Re:Cargo Capacity (Score 2)

STS has a payload bay length of about 60 feet; enough for your average bus. Oddly enough, the Soyuz capsule itself fits neatly in the shuttle bay, but that goes along with the launcher at Vandenburg AFB and the military space stories of the 1980s. Soyuz and the space shuttle simply cannot be compared, as it does a great injustice to them to do so. Soyuz was originally designed off of the L-1 Zond module, and essentially made for translunar flight. In fact, there are accusations of the Soyuz actually being a copy of GM's design for Apollo, and judging from the precedents the Soviets had set, there is every reason to believe this. To the Russian's credit, however, they have been able to adapt the Soyuz to meet their needs over the past 35 years, and today's Soyuz module quite more refined than its pioneer counterparts. STS, on the other hand, was designed from the start to military specifications (even so much so that in missions STS-1 through STS-4 the crew sat in ejection seats modified from the SR-71), hence the massive cargo bay and launcher at "Slick Six" (Vandenberg AFB). Until STS-51L, the shuttle was the sole method for the Air Force to deploy satellites; in this respect STS was a huge failure. The Air Force expected STS to be ready by 1979 and flying closer to 20 missions a year, however, the funding was cut (mostly early on by the Nixon Administration) and STS lost its turbofans, liquid fuel boosters and reusable fuel tank. Funding was not even provided for the idea of boosting the expendable drop tank, an Air Force idea, into orbit, where they could be easily used for space station components. However, STS did get NASA an excuse to launch seven Astronauts and experiments into orbit while launching satellites. If the soviet N-1 superboosters had actually worked, instead of totally destroying their launch complexes, perhaps the US would have stuck with the heavy lift rockets, such as the Saturn V and Nova, but as it was, the budgets were cut, and the rest is history....