The Most Important Space Shuttle Mission Never Happened

Sounds an awful lot like a plan to steal a Soviet spy satellite right out of its orbit while it's in a communication dead zone. I love it, space piracy is way cooler than normal piracy.

I'm so glad Scott still uses KSP to demonstrate these maneuvers for all his videos

This mission would’ve been awesome to have had a movie based off of especially since the film could’ve portrayed the entire mission, in real time, all under around 2 hours.

“We definitely want to grab it.” “Wait a minute; we’re not talking about some stray pilot with a MiG, we’re talking about several billion dollars of Soviet state property. And they're going to want it back.”

All that was missing from the plan was a landing inside the calderra of a volcano

I think it’s also worth mentioning in order to meet these USAF “requirements” the orbiter grew in size and complexity, the winged reusable booster grew with it. In order to control the spiralling development cost the booster was dropped reducing STS from reusable to “repairable” Along with it went any hope of reducing $/Kg price to orbit. Both accidents can be said to have stemmed from from that USAF requirement and the resulting design cascade.

Fun fact. Sometime in the mid-80s I worked for a company that was contracted to do the steel construction drawings to retrofit the Vandenberg Assembly Building for the space shuttle. We were given two sets of design drawings, had to sign nda's and we're not allowed to copy the designs in any way. We were only contracted to draw the service platforms that folded back out of the way of the launch vehicle so that the Assembly Building could be rolled back. The platforms were designed to fit the profile of the launch vehicle so they had lots of curves and strange angles in order to fold back into the building. Fun times.

I remember being in elementary school in the late 80s hearing sonic booms in Southern California, it was such a good time to be a kid and be interested in astronomy.

The Vandenberg shuttle facility looks a lot like the original KSC* *KSC as in Kerbal Space Center

The most important mission was the one that blew the comet back in 1998.

“Shuttle 3B: The Most Important Scott Manley video that Never Happened”

I've heard for years that the Military wanted a large cross-range capability for the Shuttle, but this is the first time that it's been explained to me what the hell that was about. Thanks.

Appreciate all the research you do for these videos Scott

Back in the late 90s I worked in a building at Vandenberg that had been part of the west coast Shuttle program. I was setting up a projector in a conference room that had curtains all around the walls, and my coworker said "check this out" and pulled back one of the curtains. The whole wall was a giant magnetic scheduling white board with little shuttle figures marked with mission numbers, starting with STS-62-A in 1986. Nothing had been touched in close to two decades - someone had just pulled the curtains over it and forgotten it. The base had sad reminders like that everywhere, if you knew where to look. Short, stubby road signs and weird road embankments for wing clearance along the route the orbiter would have been towed, abandoned facilities, that sort of thing. The cancellation of the program was devastating to the local economy and it took years to recover. It makes me happy to see SpaceX making such progress with manned space flight. There's been a lot of disappointment and heartbreak over the years.

As we say in engineering, “looks good on paper...”

It seems like the spaceplane concept has a wealth of unrealised benefits, but the pseudo-spaceplane shuttle quashed them for the foreseeable future.

It was sad that the program died. A lot of folks like myself put in a lot of effort. The one thing that came out of it was the deicing system that was installed as Vandenberg was further north and more likely to freeze. After the disaster, that system was moved to the cape. It was pretty clever you had two jet engines from an old martin Marrietta fighter program that did not win a final contract. The engines were in a blockhouse near the tower. the warm was ducted between the SRBs and external tanks. I was on the testing team for that one.

That launch at 0:18 is beautiful. I’ve never seen a lift-off video follow the shuttle upward like that.

Many Soviet satellites from that era, particularly military ones, were equipped with self destruct charges to prevent them from landing in enemy territory due to a misaligned de-orbit burn or whatever. So, if they had actually tried to use the Shuttle to snag a high value Russian spacecraft, it could have resulted in a very tragic outcome.

What a coincidence! I was reading about the influence of the military on the Space Shuttle design in Rowland White's book Into The Black today!