Book on the Space Shuttle program

by philg

“Mission to Nowhere: The fantasy of a low-cost reusable shuttle set us on the path to today’s aimless space program.” is a WSJ review of a book on NASA’s Space Shuttle program. Here are some excerpts from the review:

The shuttle project began in early 1972. Initially Richard Nixon resisted sinking big money into a NASA venture because credit for space boldness had already been won by his bitter opponent John Kennedy, while two of NASA’s three major installations were in Alabama and Texas, which did not vote for Nixon in 1968. “Into the Black” reports that Nixon became sold on the shuttle idea when, in late 1971, he flew to a summit meeting aboard a Boeing 707; the president of France arrived in a supersonic Concorde. That, Mr. White says, made Nixon want some airborne high tech that no one else possessed.

Mr. White notes that the Soviet Union built a space shuttle, launched it once and then canceled the project, “which they could neither afford nor divine any practical purpose for.” But he avoids the cost and practicality questions regarding the U.S. version. NASA originally justified the shuttle fleet by saying it would make 400 flights at a price of about $110 million per launch, in 2016 dollars. In 1979 Science, the technical journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, predicted that the promised performance was all but physically impossible. The journal was shown to be right: The actual result was 135 flights at nearly $1 billion per launch.

The International Space Station was conceptualized to give the shuttle something to do; then the shuttle mission was repurposed to serve the needs of the space station. Today the ISS is the most costly object in human history, with a price tag well north of $100 billion: Its research contributions are negligible, and it has no practical value.

NASA is so fouled up that it has turned to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk for the new ideas that the agency now seems incapable of discovering for itself. Last week, a Musk rocket lofted cargo to the space station; then the first stage returned for an upright landing. This represents a fundamental innovation in launch hardware. Mr. Musk’s engineers are on track to fly a new heavy rocket long before NASA can fly the Space Launch System and to do so at a fraction of the cost.

Note that my first job was at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center writing software to store and analyze data streamed back from the Pioneer Venus orbiter.

More: Read Into the Black (which the WSJ says is deficient when it comes to describing the high costs and failures of the Shuttle program)

6 thoughts on “Book on the Space Shuttle program”

  1. The yarn I’ve heard is the original shuttle was a lot smaller and might not have been a complete boondoggle.

    DoD: It has to be big enough to deliver and service the spy satellites, which are huge.

    NASA: That totally breaks the economics. This thing only works when pretty small.

    Congress: Make it big.

    NASA: OK. Here you go.

    DoD: Never-mind. It’s going to be too much of a pain from a security perspective and a political slapfight over budgeting to have you people mucking with our satellites.

  2. Opinions definitely vary. By 1972 standards, the shuttle was not overly ambitious or expensive compared to what was being done at the time. By today’s standards, it is because it’s a space program rather than an entitlement program. It needed a lot more money to actually work. It still remains to be seen if redirecting the shuttle money to commercial cargo & crew is going to dramatically reduce the cost. They’re moving a small pittance of cargo to the ISS, compared to the amount the shuttle could move, so of course the ISS isn’t doing anything useful.

  5. Historically, NASA’s priority was always to develop a “space plane”, and this nearly caused the failure of the Apollo program.

Comments are closed.