The Space Shuttle Program arose from discussions about what should follow Project Apollo and the lunar explorations and landings. In the 1960s, NASA’s grand vision for the future advocated placing increasingly large outposts in earth orbit, lunar orbit, and even on the moon itself. With the development of the Saturn V, these ideas became possible, and earth orbit stations holding 12, 50, and even 100 people were expected. Mars would be explored by human crews. The need for crew changes and for supplies for the stations in low earth orbit is where the idea of the Space Shuttle first developed. The concept was to minimize costs by developing a reusable vehicle.
As is often the case, dreams of engineers and planners frequently do not match those of earth-bound politicians and their constituents. President Johnson’s Great Society programs, followed by the exigencies of the Vietnam War, took precedence. The Department of Defense had its own priorities for space assets in orbit. The Nixon White House rejected NASA’s grand plans; the Space Shuttle for low earth orbit became the only feasible alternative, which was a compromise for all interests. Planned commercial, scientific, and national security payloads visualized 50 STS missions every year.
As each interest’s needs were realized and as designs were fleshed out, the Shuttle took form. The 60-foot-long bay, payload weight requirements, delta wings to allow maneuvering, and the reusable thermal shield for reentry were developed to accommodate those interests. The Shuttle would be the first reusable spacecraft, the first to have wings, and the first to land on a runway. But budget constraints in 1971 doomed plans for a completely reusable vehicle. Modified designs were searched out. Nevertheless, NASA claimed in 1972 that for the $5.5 billion funded for the project, the Shuttle would meet all performance requirements, would perform 100 missions for each successive vehicle, and each mission would cost $7.7 million. The program was launched to great fanfare during the election year of 1972.
The promised delivery date of March 1978 came and went. So did the next one, 1979, when the program was fully reviewed by the Jimmy Carter White House. One of Carter’s priorities was the need for a space platform to verify compliance with the Salt II arms treaty by the Soviet Union, which, among other things, assured the continuation of the program of development to flight status. Problems with the Shuttle’s main engines and the reentry tile structure resulted in two more years of delay.
The first STS was named Columbia, completed after nine years of development. It was launched for its first test flight from Cape Canaveral on April 12, 1981 for a two-day orbit and returned for landing to Edwards Air Force Base. Four more test flights were made and, in 1982, the Shuttle was made fully operational “for economical and routine access to space for scientific exploration, commercial ventures, and for tasks related to the national security.”25
As finally configured, the Space Shuttle, mission-designated as STS with mission number, consisted of the Orbiter, which in common usage became the “Space Shuttle,” the Shuttle’s three main engines, the external tank, and the two solid rocket boosters. The Orbiter carried a maximum crew of seven, a payload of up to 56,300 pounds depending on the orbit, and an airlock for exiting either on the ground or in orbit. The main engines burned a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen at a rate of half a ton per second, each engine producing 375,000 pounds of thrust, four times that of the largest commercial jet; the large bell-shaped nozzles swivel for steering control during ascent. The bum rate of the main engines would empty a normal-sized swimming pool in twenty seconds. The external tank carried over 143,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and over
385,0 gallons of liquid hydrogen, stored at minus 297 degrees and 423 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively; the external tank was not reusable. The solid rocket boosters provided 85 percent, or six million pounds, of the necessary thrust for the STS. These motors burned for two minutes each, then separated and were pushed away from the array by small rocket motors; parachutes deployed from their nose cones returned them to earth 120 miles downrange in the Atlantic Ocean.
Declaring such first-generation technology operational after only five test flights was considered risky and unusual by many informed observers. That decision has been laid over to
NASA’s desire to secure Presidential approval of its next manned program, the Space Station, which would necessarily depend on a credible Shuttle, and to the appearance of the European Space Agency’s “Ariane” expendable launch vehicle. Ariane was already competing for commercial launch contracts as early as 1982. The appearance of Ariane greatly conflicted NASA’s expectation of off-setting the Shuttle’s operating costs with commercial contracts. As a result, even though launch costs were running at the time over $120 million dollars each, NASA offered commercial launches for just $42 million.
The Shuttle Story was not all negative. Between 1982 and 1986 it retrieved two communications satellites, repaired another in orbit, and launched 24 more. It visited the European-built Spacelab, carried citizens of Germany, Mexico, Canada, Saudi Arabia, France, and the Netherlands into space, as well as two members of Congress. By 1985, four Orbiters were in operation. Yet, that year the Space Shuttle flew just nine missions.
The goal was no longer 50 flights each year as originally predicted; the goal in 1985 was 24 flights, but even that was unattainable. The cost of each mission was over $140 million, seven times greater (adjusted for inflation) than that projected the previous decade. The interim preparation period for each mission had grown from a projected 10 days to an average of 67 days. Worse, pressure on maintaining the flight schedule caused NASA to begin to accept less than specification performance of shuttle components.
The 25th mission of the Shuttle, flown by Challenger on January 28, 1986, abruptly terminated 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven crew members on board. No Shuttle was launched thereafter for 32 months. The Department of Defense decided to launch all future military payloads on expendable rockets (excepting a few in progress). President Reagan announced the termination of all commercial launches via the Shuttle. The abandonment of the proposed
Shuttle launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base was announced. This event, and these decisions, greatly reduced the effectiveness and glamour of the Shuttle and increased its net costs, and there was yet to be further tragedy.
