Was flipping channels last night and happened to catch the last 45 minutes of James Bond's Moonraker, just as they were launching in the shuttle. I figured this would be good for some BA laughs so I watched it. The science was better than I thought - still not great, but better than I originally gave it credit for.

Bad
-- everyone in space are all aligned level and facing each other (why can't some of them be upside-down?)
-- an astronaut gets hit by a laser and slams into the space station, breaching the hull. That's a pretty flimsy hull.
-- from dialogue you learn that the space station has radar jamming so "no one on Earth would know it's here". Yet you later learn that the station is at least 200 metres across but is only in orbit 100 miles from Earth. The movie maker must have figured that makes it too small to see with telescopes (wouldn't it be naked eye visible?)
-- lasers in space make sounds

Good
-- no gravity unless the station is spinning (the gravity is the same regardless of where you are on the station but I'll let that slide)
-- Shuttles do not dock to the station while it is rotating - they even made a point of this
-- most of the explosions involve depressurization effects and not big flames shooting through space (most, not all)

For its time I'd say that was a pretty decent job.

That puts it one step above Armpitageddon.

Actually, I'd call this good. You don't want to carry any more weight into orbit than you have to, and cutting down the thickness of the walls is a good way to start. You can hold back pressure with walls not much thicker than aluminum foil.

What's bad is getting knocked back by the laser in the first place. Those must be some heavy photons.

I agree about the wall thickness, you can get away with thin.

It's been a while since I saw the movie, but I thought the laser punched a hole in the astronaut's pressure suit and the force of the escaping gas pushed him into the space station.

I remember the lasers made a weird little "chuffing" sound. Didn't quite know what the filmmakers thought it might be.

The "bad" that always bothered me was the whole thing with the globes of toxins. They didn't look sturdy enough to survive re-entry, even without 007 hitting them with the shuttle laser. Then when he hits them with the laser they blow-up. Some laser if it is hotter than re-entry.

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Bad:

If I recall correctly, as soon as the shuttle reaches orbit, it needs to have the heat shield pointed away from Earth and the cargo bay open in order to maintain thermal equilibrium. Those right-side-up, closed bay shuttles must have been getting awfully warm, even before Bond's amorous adventures in the namesake vehicle.

When the station blows up you can pieces falling off under the normal acceleration of sea level gravity. If it's in orbit, it's all in orbit, there should be only f=ma reactions due to the explosions.

This same modeling problem shows up in 2010 during the air bag deceleration sequence, where burning pieces can be seen to be falling off the Soviet ship.

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They used to get round this on Dr Who and Blakes 7 by filming the xplosion from directly above or below.

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Nope. All they have to do is open the doors asap, as on their inside the radiators are mounted. Actually, they must be more effective when facing the black, cold space then the heat radiating Earth.

Harald

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The shuttle is most stable when the long axis is pointing towards the earth--either standing on its nose or standing on its tail.

It's been a while, but wasn't this suppossed to be some sort of advanced shuttle? Maybe the doors didn't need to be open...

I guess that works... 8-[

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We'll all skipping some of the worst bad stuff (might not be Bad Astronomy, more like Bad Aviation). At the beginning they steal the shuttle off of the transport 747 by launching it. So, do we normally transport the shuttle completely fueled up? And would the shuttle engines be powerful enough to even fly it?

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Not at all. The shuttle is virtually unfueled without an ET.

I recall the shuttle's lifting ability being compared unfavorably to a brick, so I doubt it.

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Unfortunately, we're down to about 17 ounces of the highly unstable stuff that does.

I stand corrected re the position of the cargo bay for thermal purposes. It had become routine for the cargo bay to be positioned toward the Earth, and my sentence construction unfortunately included this in the thought about thermal concerns. Still, since the cargo bay doors must be opened for thermal reasons, not a complete "nope" though. Yup.

From "The Space Shuttle The Orbital Stage"

Almost all of the shuttle missions were pre-ISS, and many didn't deliver satellites, thus the typical position was with cargo bay facing the Earth. This explains all those photos and movies of the crew looking at the Earth through the "overhead" windows.

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And there I was thinking it was all for the really coooooool views.

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That's unfair - the shuttle flies much better than your average brick. Now if you flatten out the brick a bit, you'd have a real competition.

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I always wondered, how much thrust do the OMS engines on the shuttle have? If they had fuel, could they be used within the atmosphere to provide some limited propulsion? E.g. if there was a problem at the last minute and you had to circle the runway for another attempt at landing, could you burn the engines fly around, and try again (again, assuming that they had fuel enough).

Edit: Okay, found that the thrust of the OMS is 6000 lbs. Not sure if that's each engine or total. Either way, that seems maybe a little low to be propelling a craft that heavy though the atmosphere, though it might be enough to overcome enough the air resistance to maintain airspeed.

No. The shuttle only gets one shot at a landing.

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No, I know that it's a one shot deal. I believe they dump any remaining fuel in the OMS for safety after the deorbit burn. My question is more hypothetical. That's why I said IF they had fuel for them by that point, could that happen.

We do go-arounds because of traffic, but we get our approaches right. The orbiter should as well.

The airplane supposedly closest to the shuttle in size is the Boeing 717 (formerly the DC-9), which by comparison has 18,500 lbs. of thrust per engine, and that's a more flight-worthy vehicle, so it seems unlikely that the OMS engines would be sufficient.

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That's kinda what I suspected. I also think that the safety benefit from being able to circle around and have another go in the event of an emergency would outweigh the risk of keep the fuel onboard (unless it's a problem relating to the heat of reentry or something).

I've emailed it to a friend who works for a contractor at MSFC. He does (or did) do something working with the ISS. Hopefully he'll know someone who can give a definite answer. I'll let you know if I get one.

Perhaps a penguin, then?

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Unfortunately, we're down to about 17 ounces of the highly unstable stuff that does.

No. The penguin has wings - obviously an unfair advantage.

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As I recall. it was originally planned for the shuttle to swing around if they lined up on approch wrong, or a dog or some such ran out on to the runway, but that capability was dropped for some reason. (Whether it be because they decided it was safer to dump the fuel before reentry or because of some other reason, I don't know.)

Hmm. I don't recall ever hearing of plans for the shuttle to be able to do a goaround. I remember during the tests of the soviet shuttles that the prototypes were equipped with jet engines; some experts concluded from this that the Soviet designs would be flown for real with the jets, and that they would have goaround capability. As it happens, the jets were just there for flight tests.

I believe that the jet-equipped shuttle was the small one (Snowflake?), I don't know if Buran was ever test-flown with jets.

Well, I checked my copy of The Space Shuttle Operator's Manual and didn't see any mention of it there. I also checked NASA's Evolution of the Space Shuttle pages, but they don't give too much in the way of details about the designs. I seem to recall something about Enterprise having that capability (though why a test mule like that would have it, I don't know). Back when Science Digest was a "real" magazine (i.e. they printed their own stories instead of just reprints from other magazines) they had an article which recounted the development process of the shuttle from the designers perspective, and it may have mentioned that it was discussed at that time.

Okay, got a reply from my rocket scientist friend (okay, okay. He's an "aerospace engineer").

Anyways, he said that it would take a lot of fuel to keep the shuttle in powered flight for any real length of time and that, regardless, he isn't sure that the 6000 lbs/thrust each would be enough to maintain level flight.