sts60
Illuminator
- Joined
- Jul 19, 2007
- Messages
- 4,107
If your hypthesis is correct, and that is a large if, it is one of the most poorly designed bombers in the history of military aviation...
Correct. But not really for the reasons you're thinking.
Take a look at ANY successful bomber - Lancaster, Halifax, B-29, Ju-88, B-52, Bear, etc. and take a look at the location of the bomb-bay doors. Where are they? The ventral side of the fuselage, or if they are external to the fuselage, to the bottom of the wings.
Now, look at a shuttle - any of them will do, Enterprise, Columbia, etc. Notice where the opening for the CARGO bay is? The dorsal or top of the aircraft.
Well, Columbia has been wreckage for some time.
Before you start crying about that being the cargo bay while the real attachments are on the ventral side, there are no openings there and no hardpoints for the attachment of ordnance on the wings. If you are considering claiming that the shuttle only deploys its ordnance by flying inverted I'm going to tell you that such a procedure would fly in the face of about 100 years of military aviation.
The Shuttle flies "inverted" a lot while on-orbit, but that's not the issue. In the air, of course, opening the doors would almost certainly lead to destruction of the vehicle in any flight phase.
There have been enough photos taken of the cargo bay either in action in space, or on earth to disprove your theory.
I've been inside three Orbiters, stacked on the pad, for payload integration and test. They can only carry things inside the payload bay (and middeck lockers).
The real problem is not that the Shuttle has no provision for carrying military ordnance, nor that safety rules would not permit such a thing, nor that it is completely incapable of doing anything in the air other than going to orbit or landing.
It's that it is everything a bomber is not. It's incapable of being launched without, at a minimum, many weeks of very obvious preparation, and then only from one place, and every launch requires notifying everybody around (e.g., NOTAMs and the equivalent for boaters). It's not reliable in the sense you could never be sure your sortie would happen as scheduled. Its flights require much advance notice and preparation of overseas backup sites. And it's perhaps the least stealthy flying vehicle ever, and capable of only reaching some parts of the Earth, and then not necessarily on a given day.
The idea of the Shuttle being some kind of "bomber", in short, is maybe the stupidest idea I've ever heard. Did someone really propose that?