- Hi it's me, Tim Dodd,
the Everyday Astronaut. There's nothing more exciting
than a new rocket concept, a new mission to unknown worlds, or an exciting breakthrough technology. Unfortunately for every
proposal there's almost an equal amount of cancellations
with only a small handful making it beyond the drawing board. What's even more frustrating
is when these concepts leave paper, have thousands
of engineering hours put in, hardware gets built,
billions of dollars invested and then it gets put on the shelf. In this new series called
Canceled, we're going to take a look at some space programs and concepts that were so close to complete
and sometimes even launched before it got canceled. Some of these are pretty frustrating, but nevertheless, let's get started. - [Announcer] Three, two, one. (inspiring music)
Lift off. We have a lift off. - This video is one of two
where we're going to be focusing on hardware that actually
flew before it fizzled, it was built and then bye
bye, completed then canned. You get the idea. So if there's something that
wasn't in this particular video, standby there's a lot more coming. (light music) First up we have a really weird story, it's the tale of a country who
went through all the trouble of engineering, building and
successfully flying an orbital rocket, only to cancel it
right as it was proven to work. Hi United Kingdom, I'm talking to you! In 1964, the UK government
authorized a proposal submitted by the Royal Aircraft
Establishment, RAE, for a rocket capable of putting 144
kilograms into low Earth orbit. Most of the rocket's
technology and systems were from the Black Knight
rocket, an intermediate range ballistic missile, who
was built by the RAE. The Black Arrow was also lovingly called the lipstick rocket,
because, well, look at it! It stood 13 meters tall, two meters wide and was three stages. The first stage had eight
engines that were fueled by RP-1 rocket fuel and hydrogen
peroxide for the oxidizer, the second stage had two
engines with the same fuel. The third stage was a
single solid rocket motor that was spin stabilized. The rocket launched four times,
all out of Launch Area 5B, at the Woomera Prohibited
Area in Australia. And strangely, the spent boosters
would land in remote areas of land, and not splashdown,
kind of like how Russia and China let their spent
boosters fall all willy nilly, potentially landing near
people, only this area is far more remote than
Kazakhstan or China. The first launch on June
28th, 1969 was a failure, the second suborbital test was successful, the third test was a
failure to get into orbit but the fourth mission on
October 28, 1971, was successful, putting the Prospero satellite into orbit. In 1971, only a few months
before the fourth launch was scheduled, the program
was canceled due to budgetary constraints and the fact that
the American made Scout rocket was cheaper, so they could
just purchase those instead. There was also an offer
from NASA to launch payloads for free, however that was withdrawn once the Black Arrow was canceled, whoops. There was one more Black Arrow
that was actually completed and built, but never flown and now sits in the Science Museum, London along with a spare Prospero satellite. There's also the remains
of the first stage of a flown rocket on display
in a town of 10 people in the William Creek
Memorial Park in Australia. I really want to go see that! So that's the story of the
only country to date to develop an orbital class launch
capability and then abandon it. (light music) Ah, the space shuttle. One of the most iconic
rockets of all time. Look at that thing, it's just gorgeous. Despite not quite living up to its promise of bringing down the cost of spaceflight, it sure did have some
unmatched capabilities; such as repairing satellites,
or maybe even more impressive, it could satellites back down from space. As a matter of fact
that military potential was so groundbreaking, the Soviet Union decided they needed a
space shuttle as well! So, welcome the Buran. A more powerful, more capable version of the United States' Space Shuttle. And before we go any further,
I've had people tell me I think it's pronounced
Boo-ran, so I'm gonna say that, but it might be Bu-ran, I don't know. The Buran might look an awful
lot like the space shuttle, but despite it's looks,
it was to perform the work in quite a different manner. The Soviet Union strapped the
Buran to the side of the third most powerful rocket ever, the
twice flown Energia rocket. And again, I have no idea if
it's Ener-gia or Ener-jia. That one! Construction of the Buran
orbiters began in 1980 and the first full scale orbiter saw the light of day in 1984. The striking resemblance to the
United State's Space Shuttle is of course no coincidence, but it's not just some knock off. Physics pretty well dictates
the shape of vehicles, and the Soviet Union pretty
quickly realized the U.S. did their homework and followed suit. But despite the looks, they still had quite the engineering
challenge ahead of them. They developed a fully autonomous
system that could perform the entire flight and
landing all by itself. They of course had to develop their own fuel cells,
their own control system. Then they strapped it to
their massive Energia rocket, which was a mighty and
super powerful beast. This meant the Soviets had
developed a more flexible system by making the Energia
capable of other payloads and not just the Buran. Not only that, the Buran was
also eventually to be capable of some powered flight in
the air thanks to up to four jet engines at the aft end of the vehicle. Although it wasn't used
on its orbital flight, they wanted to try to have
