Something more on the present situation.  This comes as no surprise. We never knew when, but anyone who realistically assessed the situation of space access knew something like this was coming. A failure on the Shuttle most likely means a total
loss, and a subsequent stall of our entire space program - again!

Thanks to Jim Barnard for the analogy about the astronauts floating
bundles of cash out the airlock as we "spend all that money in space"!

What this loss tells us most clearly, is that it's not a good system to
rely for your access on a fleet of 4 unforgiving ships, and each sortie costs almost a billion dollars.

I'd like to point out to this list things which are happening with
NASA's Space Launch Initiative. They've shelved plans for a supposed "next Generation Shuttle" - a 2 Stage fully reusable ship, sounding very similar to various early Shuttle proposals - and have gone over to R&D for an interim crew access vehicle.

What they're building for a 2008 first test (hopefully accelerated now) is very much like something which NASA Langley looked into and did a considerable amount of good work on developing back in the mid-'80s after the Challenger was lost: a safer crew access vehicle/station lifeboat. They cut it after going back to flying the Shuttle (maintain the monopoly on crewed space access to the Shuttle program), and now Orbital Sciences has picked it up.

I hope these images open in a manageable size...

• www.slinews.com/photos/orbital4.jpg

• www.slinews.com/photos/mrrv_staging.jpg

If not, go to the SLI site, and scroll down to the OSI space plane section.

• http://www.slinews.com/concepts.html

• http://www.orbital.com/LaunchVehicle/SpacePlane/

These articles trace the history of what Orbital seems to be proposing.  Nothing saves you if a wing comes off at 6km/sec and 60km altitude, but a smaller, cheaper, and more forgiving vehicle means a lot.

• http://astronautix.com/craft/hl20.htm

• http://astronautix.com/craft/hl42.htm

Note the RLV in that OSI space plane artwork, the liftoff mass of the HL-42 was ~30 tonnes, so that RLV (or an ELV of similar capability) neatly replaces the Shuttle's lift capacity...  The Shuttle-C exceeds this, with no new infrastructure needed.

• http://astronautix.com/lvs/shuttlec.htm

There's nothing we need now, that only the Shuttle can do. There's
nothing the shuttle does well, which only it can do. Are we satisfied
that a flying reusable experiment shop isn't feasible? Is assembling a
tinker toy modular station really the best way to get a habitable volume into LEO?  It's been said for a long time that using anything called a "Shuttle" for anything but quick travel back & forth is like chartering a plane to fly to another continent, and then using it as a hotel and conference center while it sits on the runway at your destination. Maybe a 747 could be used that way, but a commercial operation wouldn't do it.

Note also that these space planes aren't to be confused with a
"mini-shuttle", such as the failed French/ESA Hermes.

• http://astronautix.com/craft/hermes.htm

Try to do too many things at once, or to be too many things to too many people, and it gets too big, too expensive, and not safe -just like the Shuttle. Don't mix crew and cargo, don't make a crew access ship stay on orbit for weeks at a time running microgravity experiments.  A small ACRV/PLS plane on top of a booster can have escape rockets to take it to safety. Try to build in a re-entry capable escape module, and the payload goes negative.  Instances of a fire on the pad of a fueled Shuttle, and no possibility of timely escape for the flight crew if the fire gets out of control.

• http://nasaproblems.com/

We've known all this for a long time. Don't mix crew and heavy cargo, launch crew on the safest & most forgiving system you can build - the Shuttle in it's final design was never this.

Incidentally, look over these rescue options as well (orbital skydiving, anyone?).

• http://astronautix.com/craftfam/rescue.htm

John Frazer