Combining a cargo and crew vehicle was the key mistake. It was one of the reasons apollo was so expensive and why tried to separate the two functions in Cx. Going cheap by combining the two functions is a mistake that keeps being repeated. There is no cheap.

I do not think that would have stopped the military from doing it; it would have been a top secret operation. I am not sure what you mean by "live" plutonium. It was hot and that is about all there is to say about it.

" reasons why NASA can manage a better HLV? "

Because even the Falcon 9 "heavy" is not heavy. Heavy Lift is generally considered 100 tons (not metric). The Shuttle Derived Sidemount cargo vehicle is the best last hope of human spaceflight. We can stop human flights for several years- as we have done before- but letting our Heavy lift Infrastructure go extinct is forever. The shuttle hardware, minus the orbiter which was always the big problem, is the most powerful and evolved heavy lift we will see for a very very long time. We cannot let this unique asset disappear.

There is no substitute for a heavy lift vehicle with hydrogen upper stages.

Oops, deleted it by accident. Now Byeman can accuse me of nefarious revisiing.
Let me post it again:

This is the problem with forums, you post the truth and someone follows it with lies. And then you have to go back and refute- and over and over again.

1. The need to transport the SRB segments by rail restricted their size and power- the reason the shuttle could not launch into polar orbits is they could not get the first stage to make enough power. They tried to remedy this by developing expendable fibreglass SRB's but ran out of money.

2. The SRB's sustain damage during water entry because they are a segmented design, monolithic designs made using submarine hull technology like the AJ-260 are much stronger and would not have failed like the segmented design did on Challenger.

3. The most powerful rocket ever tested was the Aerojet AJ-260, and it beat out all the competing models from thiokol- they blew up during hydrostatic testing. Aerojet lost out because the DOD did not want to have to barge them in one piece to the west coast launch site.

4. The DOD specified a cross range glide capability so the orbiter could land back after one orbit for classified missions. This demanded alot of weight added to the wings and a higher performing heat shield and a far more complicated flight control system. It was for the spyplane mission that the DOD specified the large cargo bay that was never used completely.

5. It was always designed to deliver satellites.

Whatever you say.

OK Fred, I guess that is fair. I cannot argue with your post.

Well, unfortunately there is the agent provacateur scenario; a nation or organization wanting to start a war but not taking the blame. Give the country they wreck with their EMP bomb evidence that a certain country did it and cover their own tracks to protect themselves.

The article was not written very clearly- the plastic does not protect- it mitigates. There is less secondary spray than from aluminum and the secondary is of smaller particles. Layers of plastic with water as shielding mean the heavy nuclei and secondaries are "soaked up" and thus several thousand tons of plastic and water will (I am guessing) provide a sea level radiation environment. I doubt anyone has done any serious research on this because several thousand tons of shielding seems impossible for a spacecraft. But using a "wet workshop", by using this plastic as an upper stage, and getting the water off world, and by using nuclear propulsion, it is not impossible. So the sad truth may not be so sad. I am very curious how much of this shielding would be required but I have not found anything yet.

I am not talking about "reasonable amounts" of shielding. This is the problem, because of the difficulties of lifting material out of earths gravity well and the inadequacy of chemical propulsion, "reasonable amounts" of shielding are of course going to be inadequate.

But reasonable does not make the problem go away and nuclear propulsion and getting water for shielding off world redefine "reasonable."

But the point was Joe, an anonymous attack would not allow us that option, unless we just decide to destroy every country on earth- which the boomer fleet could probably do.