Five decades of experience

The retirement of the Shuttle in 2011 left something of a void. While any operational experience can be learned from, Shuttle operations will have little application directly to the proposed vehicles that will follow. The Shuttle system and hardware were unique and the new designs have more in common with the Apollo Command and Service Module than Shuttle orbiters. However, many of the lessons learned from the Shuttle-Міг program did have direct application to ISS operations.

For those vehicles which will eventually follow the Shuttle, a whole new learning curve might need to be scaled. By the time the new vehicles fly, those who were around for most of the Shuttle program will probably have retired, losing core experience that, like the Apollo era, will be hard to replace. There is, however, one significant difference between the transition from the Apollo era to the Shuttle era and the one from the Shuttle era to whatever replaces it.

In the 1970s, relatively few former astronauts moved to managerial roles in the space agency or the industry. Most of the engineers and managers who were at NASA during Apollo moved on to work on the Shuttle program, at least in its early years, bringing with them valued experience. A generation later, things were much different. The industry was much larger, most of the original employees at NASA had retired, and there were far more opportunities for former astronauts to move across to managerial roles, both inside and outside the agency, within the broader space program.

At the end of the Apollo era, many of the veteran astronauts, managers, and engineers decided to leave the program. In contrast, many of those who flew or managed the Shuttle are now in key positions within the space industry, working on a variety of new programs or projects including those contractors developing the Shuttle replacement. With the end of the Shuttle and some years before its replacement arrives, it is likely that more former Shuttle astronauts will retire. It will be interesting to monitor the career path of the ex-Shuttle pilots and mission specialists who climb the corporate ladder or advance in the administration of NASA and leading contractors in the coming decades. In Europe, former ESA astronauts are also beginning to move to higher administrative roles. In contrast, trying to track the progress of cosmonauts after they stop flying was always (and continues to be) difficult. Most of the military cosmonauts retire on a pension,

while the civilian engineers resume work at Energiya until they retire. A few, Uke Alexei Leonov and Vladimir Titov, secured positions in leading Russian corporate businesses.

Former NASA astronauts, including Bob Crippen, Frank Culbertson, Bill Lenoir, Brian O’Connor, Loren Shriver, Dick Truly, and more recently Charles Bolden, Mike Coat, and others have made the transition from the astronaut office to the management side of the agency and then stepped across into industry. Their personal experiences from flying in space have been applied back into the program, but at a much higher level. It will be interesting to monitor whether such moves have a lasting legacy for the future space program.