[bumby]

I believe the list is long of airframes where you could initially find this complaint. I think the F18 had similar concerns after it originally lost its experimental competition to the F16. But the F18 found itself as a capable workhorse for the Navy for decades. Same with the Space Shuttle, etc.

[spamizbad]

The F-16, incidentally, got loaded to the gills with expensive gizmos after the fact because the Airforce (and other F-16 customers) quickly realized it made the aircraft a far more effective platform.

[ncmncm]

Space Shuttle is a clinker, here. It never did anything well, and its costs gutted other, overwhelmingly more valuable programs.

[bumby]

Generalization (not specialization) was it’s strong point as well as it’s weakness. The reason why it was a design boondoggle was because it had to meet the requirements of many masters. People forget it has a number of DoD missions in addition to the more publicly known NASA missions.

[ncmncm]

The DoD missions its design was compromised for did not happen.

[bumby]

There were plenty of joint NASA/DoD missions that were performed using the Shuttle. Why do you think NASA, an agency built upon freely sharing scientific information, occasionally had classified payloads aboard the Shuttle?

"Between 1982 and 1992, NASA launched 11 shuttle flights with classified payloads, honoring a deal that dated to 1969, when the National Reconnaissance Office—an organization so secret its name could not be published at the time—requested certain changes to the design of NASA’s new space transportation system."[1]

NASA has a long history of working with the military. The first astronauts were all military test pilots (Armstrong gave up his military commission so NASA wouldn’t appear overtly militarized).

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/secret-spa...

[ncmncm]

They did some classified launches, but none that drew on the extreme specs they had demanded in exchange for helping to fund it.

It was an embarrassment.

Literally no STS launches did. And they were so expensive, it would have been cheaper to build more Hubbles and launch them the regular way than to have done the repair missions.

The Space Shuttle was a disaster for US space presence. US ended up depending on Soyuz!

Now, the X-37 is proving another embarrassment. They can't find enough work for it, so leave it parked in orbit most of the time, pretending to be "on a mission".

[bumby]

>Literally no STS launches did.

Do you mean no STS launches were DoD payloads or do you mean no STS launches required DoD specs? I'm not saying the "cost effectiveness" promise of the Shuttle was met, but there appears to be evidence that neither of the above claims are accurate. For example, STS-38 was a classified DoD payload [1] and there are book chapters dedicated to fact that DoD specs drove the shuttle design [2]. The gist from [3] is

"the support and budget for space decreased, increasing the need for NASA to work closely with the DOD. Their partnership prompted many compromises that were made on the vehicle’s uses and design, which resulted in a broad set of requirements"

Those compromises were largely to accommodate the DoD payload and range requirements. Whether or not they were ultimately necessary we can't know because much of that is classified and unverifiable. But they still drove the design and eroded the cost benefits that NASA wanted.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-38

[2] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137438546_11

[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296652080_Space_Shu...

[jessaustin]

Don't forget, this is an F35 thread. b^)

[bumby]

That wasn’t an oversight on my part