It was on Jan. 5, 1972, that Nixon brought the shuttle program into being with a presidential order. And this Friday, the 135th and last shuttle mission is scheduled to be launched, ending a program in which five ships carried 777 passengers into space, traveling a collective half a billion miles — or out past the orbit of Jupiter. These shuttles built the International Space Station, carried the Magellan, Ulysses and Galileo probes aloft and sent them on their ways to Venus, the sun and Jupiter respectively. They lofted the Hubble Space telescope too — easily the most productive scientific instrument ever built — and made occasional servicing runs to it, with astronauts conducting surgically precise repair work on the $1.5 billion instrument in the impossibly challenging environment of space.
But there’s the other side of the shuttle too. The $500 million price tag every time one took off, the months of maintenance and prep work needed between flights, the temperamental electronic and hydraulic systems that scrubbed launches time and time again, the thermal tiles the ships would shed like dry leaves. And, finally, there are the 14 astronauts who lost their lives when first Challenger and later Columbia soared aloft but never returned home.
A reusable, low-orbit space truck was hardly the initial direction NASA was planning to go in the triumphant afterglow of the Apollo program. It wasn’t even the initial direction the Nixon administration advocated. Not long after taking office, Nixon appointed a space task force to determine the future of cosmic exploration. The group came back with an ambitious long-term plan that included the establishment of a near-Earth space station, further explorations of the lunar surface and a manned landing on Mars by 1986.
But Nixon wanted none of it — nor of much of the remainder of the existing lunar program either, which was supposed to continue through Apollo 20 but was canceled before its final three missions could be flown. There has always been speculation in space circles that Nixon’s antipathy for the lunar program was based on the fact that it was an idea initiated by President John F. Kennedy — whom Nixon never quite quit resenting.
The more prosaic explanation for Nixon’s wariness was money.
A reusable orbital vehicle, Nixon promised in his 1972 statement, “will revolutionise transportation into near space, by routinising it. The vehicle will be recovered and used again and again — up to 100 times.”
So how’d all that work out? The answer to that question, which was impossible to know at the time, was probably already baked into the overall plan — and the recipe was never very good. The grand — and so far unattained — dream of all orbital engineers is to design a craft that can take off either from a rolling start like an airplane or an upright posture like a rocket, fly to orbit and come back down without shedding any hardware along the way.
What makes this so-called single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) concept so elusive is the stubborn, circular nature of the thrust and weight problem. Getting to orbit without shedding parts requires a very powerful engine and a lot of fuel. But a very powerful engine and a lot of fuel add extra weight that must be lifted — which requires an even more powerful engine and even more fuel and on and on.
The solution for the shuttle was to bolt the orange whale of the external tank onto the belly of the orbiter and tack two solid rockets onto the tank. That might have been the only way to get the 89-ton ship moving fast enough to achieve orbit, but it did present the inconvenient problem of positioning the crew directly next to three massive loads of compressed explosives instead of atop it as you would on a traditional rocket.
Then too there was the very idea of reusability. Nixon might have foreseen a spacecraft that could fly to space 100 times, but the most well-traveled of the five shuttles was Discovery, which made only 38 trips in 28 years. Challenger, the least flown, managed just 10 before its destruction in 1986. Now, with the space station built and the shuttles gone creaky, nothing will quite become the overall program like the ending of it.