two jet engines on the back for orbital missions, but
that never quite panned out. This could have potentially
offered some flexibility when trying to land,
unlike the Space Shuttle which is completely a glider. It only had one shot at landing,
wherever you were pointing is pretty much where
the thing's gonna land. The only orbital flight
of the Buran, OK-1K1, took place 30 years ago, on
November 15th, 1988 at 3:00 UTC. It went off flawlessly,
putting the Buran into space, boosting itself into a
slightly higher orbit, and then returning to Earth
after just two orbits, the Buran came back and had
a perfect runway landing. Ang again, it did this 100% autonomously. Once it landed, it really
looked quite fantastic. It only lost eight of
its 38,000 thermal tiles, which is quite a big contrast
to the United State's first Space Shuttle
mission which lost 16 tiles and had 148 of them really damaged. The Buran was supposed to
fly again five years later, but with the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold
War, the program went on ice and the Buran orbiter
would never fly again. And to add insult to
injury, on May 12, 2002, the only flown Buran was wrecked
when the hangar storing it completely collapsed
because of poor maintenance. The collapse tragically
killed eight people as well and also completely
destroyed the OK-1K1 orbiter. Today, there are still two
derelict Burans wasting away in a really rusty hangar in Kazakhstan. A few adventure seekers
have actually snuck in to photograph them. There's also the OK-GLI glider prototype, which is on display at the
Speyer Technik Museum in Germany. This is kind of like the
glider prototype cousin to the Space Shuttle Enterprise. And lastly, there's a
test-article Buran, the OKM that's on display at the Baikonur
Cosmodrome History Museum. Again, I really want to go see this. And that's the story of
Russia's one and only flight of a re-usable spacecraft. (light music) Now back to the rocket that
launched the Buran, the Energia. This thing was extremely impressive and definitely deserves its
own segment here in this video! The Energia was a super heavy lift rocket, coming in just after
the Saturn V in thrust and despite only have 75% the
sea level thrust of the N-1, it actually could loft more
payload to Low Earth Orbit. It was only a two stage vehicle,
and although it might look like the stack of the space
shuttle minus the orbiter, it operates very, very differently. The Energia began development
after the Soviet Union cancelled the N-1 rocket,
which we'll talk about more in another video about
alternate space history. Since the Energia was the
vehicle that was putting the Buran into space, it carried
its payloads on its side, which is super weird. It even did that when it wasn't carrying the Buran into space. I think the coolest
thing about the Energia is those side-engines on the booster. Now those are four liquid
boosters as opposed to two solid rocket boosters
like on the Space Shuttle. But these side boosters have the RD-170. The RD-170 is the most
powerful liquid fueled rocket engine ever, it
ran on RP-1 and LOX. That's right, move over F-1 engine, the RD-170 is actually
the most powerful engine! But there is a small
caveat, instead of a single giant combustion chamber
like the F-1, the RD-170 had four combustion chambers
and a single turbo pump. Technically, the industry
defines the rocket engine as the power pack, or turbo
pump, which feed the combustion chamber, the RD-170 has
a single turbo pump. So although it may look like four engines, it's actually considered a single engine. The reason they split up a single engine into four combustion chambers
is because the Soviets hadn't figured out how to solve
the combustion instability that's a problem with
large combustion chambers. So they fed a single turbo pump into four combustion chambers, brilliant! Then we have the center core
stage with four RD-0120 engines that ran on liquid hydrogen and LOX. The RD-0120 is almost like
the Soviet's equivalent to the RS-25 space shuttle main engine. Despite almost exactly matching
all the specs to the RS-25, the RD-0120 was a lot more
simple and also was not recovered since they were not
attached to the orbiter. The Energia wound up flying twice. The first mission of the
Energia went pretty well, at least for the Energia itself,
which performed fantastic. However, it's payload,
the Polyus spacecraft wound up de-orbiting. This is one of those funny
missions that'll be part of my Biggest Face Palms
of spaceflight history, so I won't go into
detail now, but basically instead of putting itself into
orbit, it de-orbited itself. The Energia wound up
launching one more time, with the Buran spacecraft as mentioned and performed literally flawlessly. The Energia also fell to
the same fate as the Buran, being canceled as the Soviet Union fell. It's truly a shame that
such an amazing, powerful and capable rocket never flew again. Despite talks of it being
resurrected many times, it never seems to make it's
way beyond the drawing board. (light music) Recognize this? Yup, that sure is pretty
much the solid rocket booster off of a space shuttle. So wait, what's it doing out
there on the pad all by itself? You my friends are looking at
one of the strangest and most dangerous rockets ever
considered for human spaceflight. In 2004, President Bush announced
the Constellation program which proposed taking
humans back to the moon on a massive rocket called the Ares V, which is sort of now the
SLS but kind of different. The constellation program
also intended to provide transportation services to the
International Space Station to replace the soon
