The Space Shuttle and the Space Station

From 1970 on, one of the performance requirements driving space shuttle design was NASA’s intent at some future point to use the shuttle to launch elements of a space station. This was recognized by the OMB staff, who observed in 1971 that “in a sense, a commitment to a shuttle is an implicit commitment to a subsequent space station program.” There is no evidence that this shuttle-station link was considered by the president and his senior advisers as the final shuttle decision was made, but the choice of the NASA shuttle design carried with it the virtual certainty that a future president would be asked to approve a shuttle-launched station.

That is precisely what happened. The shuttle’s first flight was in April 1981; soon after that flight, President Ronald Reagan’s nominees for NASA administrator and deputy administrator, James Beggs and Hans Mark, agreed that they “would try to persuade the new administration to adopt the construction of a permanently manned space station as the next major goal in space.” The two announced their intent at their Congressional confirma­tion hearing in June 1981, in essence repeating Tom Paine’s 1969 argument that the space station was “the next major evolutionary step in man’s experi­mentation, conquest, and use of space.” Beggs and Mark characterized the station as “the next logical step.” It took almost three years for NASA to gain presidential approval; during his State of the Union address on January 25, 1984, Ronald Reagan announced that “I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade.”27

Discussing the long and troubled history of the space station project is beyond the scope of this study; the point here is that from its 1968 origin as the logistics vehicle for a Saturn V-launched space station, through the 1970 decision to switch to a shuttle-launched station and then to defer sta­tion development until the shuttle was flying, to the final July 2011 outfit­ting mission to what had become the International Space Station, there was an unbreakable link between the shuttle and the station. That bond meant that, unless the station program was terminated early, NASA had to keep the shuttle in service until station assembly and outfitting were completed. The high costs of the shuttle and station programs thus dominated the NASA human space flight budget for almost 40 years.