The next mission was not launched until September 29, 1988, and the Shuttle was no longer described as “operational.” It was, in fact, thereafter treated like an R&D test program, according to NASA Associate Administrator Richard Truly.26 Yet, the Shuttle accomplished many objectives before the loss of Columbia in 2003. During that 15-year period, the Shuttle flew 87 missions, compared with 24 before the Challenger accident. It launched the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, its repair in 1993, and its servicing in 1999 and 2002. It returned America’s first orbiting astronaut, John Glenn, to orbit again in 1998, and it delivered America’s contributions to the International Space Station. It launched several planetary probes and participated in a number of Shuttle-Spacelab missions devoted to scientific research. It conducted nine missions to rendezvous with the Russian space station Mir. For a time, the Shuttle was the only vehicle that could launch the ready-built constituents needed to complete European and Japanese contributions to the ISS and to supply access to and from the ISS for scientific experiments. It was this ISS-Shuttle symbiosis, in fact, that justified the Shuttle’s existence.
The White House made a change in 1992 in NASA leadership with the appointment of Daniel
S. Goldin as Administrator. Goldin brought Russia into partnership in the International Space Station, and the ISS became his (and NASA’s) main program with the Shuttle playing a subordinate role. He transferred engineering talent and workforce from the Shuttle to the ISS and to his pet project, the exploration of Mars. This also transferred the emphasis of the NASA mission from the Shuttle to its original mission of exploration.
During the middle of the 1990s, the emphasis centered on ways to make public-sector programs more efficient and less costly. Transferring government operations to the private sector (privatization) was a preferred way of doing this. At the time, NASA was managing 86 separate contracts with 56 different firms in order to keep the Shuttle going. In 1995, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Rockwell won the Space Flight Operations Contract and formed a new corporation known as United Space Alliance to run the Shuttle program, with NASA oversight. Boeing soon replaced Rockwell.
Although by some estimates this development saved NASA some $1 billion over six years, the split of authority between NASA and United Space Alliance was not optimal. Plans for complete privatization were discussed along with a replacement for the Shuttle, which was recognized as approaching obsolescence. The X-33 program with Lockheed Martin and the X-34 program with Orbital Sciences were floated with the hope that the next generation of human space flight could be privately funded with little government spending.
These programs did not mature, despite significant spending to find a Shuttle replacement between 1986 and 2002. In the meantime, the Shuttle ground infrastructure was deteriorating dangerously and the Shuttle itself required costly safety upgrades. When the Bush Administration took over in 2001, the International Space Station was $4 billion over budget. Discussions about what to do about the situation continued without result into 2003. The workforce was depicted as “The Few, the Tired,” also an apt description of the entire Shuttle Program when the Columbia reentry accident occurred in 2003, according to the Accident Board investigating that tragedy.
In its final report in August 2003, the Board stated what it called “an inescapable conclusion: Because of the risks inherent in the original design of the Space Shuttle, because that design was based in many aspects on now-obsolete technologies, and because the Shuttle is now an aging system but still developmental in character, it is in the nation’s interest to replace the Shuttle as soon as possible as the primary means for transporting humans to and from Earth orbit.”21
In January 2004, President George W. Bush announced the mandatory retirement of the Space Shuttle, to take place in 2010. The Shuttle next flew after the Columbia accident some two and a half years later, when Discovery was launched on July 26, 2005. Congressional funding for the Shuttle allowed flights into 2011, with the final launch occurring on July 26, 2011, of the STS Atlantis.
Although in 2004 President Bush had announced a subsequent space program known as “Constellation” in his Vision for Space Exploration, which would have sent astronauts first to the ISS, then to the Moon, and then to Mars, in
2010 the Obama Administration canceled the program.
In all, there were five Shuttles: Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavor. Two of these were destroyed during Shuttle missions, a 40 percent vehicle failure rate, with the loss of 14 lives onboard. Compared with other space programs, this loss rate was extraordinary. The Mercury and Gemini Programs had no fatalities. Apollo had three fatalities, which occurred in the capsule during a test while on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. While there is no verifiable data, the Russian space program admits one cosmonaut death during reentry (Soyuz 1) and three cosmonaut deaths during Soyuz 2 when they were exposed to space vacuum. There are unverified reports of other casualties during the early days of that space program. To date, there have been no reported Chinese space program fatalities.
NASA says that it cost $450 million to launch one STS mission. There were 135 missions in total. It was independently reported in
2011 that NASA spent more than $192 billion on the Shuttle Program from 1971 to 2010 (in 2010 dollars), and that during the period 1982 to 2010, the average cost per launch was about $1.2 billion.28 The Russian Space Agency does not advertise its launch costs, but it is reliably rumored to be around $45 million per launch. They started out selling tickets to the public for orbital flights at $20 million a seat. The price lately has risen to $63 million.
The legacy of the Space Shuttle will be a subject of discussion for years to come.