On Jan 6, 7:43*am, jkochko68 wrote:

There was a requirement that
it had to have about 200 miles of cross range min. so it could make
use of different fields not directly along its glidepath.

This might be true (I've never heard of a AOA abort site in Alaska,
but I wouldn't be surprised if there was one) but it was not the main
imposition on cross range that the USAF put in. The USAF demanded over
a thousand miles of cross range for Reference Mission 3A and 3B. Those
two missions were for a spacecraft to take off from VAFB, going south,
either release or recover a satellite, and land back at VAFB after a
single orbit.

The 200 mile cross range was b/c thats roughly how far away one pt. on
Earth would be after a 90 minute orbit.

You can see just from first principles that this must be wrong. The
earth takes 24 hours to rotate all the way around. So 90 minutes would
be 1/16th of the total rotation. The earth's mean circumference is
40,041 KM. 1/16th of that is 2,502 KM, or 1,555 miles. That is
roughly how far away one point on earth would be after a 90 minute
orbit. The farther away from the equator you go, the smaller the
number, until you get to the Pole (best case) where it's 0, but that's
the worst case; average case would be half that, or 777 miles.

Perhaps 200 miles of cross range would be enough for an abort to
Alaska- but Reference Mission 3A and 3B required landing at VAFB, from
whence the Shuttle had come. That was because there simply wasn't
enough time to release a sat (or recover one) if you were going to
make a landing in Alaska.[1] And at VAFB's latitude, one needs about
1200 miles of cross range to account for the rotation of the earth and
have a bit of a safety factor. So that was a major design constraint
on the space shuttle.

Yeah but dodging multiple sats.,,, and I seriously doubt

Is not that hard.

For the infamous NORPAC '82 exercise, the USS Midway and USS
Enterprise operated for 4-5 days about 200 nm off Petropavlovsk,
launching alpha strikes each day (but on the reciprocal heading to the
Soviet naval base) without being detected by airplanes, sats, or subs
(as best we can tell by Soviet reaction). And that was against the
Soviet ship detection capabilities: they invested a heck of a lot more
in that than we did, because they were far more threatened by the USN
than we were by the fUSSR Navy. They had a great number of Bears,
launched quite a few satellites (both RADSATs and Ferrets), etc. So it
is surely not impossible.

Its
likely the task force would not be using the shipping lanes so they
would further stand out.

Why do you think that? If the enemy knows that avoiding shipping lanes
makes you stand out, why wouldn't they use shipping lanes? It's not
that hard to be on a shipping lane but not seen by any green ships if
you have a 10+ knot speed advantage over them and can run your civ nav
radars. Also, bad weather and night are quite handy for hiding in.

[1]: RM-3 was built around the concern that multiple orbits by the
big huge shuttle would make it easy for the Soviets to figure out the
exact orbit of the spy sat, so we wouldn't give them much time to get
their tracking perfect by simply doing it so quickly: one pass over
the USSR and back down. Now, by 1977 the USAF/NRO seems to have
decided that RM-3 wasn't important any more, and focused more on RM-4
(a bit more payload, but not the tight single orbit requirements)
after they thought more about how to use spy sats, but the shuttle
design was already finalized at that point. Faget's original design
track, which would have provided much less cross range (on the order
of a few hundred miles) had been binned, in favor of the big heavy
delta wings necessary to provide enough lift in the hypersonic region
of the flight to get 1500 miles of cross range that the military
demanded for RM-3.

Chris Manteuffel