Why didn't The Space Shuttle refuel in orbit to save fuel?
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answers:
Pearl L say: nnaybe its hard to refuel in space
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ngc7331 say: Because the gas station weighs a heck of a lot more than the space shuttle coming up to get a fill-up
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Chris Ancor say: That damaged one should have pulled in for repairs before re-entry.
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someg say: There wasn't enough room in the gas station. The space shuttle had wings and it didn't fit under the shade near the pump.
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save us say: Most of the fule is used up in the first few minutes of launch.
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Bill-M say: They did not need to refuel.
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Joseph say: Refuel from what? You need to launch another spacecraft and fuel into space before you can refuel the space shuttle, using even more fuel.
And to what purpose? The shuttle main engines burned for several minutes during launch and then went cold for the rest of the mission. Usually, there was still plenty of hydrogen and oxygen left in the external tank when it was jettisoned, so it didn't need any extra fuel.
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Jeffrey K say: First, it doesn't need any more feul when it is already in orbit.
Second, how would the fuel get up into orbit without using a huge amount of fuel to get there?
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Bobby Jim say: The refueling tankers weren't aligned with the stars.
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Jess say: How many gas stations do you think there are in space?
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Pearl L say: nnaybe its hard to refuel in space
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Davros say: The Shuttle's purpose was to carry a payload into orbit. Something along the lines of 20 tons to Low Earth, 5 tons to Geo Transfer.
Once it had done it's journey into orbit...that was it. It'd done was job - Time to go home. Very little fuel is needed for the return journey, just enough to point things in the right direction and gravity does the rest.
The Shuttle, much as the name suggests was really just a short range ferry. It was not designed to go beyond orbit nor would it had been any use at the job even if it were given the fuel to do so. Beautiful a machine as it was, it was a very limited concept and it's little wonder several generations of space scientists and engineers have looked upon it as a bit of a white elephant. It never really paid for itself and it pretty much killed any further development of NASA's ability to move people beyond low earth orbit for decades.
However, the idea of refuel in orbit IS a valuable concept because of how brutally expensive it is to bring fuel tanks up from the surface. In space a perfectly reasonable fuel is just oxygen and hydrogen. You can make that by passing an electrical current over water to split the molecular bonds, and up in space solar panels can provide the power to do that all the time. One thing now known full well about space is that water ice is truly abundant. No big surprise there, it is after all made from the first and third most common elements in the cosmos! You can find it frozen up in craters on the Moon, it's locked up in asteroids and comets in vast amounts, in the outer solar system whole damn Moons are made of the stuff. Basically rocket fuel is all over the solar system waiting to be tapped. We just need the engineering know-how to get at it. It's easy enough to do on Earth, but it's bound to be a hell of a lot harder to do in space.
The dream is to be able to send out robotic missions to attach themselves to asteroids, there they would spend years extracting ice from the rock, splitting it into fuel, then returning consignments of the refined products back to Earth orbit where launched spacecraft can collect it.
Being able to fuel up in orbit means that the range, speed and payload of these future craft could be many times what would be possible to keep bringing up from Earth alone. It could truly open up the solar system to Human exploitation.
But unless we get really good at robot building, it's just not going to happen.
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PhotonX say:
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And where do you imagine they would refuel even if they could? It's not like there are LH2/LOX fueling stations in low Earth orbit. We'd have to build such a station first, right? Not to mention lofting the fuel there. How do you imagine more handling is going to save fuel in the first place?
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And even if *that* were possible, where would they put the fuel, given that the cryonic tank is jettisoned before entering orbit? A Shuttle couldn't very well deorbit with it attached, since the tank (especially a full one) would disintegrate and destroy itself, along with the spacecraft and astronauts.
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But even if all that were somehow possible, and the orbiter could return to Earth with full fuel tanks, all they'd be doing is returning the same fuel that had to first be put into orbit at staggering expense, back to Earth. It would be the space science equivalent of building a gas station in the middle of Antarctica, the sole purpose of which is to refuel the trucks that drive there to deliver the fuel there in the first place.
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That is all so manifestly absurd that I'm astounded you'd ask in the first place. Didn't you put the least amount of thought into this question before you asked it?
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CarolOklaNola say: Too expensive to get the fuel into orbit. A mass if 1 pond costs $10,000 to get into orbit.
This is why shooting garbage and trash into space makes no sense. Too expensive, and what i the rocket crashes?
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