Was the Space Shuttle a "Policy Failure"?

In an article published soon after the 1986 Challenger accident, I suggested that “the space shuttle program must be assessed as a policy failure, at least in terms of meeting the objectives [lower cost and routine operation] that have been its articulated rationale since 1972.” In deciding to approve the NASA shuttle, “too much attention was paid to the short term, while longer range considerations were inadequately considered. . . The shuttle decision stands as a powerful example of how not to make a national commitment to an undertaking on which many other significant projects depend.”28 Do these judgments still stand up, almost three decades later? Was the shuttle program itself a failure? Or was it the Nixon administration decision to approve the NASA full capability space shuttle that was the policy failure? I was not very clear in what I wrote in 1986, but it was my judgment then, and now, that the latter alternative is the case. As the preceding paragraphs have suggested, the record of the space shuttle program is a mixture of success and failure. But there were in 1971 better alternatives to approving development of the NASA full capability shuttle, and thus that approval is better described as a policy mistake, rather than a policy failure.