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Grumman 619 Shuttle: The Killer Looking Concept That Nearly Became the Space Shuttle

Grumman Aerospace managed to crank out some pretty fantastic airplanes out of its Bethpage, New York production facilities before their merger with Northrop in 1994. Controversies about contaminating the local groundwater with manufacturing waste aside, the company was a point of pride for the folks of Long Island.
Grumman 619 6 photos
Photo: Northrop-Grumman
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Everything from the Zero decimating F6F Hellcat, the MiG-23 obliterating F-14 Tomcat jet, and the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) all rolled off Grumman facilities between 1929 and 1994. But what if we told you Grumman almost had the green light to design what you or I would identify as the Space Shuttle? It almost rewrote the course of space-faring history and Grumman itself to boot.

To give you an idea of how exciting it was to work for Grumman in the late 60s and early 70s, their LEM successfully transported humans to the surface of the moon and was a fittingly durable life vessel during the Apollo 13 crisis.

Failure is not an option was not just a throwaway line made by Apollo mission control director Gene Kranz during the perilous mission. It was a motto the men and women of Grumman lived by. A Grumman spacecraft was going to take Americans to the moon, and if that failed, it was going to help get them safely back to Earth.

NASA, as well as the U.S. Navy, were riding high on Grumman during this time period. Serving the role of ambassador of American aviation innovations in the Naval sector in the same manner that companies like Lockheed or North American Aviation did for the U.S. Air Force.

Grumman Shuttle
Photo: Northrop-Grumman
Grumman seemed poised to chalk up another W in their book with the announcement by the Nixon administration that manned space missions should focus on more affordable, semi-reusable design languages.

Several different aerospace companies competed for the contract to build the Space Shuttles. Hilariously, one design even proposed converting the skeleton of a Douglas DC-3 into a re-useable spacecraft carried to orbit by a liquid-fueled booster rocket with its own pair of wings.

That design never made it out of the drawing phase, but we recently went in-depth on that project. Check it out if you want to learn more. The design Grumman came up with for this concept was dubbed Project 619, or the 619 Shuttle. Compared to the design by North American-Rockwell that ultimately served as the Space Shuttle, there are more than a few similarities between the two designs.

Some key differences include aerodynamic winglets on the main fuel tank. The tank used on the real shuttle lacked this feature, appearing like a large orange cigar (or a white cigar, in the case of STS-1). Furthermore, a prominent hump-back is noticeable, running along the spine of the Grumman 619. Four turbojet engines can be seen in the rear of the cargo bay in some paintings of the design.

Grumman Shuttle
Photo: Northrop-Grumman
Implying that the finished product would have powered go-around capability in case anything with a landing went wrong, instead of going splat into the ground if the same were to happen in real life. Thankfully, that event never happened in our timeline.

Overall, it appeared like Grumman had a supremely excellent design on their hands. Unfortunately, the renamed Rockwell International group convinced the Nixon appointed accountants in high offices in NASA during the 70s that their design was cheaper in the long run.

With dollar signs seemingly shining like neon lights inside their heads, NASA awarded Rockwell International the contract for the Shuttle Project. Grumman, on the other hand, would go on to manufacture key components of the shuttle, like parts of the wings and the control surface there-in. Fifty years later, two destroyed Shuttles and 14 dead astronauts later, one can only wonder if NASA regretted not using Grumman's design. Or even the DC-3, for that matter.
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