Mueller Tries to Go His Own Way

In his new instructions to NASA’s Phase A study contractors on May 5, George Mueller had changed his original guidance to include the capabil­ity to launch 50,000 pounds rather than 25,000 pounds to the space sta­tion orbit and to provide 10,000 rather than 3,000 cubic feet of volume in the shuttle payload bay. But he did not direct the contractors to focus their study effort on vehicles capable of providing the cross-range desired by the national security community. Mueller was very aware that NASA’s “chief designer,” Maxime (Max) Faget, director of engineering and development at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston, preferred a shuttle concept with straight wings and limited cross-range. Faget had designed the Mercury spacecraft and helped design the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft, and was a powerful force within NASA’s engineering community. As the DOD/NASA report was being approved for submission to the Space Task Group, Mueller insisted that the preface to the report include the following statement: “If it is later determined that a specific performance characteristic imposes severe penalties on technical risk, cost or schedule, the necessity for fully achieving that characteristic will be assessed.” It is likely that the cross­range requirement was in Mueller’s mind as he inserted this reservation into the report.22

Mueller on August 6 mandated that the “space shuttle will be developed utilizing fully reusable systems only.” This directive came as NASA was pushing Mueller’s integrated plan, with its emphasis on low cost based on reusability, as the basis for the recommendations in the STG report. This was an influential order. NASA and industry studies for the following two years focused only a two-stage shuttle with a fully reusable “booster” stage lifting a fully reusable spacecraft, designated an “orbiter,” off the launch pad and accelerating it to a high velocity; then the orbiter’s engines would fire to accelerate it the rest of the way into orbit. Mueller’s ambitious objective of full reusability ruled out of the Phase A studies several promising concepts that were not fully reusable; those concepts reemerged only after NASA abandoned its hope for a fully reusable shuttle in mid-1971, discovering that it was both too expensive to develop within projected budgets and likely too technically risky.23