There were no enclosed wings on the Shuttle.
There is plenty of Youtube video of shuttle launches and landings.
It was a miserable, extremely dangerous flying
machine (this is just the orbiter, not the rest
of the vulnerabilities built in to the system)
with an L/D of something like 3 or 4 and a high
wing loading and no go round capability. This
resulted in quite severe re-entry heat loads and
Columbia disintegrated at around 210,000 feet
while still going Mach 12 or so. You want to shed
energy higher up and a "fluffier" re-entry
vehicle does this. Shuttle got the wing design it
did in order to have a higher hypersonic L/D so
it had more cross range capability on re-entry.
This was to meet a USAF requirement for it to be
able to be launched either from Cape Canaveral or
Vandenberg and be recovered to the same place
after one orbit, aka "the silly ass once around
mission". This was meant to be a quick reaction
reconnaisance mission but by the time the thing
got built nobody believed in this mission anymore
and anyway "quick reaction" didn't describe a
shuttle launch. Atlantis was in processing for
launch in a month when Columbia was launched on
her last flight. I've seen a report that said
they could have speeded up processing and would
have had a window of 3 days to rendezvous,
transfer the crew and either put Columbia into
re-entry for disposal or park it in a higher
orbit where it might have been able to be repaired on a later mission.
Whether a vehicle has wings or not you need to
burn a small amount of fuel to get your orbit to
intersect the upper atmosphere. After that, the
winged vehicle doesn't need to burn more fuel. A
wingless rocket powered lander will need a small
amount to cancel its terminal velocity in the
lower atmosphere for landing . Correctly designed
this should be only 100M/sec or so. Falcon 9 from
what I could see from the last flight was less
than 300M/sec but this booster stage wasn't
originally designed for optimum rocket powered
landing. (I think you want a conical shape for
greater base area). Wings are pretty awful on
re-entry. Very high temperatures on relatively
small in area stagnation points. Heat shielding
on a properly designed wingless stage will likely weigh a lot less.
The upper stage of Falcon 9 was meant to re-enter
and be recovered but the payload hit meant that
idea was abandoned but in light of the success of
the booster landings the plan has been dusted
off. There is talk of attempting upper stage
recovery on the first flight of Falcon Heavy (3
Falcon 9 booster stages strapped together). It is
planned to recover all 3 boosters and at least
one of them has flown before. See also Elon Musk
ITS. ITS is the proposed Mars ship. Highly
entertaining video of Elon Musk describing this
at an IAU meeting in Mexico last September.
SpaceX is actually testing the full scale carbon
fiber tanks for this and the Raptor engine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_(rocket_engine_family)
is in test and has been fired.
All you ever want to know about spaceships flown
and proposed at www.astronautix.com
This is the REAL space age.
Mike
At 09:50 PM 5/12/2017, you wrote:
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0001_01D2CB65.94F90990"
Content-Language: en-us
I agree Mark and disagree with your comments Mike.
The shuttles were capable of rotating to an AoA
after re-entry so that they could slowed
sufficiently to extend enclosed wings and be
turned into a much safer flying device that
operated with much more flexibility on its return to Terra Firma.
Noel.
From: Aus-soaring
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mark Newton
Sent: Friday, May 12, 2017 7:18 PM
To: Discussion of issues relating to Soaring in Australia.
Subject: Re: [Aus-soaring] High speed glider landing
Might be fine for a booster, but not so good for
an orbiter, where youâd need to take many
expensive kilograms of landing fuel all the way into orbit and back.
- mark
On May 12, 2017, at 11:07 AM, Mike Borgelt
<<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]>
wrote:
About how the Shuttle used to land except the vehicle is a lot smaller.
I think wings are the most useless things on
spaceships though. Just land it vertically on
rocket thrust as SpaceX is now doing routinely.
Mike
At 09:54 AM 5/12/2017, you wrote:
<https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/05/top-secret-air-force-spaceplane-lands-with-sonic-boom-after-two-years-in-orbit/>https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/05/top-secret-air-force-spaceplane-lands-with-sonic-boom-after-two-years-in-orbit/
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quality soaring instrumentation since 1978
www.borgeltinstruments.com
tel: 07 4635 5784 overseas: int+61-7-4635 5784
mob: 042835 5784 : int+61-42835 5784
P O Box 4607, Toowoomba East, QLD 4350, Australia
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