🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <HUGH.92Nov19200718@whio.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz> hugh@whio.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz (Hugh Emberson) writes:
>Henry> Gary Hudson claims that you could put six SSMEs on a shuttle external
>Henry> tank, without SRBs, and get it into orbit carrying a payload about 50%
>Henry> greater than the shuttle's...
>
>This sounds a lot like Shuttle-C...

Not very closely related, actually, since Hudson's design deletes the SRBs
and doesn't put engines+payload in a mock-orbiter.

>...whatever happened to that idea?

Too little demand and too much politics.  It quietly died.

>...idea was to take a normal stack (an ET and 2 SRBs) and bolt on a
>fairing containing the payload and some SSMEs in place of the shuttle.

That's right.  The fairing started out to be a stripped-down orbiter,
but it didn't take long to figure out that if you're throwing it away,
there are cheaper ways to build it.

>... Some of the pictures I saw had 4 SRBs.

There have been a wide variety of shuttle-derived heavylift-booster
designs over the years.  It looks like a sensible thing to do if you've
got a few heavy payloads to lift and don't want to invest in developing
a whole new launch system (including new pads etc.) just for them.  The
idea has been revived once again by Griffin's how-to-launch-the-space-
station "red team".
-- 
MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s.      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
              -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry