 Hey guys, Amy with you as always because this is my personal vlog channel and Today we're actually gonna be doing something just a little bit different instead of a vlog about something about my life We're actually gonna do a bit of a deep dive or deeper dive into some space history because you guys did not like that I don't like the space shuttle and Really attacked me hard for it And I'm not gonna defend my opinion because it's my opinion and I feel no need to defend it instead I'm going to take this as a really great opportunity to teach you guys something that some of you may know from history And some of you may not which is the dinosaur So yeah, my last video it's gonna pop up in one of these corners right here right now I'm not sure which one it comes out in My last video was about why I personally don't like the shuttle enough to cover it on my main channel vintage space And it was about what vintage space really means for me What kind of income is encompassed in that title and why? The most common question I get when the space shuttle will be considered vintage enough for vintage space It's not gonna necessarily fall under vintage space because it's you know my own blog and my own YouTube channel You guys got really mad at me, and I'm not gonna address the intense Horrible comments that I got but there was an overwhelming number of comments that told me In no fewer words that I'm a complete moron because I don't understand that the shuttle did some really amazing Technological things and that it was the first vehicle to return from space like an airplane that it was piloted and it landed on a runway that it was reusable and Here's where the historian and me comes in and just says yeah, I know all those things but the shuttle didn't invent those and The teacher in me wants to tell you guys about all of the pre-shuttle Reusable piloted space plane programs that actually not only predicted the shuttle but helped create the shuttle that we had So I've given this talk I'm gonna do a bit of a Kind of extemporaneous chatty version of a talk that I usually give right now So settle in this is gonna be a little bit of a longer one and a little bit more educational than most of the things on this channel Because I I've said this before and I've made no secret of my love for dinosaur Which is not dinosaur like a T-Rex It is short for dynamic soaring which is the landing profile that this vehicle flew And I have made the statement in this talk when I give it and I've given it at this point in three countries That dinosaur is the shuttle America didn't know it needed before it got the one that nobody really wanted So yeah, I'm gonna walk you through in brief the story of dinosaur I could do the whole thing But then we would have like a feature length documentary series on our hands and I don't have time to edit that So instead we're gonna go through the calls notes We're gonna go through the basics and the point is to show you guys that Hypersonic research for gliders and piloted flight from orbit and all the things that the shuttle gave us Actually existed at least in potential and in research programs before the shuttle So before you say that the shuttle did things that we could never have had otherwise These things did exist in other forms beforehand and we would have had them through other means So me saying that the shuttle isn't necessarily the best spacecraft of all time Doesn't mean it doesn't have technical merit It also means that there's other things out there that I think could have been better namely dinosaur All right, so let's just jump on it. So I always start this talk I'm gonna give some stats right off the bat Just to kind of ground us in where sort of dinosaur is versus the shuttle You can look at the two of them side-by-side and see that dinosaur in its launch configuration as shown in this This artwork is extremely shuttleoid and that was what jumped out to me the first time I ever saw this when I was a teenager. Let's look at the shuttle Let's start with the shuttle the shuttle program was approved in 1972 and it promised massive things for NASA in the post Apollo era it was meant to be and it was designed to be a usable low-cost space Transportation system hence the STS designation with each orbiter NASA wanted five Able to perform 100 flights It was designed to launch like a rocket operate like a spacecraft and land like an airplane It was designed also to launch interplanetary missions recover and refurbish satellites in orbit and The glider was designed to be refurbished and made ready for another launch with a turnaround time of just weeks It was meant to support or the program on the whole was meant to support three simultaneous flights to up to two in orbit and one either getting ready on the launch pad to go up or just returning and being serviced for the next flight and Ideally the initial proposal said that the shuttle would be able to fly up to 50 flights per year So the reality of the shuttle program is quite different than the kind of dream scenario as it was originally pitched when it was Approved and started kind of really gaining traction in 1972 It was active between 1981 and 2011 and each launch cost somewhere in the range of it $450 million so that actually puts it on par with the Saturn 5 launch So the cost saving was not really there It did indeed launch like a rocket operate like a spacecraft and land like an airplane But it didn't do as much during those missions as it was hoped to in my last video I think I said that it launched five interplanetary missions I got my figures mixed up it recovered five satellites and launched three interplanetary missions that was the Magellan mission to Venus in 1989 the Galileo mission to Jupiter in 1989 and the European Space Agency's Ulysses mission to the Sun in 1990 the average turnaround time between missions because remember even if the orbiter is a different orbiter the launch facility has To be refreshed in time to launch another one If you look at the average time between flights it varies between a number of weeks to a number of months and that's taking into account the average for the Years-long delay following the Challenger and Columbia accidents There were never simultaneous flights of the shuttle so that goal never happened and it averaged again averaged Some years were better than others an averaged of four flights a year So now let's compare shuttle and dinosaur and of course dinosaur didn't fare any better than shuttle because it never actually flew But still I think it's useful to have a sense of where those sort of key points line up before we get into the full story So dinosaur was active between 1954 and 1963 some people would put the starting point at 57 But I'm gonna make a case that it starts a little bit earlier. There was only ever one mock-up made There were seven very frustrated astronauts attached to the program one very annoyed US Air Force a Rather frustrated national aeronautics and space administration so yeah, pretty much annoying all around but I Think that it could have actually done a lot of good had it been funded through at least one of the many channels It was meant to go through at the time that it did as opposed to sort of being this weird footnote that space historians know About but the general population does not all right So we can start dinosaurs story in a number of places depending on how far back into history you want to go I usually start with Eugen Sanger and apologies up front for my inability to really pronounce German names So Sanger like so many rocket enthusiasts growing up in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s Read the works of Herman Oberth namely his thesis de rocket as you didn't plant a homin which is published in 1923 after reading Oberth's work Sanger like a number of his other peers including one or friend Brown Actually was so inspired that he self-specialized his degree in physics to study rocketry, which was not easy because rocketry was actually not considered something that would qualify for the classical requirements for a physics degree so actually Sanger like Oberth had his Thesis rejected because it was not classical physics enough Which is hard to imagine now, but Sanger like Oberth before him was not discouraged and he continued to study rocketry and Try to come up with ways to make space flight Happen his system focused on a 90-foot long vehicle with a 50-foot wingspan It was cylindrical and tapered to a point on the end with small flat wings and the key is a flat underside Now the flat underside would allow the vehicle to skip off the upper layers of the atmosphere the same way a stone skips off a compound His launch system involved a kind of first stage pusher vehicle that would be on an inclined sled So the first stage rockets would fire get the vehicle going give it Momentum and then the gliders own rocket engines would be able to kick in and between the two The the combined velocity of the two stages would get the vehicle up to that point where it could start that skipping gliding profile Traveling all over the planet or at least halfway around the planet by his calculations Without actually expending any more energy because it would just be skipping and gliding skipping gliding until it landed on a runway So he thought for sure that this first iteration of his vehicle could be built with existing technology the only missing piece was the propulsion system and He didn't really have the means to develop a propulsion system So what do you do when you have a crazy idea and you need money for it? You go to the military because the military always has the money So when he took it to the military he had to militarize it and by militarize it He just added bombs so this became the skip glide vehicle became the antipodal bomber and the idea being that from a launch point It could bomb any point on the planet as far as the opposite end of the planet antipode Within an hour of launch and then either return to its base or return to another landing site to be refurbished quickly Turned around added new bombs and then launched again in 1933 Sanger took this vehicle to the Austrian Nazi party to try to entice them with it and ultimately they said no it hinged on this very poorly understood chemical reaction of Liquid propulsion and they didn't want to have you know Project involving potentially killing a lot of people on their hands. So they turned him down the next year in 1934 He took it to the German military the German army and they said no, you're not German born Also, we kind of have this guy who is German born and like really good with rockets working for us spoiler alert So he instead took it to the German Air Force the Luftwaffe and the Luftwaffe had no problem with him Not being German born and gave him a decent amount of funding and built him a lab And they kind of wanted Sanger to be for the Air Force what von Braun was for the army So these two armed military branches would have like dueling rocket geniuses That was kind of the idea skipping ahead and spoiler alert Warner von Braun Was one of the leaders of the team that developed the aggregate series of rockets that are better known by the PR name of the Felgelton's Waffa the aggregate series of rockets was just this kind of sequential Building rockets that were more and more capable had guidance systems were able to travel further The a4 is the one that that really did the damage the a4 was the v2 Meanwhile well von Braun is developing the aggregate rockets Sanger is Languishing in his lab his lab is shut down in 1942 citing fuel shortages But really it's just because he was not delivering enough and they didn't want to keep funding his lab So at the end of the war Sanger's system has done nothing and von Braun's system is doing really really well So von Braun like Sanger had developed a winged version of his system So the a9 Was actually a later version of the v2 that was a two stage rocket the second stage the upper stage actually had wings And it would basically do the same thing that Sanger system would do the difference being the way it would launch So Sanger was launching off a sled on an angle von Braun was launching on a rocket von Braun system They would both go up hit their apex and then skip and glide off the atmosphere to land at a different point on the planet Potentially bombing someone in the meantime now Sanger tried really hard to get his system in hands that would fund it at the end of the war he wrote a report called a rocket drive for long-range bombers and Circulated it around but nobody in Germany had any money to sink into a program like this Stalin was super into it because it meant he could bomb the United States though having to deploy his men across the world But he never found Sanger lucky for America But Dornberger Dornberger von Braun's boss also had a copy of this report. So let's fast forward again in the interest of time So 1947 Dornberger is tried for war crimes because nobody can find enough Nazis to try for war crimes He's tried in London. He ends up in a prisoner of war camp in Wales Meanwhile, von Braun is immigrating into the United States as like intellectual reparations from the war Dornberger eventually is released from prisoner of war camp and moves the United States in 1950 He begins working with the US Army and ultimately ends up working for Bell aircraft Bell may be familiar to you guys because Bell was the company that built the X1 the X1 being the plane that broke the sound barrier Piled it by Jack Yeager in 1947 for Dornberger finding work at Bell was kind of awesome sauce because Dornberger was at this point had been on the losing side of two world wars But he'd given his life to developing ballistic weapons for the German army now He was in a country that was a victor of wars that was open to using German knowledge and was finally working for a company That wasn't designing weapons. They were developing research planes. So in 1952 He rehashed this idea of Sanger's anti-potal bomber with Bell's chief engineer Bob Woods and Bob Woods Was a bit of a visionary in his time He was the one that really spearheaded the X1 program and he was very interested in the skip glide vehicle Dornberger's Idea this kind of Sanger inspired boost glide or skip glide vehicle But Bell did not build the X1 alone It was a contractor that built it for the US Air Force of which Yeager was a pilot But it was built in cooperation with or with help rather from the NACA Which is the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which is simple to think of it as NASA's predecessor organization So in 1952 Woods coming off the success of the X1 with Dornberger and this really interesting idea of a skip glide vehicle in hand pitches the NACA on a new hypersonic research program with vehicles that could fly beyond Mach 5 and the idea is to Really start building on this idea that Dornberger has now Dornberger wants to take this thing away further He wants to look into a hypersonic vehicle that can fly close to Mach 20 like 20 times the speed of sound He wants to use this as a test bed for understanding issues of aerodynamic heating and friction from the atmosphere during reentry but it could reach peak heights of Over 350 miles above the planet. So that is effectively returning from low-Earth orbit So the idea of this hypersonic research program pitched in 52 really starts to gain traction in 1954 But you can't really go from Mach 1, you know, Mach 2 at this point in specially designed aircraft to a hypersonic glider capable of re-entering the Earth's atmosphere at Mach 20 like that's a huge leap Technologically to make in one fell swoop with one program So the first step was to start really understanding supersonic flight and that begat the X-15 Now the X-15 if you are ever near the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington I highly recommend going to see the X-15 because it is an unbelievably sexy aircraft It is basically a missile with a cockpit up front. This thing was just fuel tank just fuel tank with a little cockpit It's amazing So the X-15 was designed to start really understanding the challenges of hypersonic flight of returning from low-Earth orbit Not only from the technical side of thing, but from the human factor side of thing would pilots be able to Manually fly a vehicle down from low-Earth orbit Would the heating profiles do weird things to the plant they wouldn't be able to control Would you know, you're not just flying supersonically you're flying through supersonic and then transonic and then subsonic How would that be for a pilot to manually control the X-15 was designed to answer all of these questions Or at least start answering the questions the later version dorm burgers ultimate version of the Mach 20 glider would kind of round out This program without getting into a whole thing on the X-15 because I have loads of other videos about the X-15 For you guys to watch if you are interested It was launched from underneath the wing of a B 52 bomber and it could either fly speed runs Which would be lower lower Altitudes runs just super gun and for speed the top speed of the X-15 was Mach 6.7 So fast or the X-15 could actually fly altitude runs So it would go up on a high trajectory hit a peak and then return in both cases landing on skids on the dry lake Beta Edwards Air Force Base the top run of the X-15 was upwards of 300,000 feet that is a lot of feet So it was really the first step to understanding the challenges of hypersonic flight now as the X-15 program starts really Unrolling and starts showing some really good research the Air Force starts getting in on this whole idea of hypersonics and maybe hypersonics involving weapons because you know Bombs it we were still in the you know the early stages of the Cold War at this point So the Air Force starts looking into different versions of this Hypersonic weapon and comes up with one called Bomi's it stands for bomber missile There's one called brass bell that is a dedicated reconnaissance vehicle one called robo Which is a rocket bomber and this was ultimately the version investigated by Douglas aircraft Convair and North American aviation in the late mid 1950s and As it became a program with Contractors involved getting in on the research the project was given the name project Highwards Which is an acronym for hypersonic weapon and research and development system now This surfaced as a full fully fledged program in 1956 so also known as weapon system 4 6 4 L which is so not sexy So the name was eventually given to it of dinosaur which is again for dynamic soaring as in its landing profile By the fall of 1957 dinosaur was on the table as a primarily US Air Force program with Research help from the NACA because NACA was in the business of developing the most beautiful functional aircraft And also with a little bit of US Navy thrown in for good measure and it was a three-stage program The first phase would test the space plane and kind of figure out the details of it It would be the first to fly beyond the limits of the X-15 with a pilot and like the X-15 It would be air launched from mothership phase 2 would be the reconnaissance weapon systems or the brass bell version That would actually have its own rocket engine on board and start reaching peak altitudes the dinosaur 3 was the robo or rocket bomber Concept and this would be a reconnaissance weapon system that could also be a multi-stage glider aircraft that could circumnavigate the globe So in the fall of 1957 dinosaur is on the books as a piloted very high altitude weapon system for lack of a like really strong defining term for what this is going to be and then on October 4 The Soviet Union launch is Sputnik and kind of throws all of the pre space early space air space things in the United States into absolute chaos And that included dinosaur so two weeks after Sputnik the NACA in the US Air Force actually had a meeting About what was going to be the next round of hypersonic research So will the X1 is round one the X of T is round two what is round three going to be? What is the next phase of understanding? hypersonics and tending towards space flight now going to look like and Dinosaur is suddenly like the best option. There's been a lot of research from contractors into what the vehicle will be There's a lot of research from the X of T that can apply to the dinosaur So suddenly it's starting to look like a really good option for the next program however When NASA comes into existence and kind of takes over from the NACA The NACA was in the business of aerodynamics and really understanding flight NASA is in the business of civilian spaceflight But unofficially its goal is to get a man in space before the Soviet Union gets one of their guys in space and for NASA's purposes now Faster is better than maybe the right program and the faster is the ballistic mercury capsule This is a vehicle that can go into orbit with automation and can fall out of the sky In land in the ocean and just simplify the entire goal of getting a man in space So NASA is pursuing ballistic spacecraft with mercury But dinosaurs still a NASA program and a joint U.S. Air Force program and it's still getting enough love so in 59 Dinosaur on the books, but it gets it gets a number of revisions that actually I mean any technology going through revisions doesn't exactly necessarily help it So in February of 1959 the bombardment goal or the weapons goal of Dinosaur was made the top priority in April It was shifted such that these suborbital hypersonic flight goal was the priority and the weapons was second and then in May It was flipped back and the military goal was made the primary goal again Continually giving this program a new goal is leaving it really hard for the people who are designing it to design the vehicle But nevertheless it's kind of settled with the military goal on top and in 1959 Boeing is contracted to actually build the glider and the Martin company is contracted to build the rocket that will launch it and at This point in the end of 1959 another phase is added to the dinosaur program called phase alpha Which is designed to determine the applicability of dinosaur to manned orbital flight So NASA is in effect pursuing these two spaceflight programs I'll be it dinosaur never had the priority of Mercury. It is looking ahead It may be using this type of vehicle for manned spaceflight So things are looking pretty good in 1960 The US Air Force completes phase alpha in March and determines that the gliders very low lift to drag ratio means it is ideal for spaceflight and Dinosaur is cleared to go forward towards suborbital test flights and the Department of Defense formally jumps in on the program endorsing dinosaur and Funding it with enough money to actually see it through stages two and three so that is advanced orbital operations and Martin picks a launch vehicle for it the Titan 2 and potentially the Titan 3 will be the vehicle So everything is starting to come together and the Air Force wants to actually kick up its schedule to get dinosaur flying as fast as possible Now Mercury was never going to be the end of ballistic spacecraft for NASA already in 1960 towards the end of 1960 It was looking forward at an evolved version called Mercury mark 2 which eventually became the Gemini program So it's unlikely I would say that that NASA would have gone from Mercury You know say America had gotten the first man in space before the Soviets did Abandoned it and then gone with dinosaur But still it was pursuing dinosaur concurrently with Mercury and Mercury mark 2 slash Gemini in the end of 1960 So things were looking good for NASA from the American perspective until the Soviets launched Yorca Garin on April 12th of 61 nailing the goal of the first man in space and NASA had nothing to compete with that Al Shepard launched on May 5th on a suborbital flight. So even NASA's best Attempts or best technologies at the time couldn't match the Soviets This of course is ultimately what led to the moon as a goal and that is a whole separate thing that I'm not getting into Right now suffice it to say that the same month that Gagarin went into orbit the Department of Defense Announced a firmer commitment to dinosaur to the tune of a hundred million dollars Which is about close to eight hundred million dollars adjusted for inflation just for the fiscal year of 1962 for a dinosaur So this is still looking like it's going to be a program that will eventually take Americans into space So the problem was as 1961 wore on the Air Force started to not like its own program It was still on the books as being a spaceflight program, but also a weapon system So it was a little bit schizophrenic But even still the Air Force was getting pilots involved and one of the dinosaur pilots or the astronauts rather Was Neil Armstrong before he joined NASA so there were pilots training to fly in space on dinosaur and even NASA was lending its astronauts to the Air Force to start figuring out the cockpit layout for dinosaur Mercury astronauts Wally Shara and Gus Grissom both Helped design the cockpit layout for dinosaur and started working on training and this vehicle was really starting to come to life This was getting you know the mock-up couldn't fly in space But the technical details were all really getting worked out in anticipation of it flying in space But again, it just couldn't really find its firm footing in 1962 Kind of was like the start of the death knell for dinosaur in the first half of the year The Air Force canceled developments towards stage three which was the multi orbital flights and then Boeing canceled all sub orbital flights because it didn't think they were necessary and Then the Air Force canceled its military application So now it doesn't really have a thing to do anymore So Department of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said that dinosaur would be an orbital research program vehicle And that gave it its other name. It was designated the x-20. Nevertheless dinosaur went on It was unveiled that mock-up was unveiled at a press conference in Vegas in September of 1962 and the Department of Defense Announced that it was going to be funding again Dusted for inflation about 800 million per year for 63 and 64 to get it flying by the end of 1962 and into 1963 Dinosaur kind of lost its edge over NASA's own other programs being Mercury Gemini and the still underdevelopment Apollo there was no way dinosaur was gonna come out and like sweep the rug out from under Apollo It was capsules all the way NASA was committed to capsules It tried to use other runway landing systems for Gemini and even looked into them for Apollo with hang gliders the regal owing and Rotor reentry systems all kinds of neat stuff that just never came to fruition. It was going to be splashdowns It was going to be ballistic capsules dinosaur wasn't gonna change NASA's path in the moon because by this point The nation was committed to the moon landing goal and also Dinosaur was supposed to be answering questions about hypersonic reentry and heating profiles and materials and all these things and human factors and NASA was also already doing a lot of that Dinosaur was supposed to answer questions about how humans would survive in space on orbital missions NASA was doing that with Mercury and with Gemini ultimately Robert McNamara decided that dinosaur was a poor return on investment at this point It had cost from its official sort of endorsement in 57 to mid to late 1963 As adjusted for inflation it had cost almost three billion dollars and it didn't have a firm mission because NASA was doing space The exit team was doing piloted super high altitude very fast flight There was no need for dinosaur and it was canceled on December 10th of 1963 But the problem was it's so easy to see this in hindsight that NASA Really did want dinosaur at the time like dinosaur was kind of the vehicle of its dreams With the exception of the fact that it was not equipped to do things like go to the moon But ultimately NASA was so annoyed to splashdown landings. I've done videos about that It wanted to get away from slash-down landings and dinosaur was able to land on runways or on dry lake beds Just like the exit team was it would have been far better for the astronauts Dinosaur was designed to be reusable It was designed to do so many things that NASA wanted capabilities that NASA wanted But it ended up locked into this capsule idea this capsule shape for the Apollo program and Apollo just took over absolutely everything that happened in the 1960s because Going to the moon to beat the Soviet Union was just the goal and nothing was going to preempt that goal The other thing that dinosaur could have given us had it been funded and had it actually flown is these these futures That I think a lot of us would like now and their futures that people like dorm burger and Fun Brown and Sanger were all thinking about in the 1930s 40s and 50s things like fun Brown's idea of going to Mars So he wanted to use dinosaur like small space shuttles Which he refers to ends at some point as space taxis to take pieces of a space station up into orbit to build the station It would be 900 launches just constantly Cycling these tiny little space planes up and down between the earth and and low earth orbit But that space station would then be able to launch a flotilla of space craft to Mars into the moon and to other Planets and from there that space station would be our jumping-off point for deep space exploration The commercial and kind of public spin-off that dorm burger wanted was what he called ultra planes So this would be a dinosaur like glider piggybacked on top of a larger glider That would be the booster to have basically a two-stage rocket-powered commercial aviation system So it would work effectively like Sanger's system Meets the fun browns a nine system from the late World War two where the two vehicles the booster would launch At a certain altitude the glider would it would tip the glider would launch off its back fire its own engines And then skip and glide to its destination I mean with dorm burger system Imagine if you could fly from the US to Australia the longest single leg flight I think I've done is LA to Brisbane was 14 hours with dorm burger system He imagined being able to do it in three That's that's the future that he wanted from developing this technology in the 1950s So when it came time to developing the space shuttle NASA didn't just like look at ideas of what to do and decide to completely invent a New spacecraft out of something that it had never played with Dinosaur was a NASA program Dinosaur in a lot of ways was just a smaller scale version of the shuttle Now what's interesting in NASA's history also is that the idea of wanting reusable flight was never new I mean everybody always wanted reusability that the cost-saving of Reusing a vehicle for space flight has never been lost on anybody The problem was that with the Apollo era of technology It was just so much simpler and faster to just make a whole whack of them and launch them again Speed was key for Apollo not necessarily a lasting architecture of space flight That's another story In the mid 1960s NASA started looking ahead and started bringing up this idea of the shuttle And it was constantly looking back in the memos and sort of some of the early chronologies that I've been looking through lately Did look back at dinosaur as one of the Technologies that inspired the type of vehicle that NASA would eventually pursue and actually some of the earliest Shuttle configurations NASA was looking at three different ones a class one class two and class three and the class one Vehicle the shuttle that we had got was actually Described in various memos and in various reports as an uprated Modern version of dinosaur so I said this in the video I've said this before and I said this in the video that everyone hated that One of the reasons I love the Apollo era and focus on that so much for vintage space is because Everything modern has those ties back to that vintage technology that first time you had to solve those problems And for the shuttle one of the most interesting things for me beyond the fascinating politics that led to its existence as it was is where the roots really came from and the roots come in these 1930s Futuristic space plane ideas that never got off the ground and these 1950s Air Force programs that were developed But ultimately never flew but started answering those questions So the point of this very long video that is way more educational than anything I ever thought would go on this channel because this is supposed to be my fun space Is to say that you can't take the shuttle out of historical context because to take it out of historical context is to ignore Everything that fed into it and is to give it a lot To ascribe a lot to it that it doesn't necessarily have To say that it's the only thing that ever solved problems of piloted reentry from orbit is absolutely not true because the X-15 Started working on that 30 years earlier to say that it was the first vehicle that ever started looking at how to deal with the heat of reentry For a space plane the X of T and dinosaur looked into that dinosaur looked into exactly the flight configuration Early shuttle flight configurations looked exactly like dinosaur even when it was giant There were all kinds of ways Nass was looking at the shuttle and they were all influenced by what had come earlier And what it had learned in the interim there is so much more to any technology than Necessarily meets the eye you might look at the shuttle and you might see that it is the only vehicle that looks like this Therefore it is the only thing that did this well It's not because if you look into its history You find that its history has roots and those roots Inspired the vehicle that it came and it will inspire things that come after it But to say that it's the only thing that ever did it therefore It's the best is to ignore the fact that it's coming from something and that something is really meaningful So you cannot love the thing but still be fascinated by its roots history is awesome You guys history in the case like this is big and complicated and messy and tells us So much more about the thing that we think we know all about because even if you know But the shuttle looks like you can pick it out You know a handful of missions and you think it's the greatest to know where it comes from should make you appreciate it That much more or should put it in a different perspective. All right. That was a lot of talking Okay, all that being said I'm shamelessly self-promoting because it's my channel and I can do what I want to if you would like to know more about the story of dinosaur its roots the roots of Nazi systems weapons Rockets on American rocketry space planes all that stuff the early things the x-15 the x-1 It's all in my book up to 1958 after the creation of NASA Hi Pete Pete's here Breaking the chains of gravity you can buy it on Amazon you can buy it in bookstores You can buy signed copies off my website There's a lot more to the dinosaur story in here. It's not all there, but all the pre-nasa version is in here So let me know in the comments. I'm curious. How many of you have actually come across dinosaur before? and those of you who haven't and who actually were curious enough to learn about the History of the space shuttle that you love. Let me know if this changed your perspective at all Let me know your thoughts and let me know if you have other space questions And you know anything else anything else you feel like saying just say it in the comments below because this is just the The weirdo channel for all the space things and space adjacent things and catbums All right So if you want more from me more straight-up space history be sure to check out venture space my main channel my little internet baby It's short weekly videos about space history and of course follow me on Twitter and on Instagram for daily content That's sometimes busy sometimes completely unrelated to space and of course subscribe to this channel right here This is my vlog channel where I will apparently put up the occasional long-form video about space But also all kinds of other things about other facets of my life because the whole point is to show you guys That space nerds are not one-dimensional nerds. Also, this is the home for the punk rocker moon stomper podcast my currently bi-weekly Podcast about punk ska space beer and pets that I co-host with Jason McClellan This is the weird grab bag of stuff channel. So be sure to subscribe and join in for all the weird fight