The space shuttle looked like space ships in Star Trek and a lot of other science fiction movies/TV. Did people's expectation of what a space vehicle should look like, based on futuristic movies/tv shows, negatively influence the design of the shuttle when a reusable rocket like Falcon Heavy or some other design would have been more cost efficient?
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Did people's expectation of what a space vehicle should look like based on futuristic movies/tv shows negatively influence the design of the shuttle
No.
The design of the space shuttle concept went through many, many revisions before reaching the form that got constructed. Many options were considered, and they were selected or rejected for technical reasons, not for aesthetic ones. You can read about the process in The Space Shuttle Decision.
a reusable rocket like Falcon Heavy or some other design would have been more cost efficient?
The shuttle didn't even look very much like science fiction. I'd argue that Falcon Heavy looks much more like sci-fi than shuttle did.
Shuttle's relatively poor cost-efficiency (much exaggerated, actually) was due to the combination of very ambitious specifications and a lack of funding for development. Many of the shuttle concepts involved a fully reusable first-stage flyback booster, which could have reduced the per-flight costs, but would have required much more money for initial development. The main engine specifications were at the very edge of what was possible in that era, leading to an engine that was expensive to build and maintain. Congress demanded that shuttle be the only launch system for all US government applications, and in turn the Air Force set unreasonable requirements on its capabilities, making for a much more expensive launcher.
Russell Borogove
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4If you want an example of a spacecraft clearly influenced by sci-fi, the Starship/Starhopper line of rockets are pretty much spot-on. Some versions of that look almost cartoonishly sci-fi, like straight out of the Jetsons. – Darrel Hoffman Apr 07 '21 at 16:20
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18@DarrelHoffman The stereotypical sci-fi rocket shape comes directly from Von Braun's V-2 design, which is what it is for technical and aerodynamic reasons. On real rockets, the big fins went away with the advent of gimbaled rocket engines in the late '50s; the rear boat-tail taper went away because it improved stability. Starship got fins back for maneuverability and attitude control during reentry and descent. It's influenced by physics, not by fiction. – Russell Borogove Apr 07 '21 at 16:41
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@RussellBorogove: Why would removing the boattail taper improve stability? Wouldn't removing the taper shift the vehicle's center of mass rearwards, negatively affecting stability? – Vikki Apr 07 '21 at 19:22
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5@Vikki-formerlySean With a boattail, small deviations from 0 angle-of-attack don't put any additional cross-section "into the wind" at the aft end. Without boattailing, but retaining some amount of tapered forward profile, the aft section produces more correcting torque than the forward section does diverging. – Russell Borogove Apr 07 '21 at 19:26
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@RussellBorogove: On the other hand, that has to be balanced against the reduction in stability produced by moving the center of mass aftwards. – Vikki Apr 07 '21 at 19:28
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1@Vikki-formerlySean It would depend on the particular design, but conceptually it could be a thin skirt over a similar tank and thrust structure. It's not apples-to-apples in practice, though. – Russell Borogove Apr 07 '21 at 19:36
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@Russell Borogove: The part of the SpaceX designs that really seems to come out of pre-60s SF is the whole idea of landing tail-first, under rocket power. I'm not sure that would have worked even for 1st stages, given the limited sensing & compute power available in the Shuttle design era. (Yes, it worked with unmanned lunar landings, but the problem is a lot simpler when you don't have to deal with atmosphere.) – jamesqf Apr 07 '21 at 23:36
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5The sensing and compute problem is nearly unchanged in atmosphere. Doing it in 1g is a little harder than 1/6g. And, as I never get tired of screaming to an uncaring sky, NASA did it twenty years before SpaceX did. – Russell Borogove Apr 07 '21 at 23:41
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1Elon Musk has even clearly stated that he was biased towards a three-fin design for Starship because of how much it resembled the rocket in Tin Tin's Destination Moon. – Steve Bennett Apr 08 '21 at 01:59
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1@SteveBennett And now technical considerations have driven them away from three-fin. – Russell Borogove Apr 08 '21 at 03:23
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"NASA did it twenty years before SpaceX did" DOD, not NASA, but who's counting. – Organic Marble Apr 08 '21 at 03:52
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@Russell Borogove: How is the problem unchanged? While I have no personal experience of vertical landing rockets, I can tell you that it is MUCH more difficult to land a small plane (much more forgiving than a rocket) in any sort of crosswind or gusty winds than in a dead calm. (Not to mention that the DC-X benefits from 3 decades of improved computer tech.) – jamesqf Apr 08 '21 at 04:02
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@jamesqf That doesn't make the math any harder. You're still driving a measured error to zero. – Russell Borogove Apr 08 '21 at 04:08
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This. The shuttle suffered from the exact same design problems that the F-35 had - too many cooks, design by committee, and a swiss-army ambition that turned into a three-headed monster. – J... Apr 08 '21 at 14:11
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@Russell Borogove: No? Instead of two factors - distance and velocity - that vary smoothly, you have additional impulses that can vary erratically. Your computations are more complex, and must be done at higher speeds to adequately adjust for changes. – jamesqf Apr 09 '21 at 04:52
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@jamesqf Measured distance and velocity will never be changing smoothly. You may need faster and more powerful gimbals on your engines, and you may need a faster control loop (but, nah, it was plenty fast already), and you may need different tuning variables, but balgorithm doesn't change a lot. – Russell Borogove Apr 09 '21 at 08:02
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1@Russell Borogove: What I said: faster sensors, processors, actuators... The whole thing has to be more capable. – jamesqf Apr 10 '21 at 16:01
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The dream of a space shuttle that would be reusable and could land like a plane had been around the space community since the 50's at least. You could argue that it was a mistake to follow that dream, and that NASA would have been better off continuing to use expendable rockets. So a case can be made that a wrong direction was taken. And it's true that science fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke helped keep the public aware of that dream. But the thing is, it wasn't their idea.
