– could the space shuttle just fly into space like a plane, rather than being propelled vertically by rockets?
In: 48
In theory yes, but it would take much too long and the required fuel world almost quintuple.
I can’t think of the name but nasa has a plane that rides up on the wing of a 747 then launches itself into lower orbit and returns.
No. It was not designed to do that. You know the shuttle stack at launch had those 2 solid rocket boosters and that giant orange external tank? That’s because it needed the propellant from that orange tank and the thrust from the SRBs. The SRBs burnt out and were dropped at an altitude of about 24 miles while the shuttle was at a velocity of 3,000mph. Even if you could get orbiter itself to that altitude and speed, it would still need most of the propellant in that orange external tank. There’s no plane or other vehicle on Earth that could carry the orbiter *and* the attached external tank to 24 miles at 3,000 miles per hour. And for obvious reasons, there’s definitely no way it could have taken off like a plane from a runway.
The Space Shuttle launched vertically just for the first few seconds. You can even see on the videos from the ground that it turns to go almost horizontally before it is out of sight. The reason for this is to get out of the thickest part of the atmosphere as soon as possible. The atmosphere at higher altitudes are much thinner creating much less air resistance making it easier to accelerate up to speed. You see the same maneuver in interceptor fighter jets like the F-16. Just after takeoff they can go almost vertically getting up to cruise altitude before the end of the runway. The Space Shuttle did the same and went up to altitude before flying horizontally to get up to speed.
Technically it does fly, the trajectory isnt straight up (for the whole flight) it starts vertical then an arc, then flies “sideways” (belly to earth) fast enough to basically continuously fall around the earth vs flying around it.
The shuttle was designed to carry the maximum allowed payload in it’s back. There is no room for fuel tanks which is why it has to be carried into orbit.
Planes can (and sometimes are) used to get spacecraft off the ground. The problem is that the higher you go, the thinner the air is, and the thinner the air is, the less lift you can get from airfoils. So if you wanted to lift something as heavy as a space shuttle to the edge of the atmosphere, you’d need huge and impractical wings.
Additionally, once you’re out of the atmosphere, plane wings literally cannot help you ascend any further, so you’ll need a rocket booster anyway to get you across the finish line.
The X-15 was launched from a B-52 and technically did enter Space. Some of the X-15 pilots were awarded Astronaut wings.
From Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff:
On My 19 Joe Walker flew the X-15 to 347,800 feet, which was sixty-six miles up, surpassing the record of 314,750 feet set by Bob White the year before;and on August 22 Walker reached 354,200 feet, or sixty seven miles, which was seventeen miles into space. In addition to White and Walker, one other man had flown the X-15 above fifty miles. That was White’s backup, Bob Rushworth, who had achieved 285,000 feet, fifty four miles, in June. The Air Force had instituted the practice of awarding Air Force Astronaut wings to any Air Force pilot who flew above fifty miles. They used the term itself: astronaut. As a result, White and Rushworth, the Air Force’s prime and backup pilots for the X-15, now had their astronaut wings. Joe Walker, being a civilian flying the X-15 for NASA, did not qualify. So some of Walker’s good buddies at Edwards took him out to a restaurant for dinner, and they all knocked back a few, and they pinned some cardboard wings on his chest. The inscription read:”Ass-tronaut.”
Not really. Orbit is at around 100km high and roughly 17,000mph. Standard jet planes the size of the shuttle would only get you 1/4 of the height and the 1/10th the velocity. And until you add rockets into the equation, a jet engine plane will very much fall short of orbit; they just aren’t capable of hitting the speeds necessary. They need atmosphere to work…but atmosphere means drag.
So instead of having a bi-modal craft, it’s easier to have just one mode of propulsion.
Just like a plane without rockets? No. The higher you go, the thinner the air. A plane needs air to generate lift, which is what keeps the plane up. Once you get to a certain point, no plane can go higher, no matter how well-designed and efficient the wings, because the wings can no longer generate enough lift to go any higher. In theory, you could have rockets attached to the plane (or part of the plane) to get even higher, but I don’t know enough about orbital mechanics to tell you if such a plane could carry enough fuel to reach a semi-stable orbit (even at ISS heights there is still enough atmospheric drag to require an occasional boost to keep it there)
There are basically two problems: firstly, many airplane engines need oxygen (air) to work, and secondly the speed that is needed to get into an orbit around the Earth is immensely high.
The first of these could be overcome by using a fuel that already has the oxygen inside … which would be a lot like rocket fuel…
Similarly, the second problem could be overcome by using an immensely powerful engine that burns through an immense amount of fuel that would need to be transported by the plane, at least for the first part of the journey. This could be done by adding extra outside tanks that could be ditched once they are no longer needed …
No matter how you try to solve these problems, you will esentially end up with “rockets” by a different name.
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