retiring space shuttle. NASA was going to address
some of the biggest flaws of the Space Shuttle; like crew safety, and the cost of flying cargo
on a crew rated vehicle. They sought a simple and
cheap way to get crew up to the ISS, and thus
the Ares 1 was born. The Ares 1 would loft an Orion
Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle on top of a single solid rocket booster and a liquid powered upper stage. By 2007 things were looking
good with NASA completing its system requirements
review, a first for the agency since the Space Shuttle in the 1970's! Although they intended to
use mostly Space Shuttle derived hardware, a lot of
work went into the design of the rocket and pretty quickly, a lot of preliminary plans changed. For instance, due to the massive size of the Orion spacecraft,
NASA soon realized they would need a five
segment solid rocket booster instead of a four segment booster like the Space Shuttle had. Despite wanting to pull
from the Space Shuttle, a lot of technology wound
up coming off the Saturn V! For instance, NASA was originally
going to use a separate hydrogen and oxygen tank
inside the upper stage, just like the external fuel
tank of the Space Shuttle, but instead they had to
use a common bulkhead like the second and third
stage of the Saturn V. They also wanted to try to use
a space shuttle main engine, the RS-25, for an upper
stage, but they soon realized it'd be more expensive
and it would require a ton of heavy modifications
to make it air startable. And air startable isn't
necessarily like sea-level or vacuum, it's talking
about starting mid-flight. So they went with a
Saturn V era J-2 engine, but that too required
so many modifications to increase the thrust, they
wound up with a clean sheet design, known as the J-2x. Okay, so put all this
together and we end up with a review in 2008 that wasn't so good. It was revealed that there
were such great concerns over massive vibrations
during the first few minutes of ascent that NASA admitted the problem was a four out of five
on their risk scale. So they had to design a solution that would dampen the vibrations. They stuck an active tuned-mass absorber, otherwise known as a giant spring, inside the rocket to
absorb the vibrations. But that wouldn't be all the bad news the Ares 1 program would
receive, perhaps the biggest blow was a 2009 study by the
Air Force's 45th space wing that determined if the crew had to abort between 30 to 60 seconds after launch, they would have a 0%
chance of survivability. When a solid rocket booster is detonated, the solid propellant
fragments would easily melt the parachutes of an aborted crew capsule and they would fall back to Earth. Okay, okay, but fast forward a
few months later and finally, the first NASA developed
rocket since they rolled out the Space Shuttle in
1981, hit the launch pad. This was the Ares 1-X, a test
vehicle designed primarily to test the first stage's performance and verify the controls
and dynamics of the Ares-1. It was a bit of a hodgepodge
rocket with avionics from an Atlas V, a four
segment booster from a shuttle with a dummy fifth segment as
well as a dummy upper stage, orion capsule and crew escape tower. It also had the roll control system off a Peacekeeper missile. The rocket successfully
launched on October 28th, 2009 and the flight lasted only six minutes from liftoff to splashdown. After two minutes of powered
ascent, the first and second stage separated and the
booster began to deploy its parachutes, just like the
Space Shuttle's boosters did. That single launch cost
approximately $445 million and that was the only time
an Ares rocket took flight. Because of cost overruns,
delays in schedules, unforeseen engineering and
technical difficulties, and an ever inflating
budget, the Ares 1 program was canceled along with the
rest of the Constellation program on February 1st, 2010. In 2011, NASA's then acting
administrator Charles Bolden testified that the Ares 1
and the Orion capsule program would have cost four
to $4.5 billion a year, plus $1.6 billion per flight. Because of this, NASA
ended up moving towards the Commercial Crew program
that would hopefully bring the cost of launches down. But it's almost 2019 and we
have yet to put an astronaut on any of these commercial
providers to space. Mostly because the Commercial Crew program has been underfunded
for quite some time now, that's gonna end up leaving the US with about an eight year gap
in human spaceflight, ha ha. But, we're finally almost there. That being said, I'm really
glad the Ares-1 was canned, considering how much money
it was already costing us, how much money it would
have cost per launch and also how dangerous it was for humans, I think we made the right choice. This all just makes you
realize how important it is to have a clear goal, a healthy budget and strong leadership to
really make big things happen. It makes me really thankful
for what we have been able to accomplish, but it
also makes me frustrated to know what could have been. Before leaving me comments
on things I forgot, don't you forget, there's
a few more of these videos coming out with slightly
different angles to each one and even another one coming
out with this exact same developed and dropped theme. So stay tuned, there's a lot more coming. But let me know in the comments
below what other questions you have about canceled programs, rockets or just spaceflight in general! I owe a huge thanks to my
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gonna do it for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut. Bringing Space down to
Earth for everyday people. (light music)
Part.2