This painting is not from a science fiction magazine. It led off a series of articles in the magazine Collier's about the future of spaceflight, and the ideas in the article were from people like Wernher von Braun. So it may have been a mistake to follow the dream of a winged shuttle like we saw in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the people who followed that dream were basically the ones who hatched it, and their intellectual descendants. They weren't following SF.
Mark Foskey
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No. "Sci-fi" is often the forerunner of reality by inspiring innovation. Just look at the Star Trek communicators, Tricorders, and talking computers (working!).
The Space Shuttle design (50 years ago!) actually made a lot of sense, with the massive solid boosters making up for the weight penalty of carrying wings and landing gear into orbit.
The real failure of the Shuttle was its lack of ability to carry a third stage of any significant size, limiting the scope of its application options.
1970 was as far away from today as it was from 1920, and precious few people comprehended how much of an orbital flight in terms of height and speed occurred above the atmosphere. This is the realm of rockets.
A shuttle craft provides an interface between orbital an atmospheric flight only to recover that stage and anything returning from space. Most flights at that time were one way trips up, with the rocket being thrown away.
With today's technology, including advances in automation and GPS, we can recover boosters, giving the Shuttle concept new life for a much wider range of applications (other than returning astronauts or broken satellites).
But to do this we must get away from the science fiction inspired picture of a winged craft soaring through the heavens on the back of a rocket (Estes Orbital Transport for one).
Glider pilots know kinetic energy (from velocity) and altitude are your friends, and from orbit, after re-entry, you have plenty. The glider can be ugly, and not even good at gliding. To train Shuttle pilots, aircraft were flown with their engines in reverse.
All that is needed is an adapter for the third stage, so it can be pushed into orbit in much the same manner as a tug pushing a barge on the Mississippi river. Here in this article we can see Arthur Rudolph holding a model of the Saturn V. Fast forward 50 years and we have a fly-back booster on the right. The second stage is a lifting body, the third may not be changed much at all (or could be anything else that weighs 100 tons). Giant wings on the 2nd stage shuttle are not necessary when landing at 200+ knots.
the empty weight of the Saturn 2nd stage, at 88,000 lbs, is about one half that of the Concorde airliner.
The European Space Agency developed a "wingless" shuttle and flew it around 5 years ago. Lacking the cross-range gliding requirement of the Space Shuttle, it would be a candidate for application as a recoverable air to orbit shuttle, or RATOS, designed as a second stage to recoverable boosters now being commonly flown.
Robert DiGiovanni
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Yes.
The requirement that the space shuttle have a pilot sitting up-front, looking out through a windscreen, and "controlling" the craft during takeoff and landing, negatively influenced the design. Alternative designs either fully automated, or with astronauts carried as passengers in the belly of the craft, were rejected for reasons that were predominantly related to gaining political and public support for the space shuttle program.
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5Welcome to Space! During the 1970s when the Shuttle was designed, the idea of autonomously landing an aircraft was the fiction, and having a human pilot visually landing a plane was the reality. So I think you have it backwards. – DrSheldon Apr 08 '21 at 13:24
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8This answer would benefit enormously from citing sources for its claims. – zovits Apr 08 '21 at 15:50
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If you're looking at the broad zeitgeist, how could fact and fiction share the same influences then, as they did for generations before and have ever since?
– Robbie Goodwin Apr 08 '21 at 23:13