Does anyone know NASA's reasoning in moving from a verticle arrangement to the side-by-side arrangement of the shuttle? Obviously the shuttle is larger than any of the Apollo capsules, but other than size, was there a basic reason for the design?

bucy wrote:

Steven Robinson, the astronaut who will attempt to pluck two thin pieces of dangling cloth from the underside of the shuttle Discovery Wednesday morning, said today that the risks of the operation are manageable and the tools are well understood.

There was a great quote in one of the Times articles the other day: "there's nothing about that system that you can't make worse by trying."

bunnygrrl wrote:
Does anyone know NASA's reasoning in moving from a verticle arrangement to the side-by-side arrangement of the shuttle? Obviously the shuttle is larger than any of the Apollo capsules, but other than size, was there a basic reason for the design?

Primarily size reasons - the Orbiter is the size that it is due to a combination of payload requirements as specified by the DOD and the aerodynamic configuration required to meeet other DOD requirements for the shuttle dealing with potential landing sites and other various minutae. With the Orbiter's design calling for a specific size, the only practical solution was to look at a side-mounted or piggy-back launch configuration. Engineering a booster large enough to launch the Orbiter in a traditional in-line configuration would be prohibitive, if not impossible with the resources available. When it was decided that the option of using a fly-back booster during launch was too complex, the Orbiter began carrying its own engines and it was attached to the tanks carrying fuel for those engines.

There are some designs that have been floated around over the past decade or so for smaller lifting-body vehicles to be launched in-line, including the proposed Russian Kliper and the cancelled ESA Hermes. These are much smaller craft, designed to transport crews to the ISS or other orbital facility and not large payloads.

bucy wrote:

There was a great quote in one of the Times articles the other day: "there's nothing about that system that you can't make worse by trying."

FYI, this quote is from Astronaut Emeritus John W. Young, who retired as an astronaut only last year after joining the program with the second group of astronauts in 1962. Young has always been fascinating to me, largely because of the way his steel-trap engineering mind manifested itself through his laconic wit, such as in the quote above.