Space Shuttle

The figures are for the whole stack on the pad, which is the only honest way to measure it. NASA gives the length as 184 feet, or 56.1 metres, and the 8.4 metre diameter is the external tank, because the tank is the widest thing in the stack and the orbiter hangs off its side rather than sitting on top of it. The liftoff thrust is less settled than it should be: NASA's own live pages quote the pair of solid boosters at figures ten percent apart, and no single agency page states one total for the stack.

That side-mounted arrangement is the whole design in one decision. Putting the payload beside the tank instead of above it is what let the orbiter be a winged vehicle with a cargo bay and a runway landing. It is also what put the crew alongside a shedding foam tank with no abort mode worth the name for most of the ascent, and it killed fourteen people across two flights.

The payload fraction is the number that should have ended the argument early. Twenty-seven and a half tonnes to a 204 kilometre orbit out of a two thousand tonne stack is about 1.35 percent, and to the space station orbit it falls to 16,050 kilograms. A Delta II threw everything away and still put a higher fraction of its launch mass into orbit. The three most expensive engines ever built rode all the way up and back on every flight, and the one part nobody could reuse, the tank, was the cheapest thing in the stack.

It flew 135 times between 1981 and 2011, an average of four and a half missions a year against a programme sold on airline-style turnaround. NASA puts the lifetime cost at 113.7 billion dollars and the FY2010 cost of preparing and launching one mission at about 775 million. The solid boosters were recovered by dropping them into salt water, which is a reliable way to guarantee an expensive teardown.

What it actually bought was the payload bay and the arm. Hubble went up in it and was serviced in it four times, and the space station was assembled out of modules that nothing else could carry and nothing else could hold still while astronauts bolted them together. No vehicle since has been able to bring a satellite home. That capability died with the programme and nobody has rebuilt it.