They're asking for nearly 2 magnitudes better safety than they could provide. Granted the space shuttle was dumb from the beginning and we'd be flying around in our flying cars and vacationing on Mars if they'd stuck with the far superior Saturn launch system. But who could of known that, besides the plethora of scientists who pointed this out?
It's supposed to be achievable precisely because the shuttle was such a dumb/difficult/unwieldy concept no matter how it was implemented. SpaceX and Boeing get to have abort capability all the way to orbit and inherently simpler capsules.
To torture the shuttle comparison, they shouldn't get damaged by a piece falling of their launching rockets because they get to sit on top and keep their heat shields protected during launch, and they shouldn't be destroyed if the booster explodes because they have launch escape systems. The only two shuttle failures causing fatalities were kind of inherent to shuttle.
Except that the options at the time were space shuttle or NOTHING--not space shuttle or Saturn V.
NASA threw in with the only folks willing to fund spaceflight--the military. And the military demanded an orbiter that could do circumpolar orbits--which was totally crazy from an engineering standpoint.
We already had the Saturn. If you're saying NASA's other choice was nothing, then it was purely political and if they'd stuck to the science the Air Force would have been told to suck it eventually. Instead NASA wasted 30 years of rocket science on a giant turd that was far more expensive than Saturn and killed a person ever 2.5 launches.
> If you're saying NASA's other choice was nothing, then it was purely political and if they'd stuck to the science the Air Force would have been told to suck it eventually.
Yes, it was political. And it wasn't at all impossible that they would just collapse NASA's budget (this was in the recessions of the 1970's), and NASA wouldn't even exist today.
circumpolar doesn't make sense as an orbit. The crazy shuttle design requirement was to return 40 tonnes from a single polar orbit in 1 pass. I.e bring a spy sat back to america without flying over russia.
This means a massive body to hold an object, The earth would move under the craft as it rotated. Without being able to wait for it to rotate around you need wings for the large cross-range capability to glide back to america.
As KSP teaches us you can't put massive wings at the top of a rocket, without even bigger wings at the bottom. But that's got too much drag to get to space and so, the insane launch system that was the shuttle is invented.
They never used this ability for the entire service life of the shuttle.
It means being able to reach more kinds of orbits, which adds requirements. So does reentry capability. Why add those two sets of requirements to the same vehicle, see?
Considering SpaceX plans to launch up to 100 people at a time to Mars with no real abort possible, I think its quite reasonable to ask them for that level of safety on a system with an abort.
