to said vase is beyond credibility.

If anything, both capsules and lifting-bodies are little more than cannonballs with limited options should something go wrong. The X-37 is already having problems that led one individual to question the competence of Nasa/Marshall.

In Gemini 8, we saw just how quickly a small, low-mass capsule could spin wildly after detaching from its Agena target.

In addition to a little something called "lift" wing mass is not useless but can add stability to any craft in orbit. When the Gemini capsule was attached to the Agena, if you recall, the spin was far less.

While winged craft cannot be too small, neither should they be too large. The VentureStar SSTO concept and similarly overbloated winged craft are little more than hypersonic dirigibles. These eggshell-blimps are as vulnerable to weight creep than the tiny, unstable top-mounted mini-spaceplanes like the OSP.

While Nixon can be criticized for many things, the Shuttle should not be one of them. All the money in the world would not have built the insane TSTO craft on the drawing boards then. With two sets of wings two sets of landing gear -- two times Everything -- TSTO craft are the worst of the weight hogs, as are mini-spaceplanes which are so small that the avionics packages, life-support equipment, etc. all make up a large percentage of overall vehicle weight, leaving room for little else. This dooms OSP from the very start, as Mr. Bell explains.

The shuttle may not be much to look at, but it is the way it is and looks the way it does for many valid reasons. By combining crew and cargo while keeping the far more vast bulk of to-orbit-propellant mass OUTSIDE THE AIRFRAME, you have a vehicle that is scaled up big enough to be useful (absorbing life-support, avionics, etc.) while still being compact enough to be buildable with modern materials.

Propellants are stored in simple cylinders which are easily fabricated.

This is why the shuttle must look the way it does, Nixon and USAF requirements be damned. Nothing else works.

With side-mounting, pitch-loads are reduced and the vehicle is supported along its length, allowing a wider wingspan and a longer fuselage. With main hydrogen engines being placed underneath the External Tank, as in the Energia/Buran, the orbiter can be exchanged with 100 ton payload pods for faster assembly and other uses, allowing crew and the heaviest cargoes to be separated in a more safe, stable manner.

The orbiter retains a payload bay, and is as large as the automated 100 ton cargo pod it can service with ease. This beats 20 ton ISS modules that require five launches to orbit what an engine equipped External Tank (like Energia) could place in orbit in one shot.

This reduces launches, allowing each launch to be checked over time--without a sense of rush or urgency we have in the painful assembly of ISS the way we are doing it now. Some of the 100 ton craft launched in place of the orbiters can be manned craft that go beyond LEO.

Since an Engine-equipped External Tank is now its own rocket, different types of winged craft can be carried:

1. All-passenger craft with reduced cargo but strengthened heat-shields and turbojets, as with the Buran Analogue, which burned kerosene (sintin) used as both orbital insertion, maneuver, and jet fuel.
2. Standard Shuttle Orbiters with escape capsule/cockpits (a la' the F-111).
3. Winged hypersonic boilerplates of large scale first released by 747 orbiter ferries for low speed tests, then side-launched to space for release in vacuum, unlike the failed X-43, which is too small for valid airframe tests.

But you know this already, having read my Space Daily article CUT THE UMBILICAL: Some of you may question side-payload mounting, but do understand that any shuttle can be launched in a heads-up attitude, as described on page 250 of the May-June, 1988 edition of J. SPACECRAFT "Shuttle Performance With A Heads-Up Ascent" (Vol. 25, No. 3).

In this attitude, lift is generated, increasing payload performance as well as safety, in that such an attitude allows any potential debris to fall AWAY from the orbiter instead of on it, as was the case with Columbia's heads-down ascent. Roll issues did not defeat Buran's flight, contrary to what has been said.

If side-mounting a winged craft on an engine-equipped External Tank without wings is such a bad idea, then how is it a good idea to side mount a spacecraft on a External Tank with wings that is made flimsy since you must steal mass from tank thickness margin and put it into very large booster wings? This is why TSTO concepts are crap and Energia/Buran wasn't.

Small spaceplanes atop a dead-weight-on lift-off Zenit booster are far heavier than Buran was, since the weight of both the mini-spaceplane and its booster must be born by the strap-ons, as in the suggestion of Josef Pinkas in his article "Is The Shuttle Fatally Flawed?")

Jeffrey Bell admits that a base Atlas V costs MORE than an External Tank. So why not use the ET as the base of a shuttle derived HLLV that can carry either 100 ton cargoes or a variety of winged craft that are compact enough to be buildable yet big enough to be useful and safe, for they will be scaled up enough to have real RTLS capability and self-ferry capability that no capsule or OSP can ever have.

There is room for parachutes, ballistic recovery, and the use of wings to co-exist. Keep the 'chutes on unmanned strap-on boosters or returning Mars craft with heavy ablatives but compact build--but keep wings on middle-sized orbiters like the Current STS and Buran.

No one likes the word 'compromise' and we only hear the negative aspect of that word (no compromise on safety for example.) But we all must learn to compromise every day. The purists in our industry are going to have to learn its proper use whether they want to or not.

Bob Ballard used neither a capsule of a john-boat nor a supertanker (read: SSTO) to ocate the Titanic. The shuttle is not a truck, but it is rather like the craft used to service off-shore oil platforms that like ISS, also require able craft to service them properly.

These ships have many uses. A mid-sized Buran-type shuttle replacement can deploy OMVs and return these space tugs for refurbishment, deliver water, etc--or be exchanged with very large 100 ton payload pods/modules that are to remain in orbit. OSP is to cost many billions--the same money spent on the more capable Energia.

Robert Truax understood that small craft cost at least as much if not more than larger ones scaled up. We should takes those words to heart when we hear of folks who would turn back the clock to capsules and deny our astronauts the ability to work out of a stable platform, since space assembly cannot be done with capsules.

Let us not have a giant leap backwards.

Publius Rex is a regular contributor various discussion groups on space issues. you can discuss this topic with Publius via email publiusr@[email protected] - remove @NOSPAM@ and replace with a single @ sign. Or you can join SpaceDaily's new discussion board.

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