Has the space shuttle program been a success?

Thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography I was privileged to photograph at the Kennedy Space Center. I was there for a week and pretty much given the run of the place. This was in 1981 when the era of Space Shuttle era was on the threshold of inception – the Columbia was being readied for flight and all of the myriad and massive installations and equipment were brand spanking new.

The air of the place was aflame with awe and excitement, promise and potential. I too was drawn into the heat of the moment. As a child of the 50s with a built-in lust for ‘Outer Space’, my fires really needed no further fanning – I’d been a junior scientist, and now I got to play where the big kids did.

These space-based passions have never abated. And, now at the close of the Shuttle’s era, I stand in, something like I feel must be, reverence.

So, as I see it from this very personal point of view, I’d say the program has been a definive success.

Depends on what you call a success.

The shuttle program had LARGER goals, only CONGRESS never understood it or why it was important. The Shuttle Fleet was to be larger, only Congress never funded it.

But other then making space station and launching satilites few in the public understood what the mission was.

And it was handy capped by budget cuts everywhere…. And it originally was to not be limited to low earth orbit, but those budget cuts forced it to use weaker booster rockets. The ones from Utah, the ones with the O-rings, the ones that caused the fatal ‘explosion’….

It got the Hubble telescope up, it make the international space station, and it got the GPS satellites up. It conducted many needed experiments, including some dealing with alternative energy, biochemistry, and improved our understanding of long term life in space. (And once the CONCERVATIVE party ruin the earth, this will be important to know, only very few will have this as option…)

Some of the other plans such as orbital Solar Arrays sending power to earth never got done. The construction of a interstellar shipyard never was realized. And really the limitation that Congress put on it with their limited imagination forced NASA to ONLY dream what COULD have been. And could have been easily.

Every dollar spent on NASA has turned around and advanced our society and turned a profit from the research they do for many companies.

Be it contact lens, microcomputers/laptop technology, the microprocessors, and it goes on.

And in reality the entire budget of NASA is often smaller then the entire ups and downs of entire department budgets in our government. One years increase for military spending (Pre Iraq/afghanistan) was greater then the entire NASA budget…..

And honestly all those griping about starving children in a random country…. Sorry, but NASA has done more to help feed them then any other department in the government. (Hurricane warnings, climate monitoring, and pretty much all the information we have on how to get food to where it needs to be safely.)

So has the Shuttle program succeeded?

* What it wanted to do? No, congress never gave it a chance.

* Did it help and in that manner add to our success as a whole? Heck YEAH!

* Did it end too early? Yeah, at least have the replacement in play before its replaced….

(Again I blame cut happy congress with not intelligence to have a vision of a better future…)

“Joe Sixpack,” your comment is based on revisionist history. You obviously aren’t old enough to have watched Neil Armstrong’s small-step/giant-leap live on TV. Otherwise you’d remember that it was liberals who scuttled further Apollo missions after #17, complaining that the money would be better spent on programs to help the poor and disadvantaged among us. The sound bite in those days was, “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we ______ (fill in the blank)?” Nixon, Reagan and both Bushes (those don’t-tax-but-spend-anyway Republicans) wanted more spending for NASA than the liberals would support. Support for NASA has always been propelled by an appeal to national pride and patriotism, which is much more effective among conservatives than liberals.

The question I ask is, “did the space shuttle fail us or did we fail it?”

I beg to think the latter.

In the 1960’s the American public was proud of NASA and our space program. Boys aspired to become astronauts, the media actually heralded missions to outer space and the politicians were united in the effort.

That is until July 20th 1969. I could almost hear Nixon tell Armstrong in the longest distance telephone call in history, “by the way Neil, I just cancelled the last three missions to the moon”. (The remaining hardware was used for SkyLab and the Apollo/Soyuz missions). And so from that point being the apex of NASA greatness, we are now about to witness it’s decline reach the bottom. For once I agree with Steve the Cynic believe it or not.

The shuttle transport system, (STS), itself is not the cause for its demise. It is incredibly complex, costly and yes, dangerous. Who ever said flying into space was safe? Rather we the public and more so, the media, never gave it a chance to be come what it was originally intended to be. Unlike Apollo where no expense was spared, STS was the victim of budget cuts, compromises and constant ridicule by the shameless media. Like Apollo, STS technology had to be invented on-the-fly. So the only reason it failed to even hope of living up to its expectations was we as a nation were not willing to invest in the effort for ultimate success what ever the cost.

When Atlantis comes home for the last time it will become a museum piece. And along with it, so will America as a space faring nation.

“For once I agree with Steve the Cynic believe it or not.”

I’m curious what exactly you agree with. That there are some human endeavors worth doing that require having the government organize collective effort to achieve them? That the Apollo program was one such thing? That human exploration farther into space is another? Then how do you feel about government funding for the arts? How about basic scientific research? Environmental protection? Universal coverage for medical care? Do you think Congress was right to cancel the Superconducting Supercolider in 1993? On what basis would you argue for one of these things but not another?

Success will be measured in the future. Currently, Jim Rock from the University of St. Thomas, has a science experiment traveling on board this last shuttle. It involves growing the 3 Sister crops in space. The project is dedicated to his father and to a very close 2nd father, Ed Dyke, a World War II war veteran who recently passed away. The projects conducted on these shuttles affect parts of our lives that we may never fully realize.

Steve T.C.,

Your point is sound, but I question your conclusion on space travel as being “inherently expensive” and “dangerous”. Yes, today it is, but in the future it may not be.

To compare, the development of airplane technology was an expensive and often disastrous endeavor. Only over time and multiple competing designs did we arrive at the modern era of routine, safe, and relatively cheap air travel. For space travel we are entering an era where multiple nations and private enterprises may provide that necessary competition. This may be the way to making space travel as commonplace as air travel.

The shuttle missions constituted only one program. We didn’t have the luxury of multiple designs competing with each other to see which worked best. We committed to the design, and then just dealt with the inherent limitations as they became apparent.

In other words, I don’t think the shuttle can be used to say definitively that space travel can’t be cheap or safe. Yes, the shuttle was conceived just for these purposes. But because it didn’t quite live up to those expectations it does not mean that some other program couldn’t succeed.