/sci/ - Science & Math

>>14671774
Like could you imagine if NASA was able to build the DC-3, which was fully reusable. Also DC-3 didn’t use the shuttle’s crappy tiles. Because the orbiter was mostly fuel tanks, it used metal thermal tiles which are apparently lighter and safer, although they don’t work as well on a “dense” vehicle like our shuttle

As cool as a lot of NASA concepts for reuse are, I’m 99% sure they’d fuck it up and make it expensive anyways.

>>14615175
True but Starship blows it out of the water. Doesn’t really matter though. It’s a damn shame NASA never at least built one operation VTVL orbital rocket in its history.

Lately bro’s, I’ve been obsessed with the original shuttle design. It was called the DC-3. Fully reusable and it wasn’t even dolphin-sex based. NASA was actually pretty conservative with the design. It only put 5 tons into LEO, and NASA expected “only” 30 flights per year. It also was expected to cost about $100 million per launch, however, if carrying a crew of 7 like our shuttle, it would actually be even cheaper per person than any other manned vehicle.

I don’t know the utility of such a vehicle other than crew and cargo transport to space stations. But how would you even build a station? Most of the ISS modules are 20 tons or so. The shuttle in our timeline could put almost 6X the payload as the DC-3 into LEO. The DC-3 was fully reusable though, so it was probably a much better (and cheaper) crew transport.

In the world of the DC-3, expendable rockets like the Titan would build space stations, while the DC-3 would bring cargo and crew on a biweekly basis.