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In the 1970s, the USA was planning vast network of solar power stations, or SPS, to wean the country off oil and avoid using nuclear power. These stations would have been huge and required vast lifting spaceplanes like the Boeing space freighter or the Star Raker to get materials into orbit.
But hold on,
There was an essential component of the SPS program that we skipped over - that the star raker for all its glory was actually not designed to carry passengers. that these gigantic SPSs in orbit 300 nautical miles above the earth would in fact require a huge workforce of zero g workers as well - but how would they get there?
That role would fall on a different spacecraft entirely. Essentially, a passenger space shuttle.
The project was called the Personal launch system and would very much like the space shuttle we have today, although its actual support rockets would be very different. This is because the space shuttle was actually under development around the same time and was seen as the obvious leaping-off point for any sort of personal ground to orbit system.
So why not just design a passenger module and turn the space shuttle into a commercial transport? Well hot off the creation of the star raker, Rockwell did just that.
This design, from 1976, would be able to carry at least 68 passengers, although there are some concepts that could increase that capacity up to 86 if needed or as low as only 50 astronauts.
Passengers would be divided into four different areas, with different passenger configurations over two decks. Section A-A was the most dense at the rear of the cabin, with 4 seats across the top and two in the bottom. Section B-B had the same densifty but room on either side of the lower seats for cargo. Section C-C and Section D-D were areas with the four doors, with C-C having only four chairs and section D only two chairs at the lower deck leaving room to maneuver around the cabin.
Passengers would first be loaded through four different doors on the ground through the shuttles cargo doors - which themselves would be replaced by a single fixed cover with door openings - the shuttle wasn't designed for any cargo and the module wouldn't be released in flight to thus opening the main bay was not nesscearly.
Once in orbit, the passengers would depart from a new airlock section built into the passenger module at the front of the passenger cabin. It was expected that once the shuttle arrived, passengers would disembark and then the returning passenger's board before heading back to earth.
For missions that only required 50 passengers, the shuttle could reach an orbit of around 500 kilomenters with the extra space given over to more fuel tanks. The 80+ seater version with a shorter range would instead remove two of the ground doors and replace them with a high density B-B section.
The shuttle would return to earth using the typical method that would be employed by its real world equivelent.
There were other designs for earth to orbit transportation, a smaller version of the star raker, but research discovered that it would be cheaper and quicker to develop a simple booster rocket with a fly back orbitor hitching along s ride.
Like the SPS heavy lifter, Boeing was called up to present their ideas.
Instead of a series of boosters, Boeing had the idea to use a single large conical booster instead of the solid rocket boosters that had been used in the apollo program. This design would have had four liquid rocket engines, fed with a potent mix of liquid oxygen and liquid propane - easily giving enough thust, 1.815 Mlbf per engine, to get the whole apparatus to orbit. The shuttles own engines wouldn't have engaged until the booster had seperated, freeing up room onboard the orbiter shuttle for more passengers.
Each booster and orbital pair would have a life span of 14 years, and would cost 12.619 million USD per mission, which would be 100 million in todays dollars. For the whole program, NASA would need 26 boosters and 10 orbiters, a staggeringly high cost.
had this been built, we would have seen the possibility of commercial ventures. Space hotels would have sprung up and there would have been a real possibility of operators filling those 86 passenger seats with those paying customers - clearly there is a market today for it and plenty of people would have paid for it very much like the rise of air travel.
But... this history never happened, and like the SPS program being cancelled, the extense of the shuttle was greatly scaled back and there was never a need to send that many passengers into orbit.
