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WHEN THE SHUTTLE GOES THE WAY OF THE DYNA-SOAR
By William Terdoslavich
To not go where no man has gone before.
The Space Shuttle was the most amazing, most advanced spacecraft that ever flew. It was also a white elephant. There was a cheaper alternative that could have flown twenty-five years sooner, had the right people made the right decisions.
In the 1950s and 1960s, aerospace engineers were tinkering with a reusable space plane called the X-20. The concept was called Dynamic Soaring, shortened to Dyna-Soar. It was a delta-winged craft with rudders at the wing tips and an onboard rocket engine, capable of transporting a single pilot.
Later designs showed configurations carrying a few astronauts in a passenger compartment. This would have been useful to support a planned low-earth-orbit space station, based on a Gemini capsule mated to an upper rocket stage for the station’s casing.
Yet all this advanced thinking did not add up to a program. With Projects Mercury and Gemini using space capsules to put astronauts into orbit, and uncertainty over what Dyna-Soar would be used for, the need for a space plane seemed expensive and redundant. The program got chopped.
Advanced Thinking, Advanced Design
Dyna-Soar was born amid conflicting visions. NASA wanted to test the boundaries of hypersonic flight. The air force wanted a piloted spacecraft that could nuke Russia from orbit, snatch Russian satellites, and do high-level reconnaissance. And all this was going to happen in 1966!
The cockpit would have life support for the pilot, while the central section remained isolated, but pressurized with a 100 percent nitrogen atmosphere. Into that compartment would go up to 990 pounds of equipment for instrumentation and data recorders to measure up to 750 variables affecting the space plane. The two unpressurized equipment bays just aft would house propellant tanks and a single rocket engine.
Sketches of Dyna-Soar showed a space vehicle roughly one-third the size of the Space Shuttle. The onboard rocket engine could kick out seventy-two thousand pounds of thrust. The space plane could ride into orbit on top of a Titan IIIC booster, a much simpler configuration than the shuttle’s.
In orbit, the Dyna-Soar would retain the Titan’s third stage for the needed burns to change orbit or altitude. Flight plans called for the pilot to jettison the third stage over the Indian Ocean before lining up for approach on Edwards Air Force Base in California. The plane would then land on a set of wire brushes instead of wheels.
“Coming in hot” would have been an understatement for the Dyna-Soar. Plans called for a molybdenum coating of the underbelly and wing leading edges, expected to withstand temperatures of up to 1,500 degrees Celsius. The zirconium nose cone had to withstand reentry heat of 2,000 degrees Celsius as well.
By the end of 1962, the project looked like it was coming together. Critical subsystems were tested. Advances in metallurgy made the structure of the Dyna-Soar feasible. And a full-sized mock-up was rolled out, making the Mercury space capsule look . . . dull.
Dyna-Soar was going to be an honest-to-God flying machine, giving the pilot full control over yaw, pitch, and roll. He would even have to fly the thing by hand during reentry. We even had the test pilots who could do this.
The Bean Counter Strikes Back
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was not impressed. He could see that Dyna-Soar lacked direction. And that spawned questions: Is it an air-force space plane ready to take on the Soviets? Is it a NASA research vehicle that could do what no one had ever done before? If no one could say what Dyna-Soar was for, then how could anyone plan missions for it?
The Dyna-Soar did not make it past 1963 when McNamara killed it after a series of project reviews. It was a cruel death. Dyna-Soar was just months away from being flight-tested. Uncle Sam had just spent $530 million and the program was more than halfway done.
Maybe Dyna-Soar did not die in vain. Six years later, its data would be reused on another design: the Space Shuttle.
Same Problem, Different Program
NASA needed a replacement program for the Apollo program while it was under way. As Neil Armstrong planted the American flag on the moon, others worried about what came next.
Thus the shuttle was born on paper, concurrent with a manned space station called Skylab. Once again, interagency wants screwed around with NASA’s needs. Money was no object in putting a man on the moon, but the shuttle would have to come in on a limited budget. And in the inflationary 1970s, those budget dollars would lose value very quickly.
The air force wanted to launch the shuttle from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to achieve circumpolar orbits, ideal for space-based reconnaissance and spying. The NRO wanted an extra-large cargo bay to launch its next generation of spy satellites, each one the size of a school bus.
If NASA wanted to achieve budget priority, it would need to cut the other agencies in for a piece of the action, making the shuttle program harder to kill. But the political compromises were affecting design, making the shuttle larger than originally intended, and more expensive.
In the end, NASA got a space truck, with a cargo bay measuring fifteen by sixty feet. The agency wanted the shuttle to be the DC-3 of spaceflight, capable of flying fifty times per year. The best NASA did was nine missions in 1985. Other years saw four to six flights. And it took about ten thousand people to prepare and launch the shuttle, at a cost of about $450 million per mission. The loss of Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003) set the program back several years.
The air force did get to use the shuttle for some classified missions, which proved to be of marginal value. Along with the NRO, it still found it more convenient to use conventional boosters to put its satellites into orbit. If taking astronauts up to the International Space Station was all the shuttle did, wouldn’t a cheaper space capsule do just fine instead?
Once the program reached its 135th flight in 2011, the loss of another orbiter became statistically certain. The shuttle was grounded. The total program cost was more than $200 billion.
The Better Course of Action
The Apollo program was a Cold War effort to beat the Russians to the moon. It cost $20 billion in 1960s dollars—well over $100 billion today, adjusting dollar value for inflation. To skip Apollo would have been daring. So let’s look at how things would have turned out if Dyna-Soar had gotten funded.
When Dyna-Soar was canceled, it was less than three years away from spaceflight, with only another $300 to $400 million to be spent to get there. That first flight in July 1966 would have seen test pilot James Wood become the seventeenth American to go to space, at the controls of a true space plane.
From there, assume a number of orbital missions in the next four years to fully develop the program’s capabilities. The Dyna-Soar would have been a frequent flier, with less crew support needed to ready the craft for the next mission, compared to the shuttle.
NASA was already tinkering with space station design concurrent with the Apollo program. One scheme, called the Manned Orbital Laboratory, would have relied on a Gemini capsule mated to a Titan third stage containing the station. First flight was expected in 1971. With Dyna-Soar acting as the crew shuttle, the Gemini capsule would have been downgraded to a lifeboat.
In real life, we got things backward. Our first space station, Skylab, went into orbit before the shuttle Columbia was flight-ready. Skylab burned up on reentry in 1979, several years before Columbia’s first flight.
The Dyna-Soar/MOL combination would have gotten the program order right—shuttle first, space station second. A supported base in low earth orbit could have been the construction site for a reusable lunar lander. The first man—or woman—could have set foot on the Sea of Tranquility in 1979. And the first moon base would have followed, all the while tracing supply and support to MOL.
Eventually, all this space hardware would have been replaced with better stuff. Having made history, Dyna-Soar would have ended up hanging from the ceiling of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, alongside the Spirit of St. Louis and above the Mercury capsule.
If only things had turned out differently.