Back in 1978, I read in Starlog or Future magazine an announcement that the French Space Agency were building their own space shuttle, called "Hermes." Development began the next year, and ran until 1994 or so, when the project was finally abandoned. In that time, it never flew, never even hit a finalized design. It remains fascinating, however.
In essence, it was simple: a mini-shuttle atop a big bohonkin' rocket, not unlike a slightly scaled up version of the "DynaSoar" project from the '60s. ( http://www.republibot.com/content/used-be-future-proto-space-shuttles ) There were actually two simultaneous development projects, the Hermes itself (The name an in joke, "Hermes" and "Mercury" are the same god), and the Arianne V rocket to launch it. Here's what it would have looked like:
The project sprawled out of control almost instantly, and just when they were finally making progress, the Challenger Disaster caused a fundamental re-think of the entire project, from which it never recovered.
Wiki overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermes_(spaceplane)
Vastly more detailed info and pictures at Astronautix: http://www.astronautix.com/craft/hermes.htm
It was a neat little project, but over-ambitious. Ultimately the Arianne V became the dominant French launch vehicle, but the irony is that the French decided to show off by building an "Economical" Space Shuttle that damn near bankrupted their space agency, when they could have easily put a person in space in two years or less if they'd simply decided to build a standard capsule.
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Comments
27 December 2008
11 min 7 sec
I think ultimately this can all be laid on the shoulders of NASA's decision to get Congress to kill the X-20 DynaSoar.
http://republibot.com/content/used-be-future-proto-space-shuttles
I'm convinced that if the X-20 had gone ahead, the lessons learned would have prevented the development of the Space Shuttle, since it's obvious the thing was wasteful, dangerous as hell, and inherently inefficient. So since they avoided a mistake/learning experience back then, they made a vastly bigger one a decade later that we're still paying for.
ANd of course Hermes was on a lot of levels basically an X-20B or X-20C
27 June 2009
5 min 15 sec
The halcyon days of the world trying to follow America down the rabbit whole of reusable spacecraft. This was like the race for a SST back in the 60’s everyone was afraid to be left behind and spent billions on projects. The US dropped out when we looked at the economics the Russians built a plane that liked to crash and the French and British gave the world the Concord. Oh if only we would have crunched the numbers on the shuttle and dropped it like we did the SST we might have really done something in space the last forty years.
The Hermes like the Concord over promised and under preformed, at lest they stopped the madness before they built the thing and killed someone. The main problem with the shuttle and its me to bothers over seas was that governments thought reusable equaled cheap. NASA forgot that building a new class of aircraft was always expensive and almost never lived up to the hype of the original idea.