I have decided today that the United States should proceed at once with the development of an entirely new type of space transportation system designed to help transform the space frontier of the 1970’s into familiar territory, easily accessible for human endeavor in the 1980’s and ’90’s.
This system will center on a space vehicle that can shuttle repeatedly from Earth to orbit and back. It will revolutionize transportation into near space, by routinizing it. It will take the astronomical costs out of astronautics. In short, it will go a long way toward delivering the rich benefits of practical space utilization and the valuable spinoffs from space efforts into the daily lives of Americans and all people.
The new year 1972 is a year of conclusion for America’s current series of manned flights to the Moon. Much is expected from the two remaining Apollo missions—in fact, their scientific results should exceed the return from all the earlier flights together. Thus they will place a fitting capstone on this vastly successful undertaking. But they also bring us to an important decision point—a point of assessing what our space horizons are as Apollo ends, and of determining where we go from here.
My love for the fatally flawed vehicle is well-documented, but consider:
[T]he shuttle ultimately won Nixon’s support in 1972 for the most mundane and self-serving of reasons: he saw personal political benefits in its construction. The space shuttle provided what the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) deputy director Caspar Weinberger regarded as a technological talisman to assuage skittish voters fearful of America’s decline, while other influential voices claimed that it would enrich a major Nixon campaign donor and sustain aerospace employment in California, a swing state critical to his reelection campaign.
Addled by reelection woes, Nixon assented verbally to NASA’s plan, not quite certain of what he had agreed to and unconvinced that the plan would produce an economical space vehicle. But, enthusiastic about the toy model of the shuttle that NASA lent him for the press conference announcing it, Nixon stole it. [Ed note: LOfuckingL]
The space shuttle was daring; it was messianic; and it failed. The system of Earth-orbiting and interplanetary spaceships favored by radicals and intended to provide a destination for shuttle missions proved more expensive than Nixon would support, leaving NASA to develop a space shuttle with nowhere to go. And the vehicle that NASA’s contractors ultimately produced, while meeting Nixon’s budgetary constraints, was fiendishly complex and steeped in design compromises and lost opportunities.
NASA’s promise that the military services and intelligence community could borrow the craft to launch and recover spy satellites ensured its approval but dictated its size and shape. Initial plans to make both the booster and the orbiter fully reusable proved too difficult and expensive; the half-price shuttle, eventually built for $6 billion, was a collection of reusable, semireusable, and disposable parts. The thermal protection system (TPS) for the orbiters—thousands of ceramic tiles intended to absorb frictional heating when the orbiters slammed into the atmosphere at the conclusion of their mission—proved finicky and delicate.
On the shuttle orbiter Columbia’s first flight in 1981, nine years after its approval, troubling problems arose that proved fatal on later missions, and the shuttle’s crew members eventually found that flying the vehicles required equal or greater acceptance of risk compared to what previous spacecraft had demanded. Shorn of many of its features, yet still hideously expensive to build and operate, the vehicle was eventually constructed enjoyed the unqualified support of no major constituency.
By the time the shuttle fleet finished its thirty-year flying career in 2011 with 135 missions, the program had flown (and killed) more people than any spacecraft before or since. Despite two accidents resulting in the loss of fourteen crew members and two shuttle orbiters in 1986 and 2003, the STS continued to fly, orbiting satellites and the Spacelab and SPACEHAB flying laboratories and helping to assemble the International Space Station (ISS).
By the end of its operational lifetime, the shuttle fleet had even become the indispensable American technical infrastructure that its advocates had wanted: the only American vehicle left that could send humans into space and bring them back. These benefits, though, were accidental rather than intended: by every measure, the shuttle had fallen far short of even the modest hopes that had surrounded it. And the shuttle remained flying only because every effort to replace it with a better-winged, reusable craft also failed.
After reading Dark Star and more recently, John Young's memoir, I am amazed the shuttle didn't kill more people (or get put out to pasture much earlier). The number of missions that came literally inches1 from complete destruction - saved by sheer luck - is terrifying. So many of the suboptimal compromises in development and operation boiled down to money, of course.
In conclusion: we Americans excel at squandering opportunities and making piss poor decisions.
1 - Just two egregious examples, sparing you the full litany: STS-26, Discovery's post-Challenger "Return to Flight" mission (wing surface roughness likely made all the difference between this one and Columbia's ultimate demise), and the following flight of Atlantis.
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