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2 days agoThe more I think about it, it’d ruin the magic of the story if “Max” got outed. If “Max” goes public and takes credit and maybe talks through how it worked (especially understanding that you could not pull off the same trick today) that would be cool but … even ignoring any sort of potential harm it just ruins the spirit of the thing.
There really aren’t any simple counterfactual historical arguments to be made.
I have a fairly strong feeling that, of the various shuttle variants studied, the majority of them would have at least been vulnerable to a Columbia level disaster.
Plus, the shuttle was very much overweight and there were a lot of nasty compromises there, so I kinda wonder that if they’d gone for broke with the two stage reusable designs that they’d have ended up just getting cancelled because the more reusable things are, the colder the equations. So you can’t even really treat the earlier proposals as something that might have worked out better. There are things that no amount of money can make work. Like faster-than-light travel without a fundamental reassessment of physics.
And then a lot of the things in the late-70s-early-80s vision wouldn’t have worked out. There was a giant Microwave Radiometer Satellite project that they were cooking on with a giant antenna with a radius of 1150m. Eventually that survey was completed with a much smaller synthetic aperture radio that sat in the shuttle’s cargo bay and today there are lots of tiny SAR survey satellites.
There was another giant geosynchronous dish antenna that was supposed to be a single cell phone satellite for all of the continental US. That was overall a bad idea, Iridium did a better version with less lag in lower orbits, and now we’ve got Starlink and some new competitors coming online and, overall, cell coverage is actually pretty great with conventional towers.
Then again, here’s this paper from 1973. See, the shuttle ended up with a reusable second stage the conventional wisdom was that the second stage is always the expensive one so therefore make that reusable and the first stage can basically be a steel pipe with propellant poured into it and everything’s fine and the bulk doesn’t matter. Thus, only a madman would reuse the first stage. Which is why they were proposing putting parachutes on the Redstone rockets that Mercury used for reuse but never bothered. But, see, they were going to build this two-stage reusable rocket but wanted to preserve the option of launching large bulky cargo… yeah.