For most Americans who, like me, believe human spaceflight is vital to our future, the shuttle remains a flying contradiction. On the one hand, it is an elegant and ambitious feat of engineering, able to carry large crews and big cargos, launch and retrieve satellites, and then land on a runway when it returns to Earth. Yet the shuttle is also an ungainly and impossibly delicate piece of hardware. (One launch was delayed because of damage from woodpeckers.) Conceived as a practical, affordable workhorse, it turned out to be unreliable and, with total costs of well over $1 billion per launch, wickedly expensive. And, of course, dangerous, with an overall failure rate of one per 67 missions.
As NASA prepares for the shuttle's expected final mission, to launch this month, we need to ask: Can we do better next time? The fact that NASA is ending the shuttle program before fully developing the next generation of space vehicle represents an egregious failure in planning. But it also presents an opportunity. What can we learn from the shuttle that will help the United States develop more agile and affordable space transportation?
The shuttle began as a daring and innovative concept. Although the Air Force had experimented with planes that could exit and re-enter the atmosphere, NASA, like the Soviet space agency, focused on rockets. Astronauts sat in capsules high atop multistage launch vehicles (like "Spam in a can," as Chuck Yeager and other aviators of the time sneered). All components except the capsules were expendable, that is, destroyed during flight. And the capsules' re-entry was ballisticthey fell, rather than flew, back to Earth. By the 1970s, when the shuttle was being built, expendable rockets routinely launched satellites and had carried men to the moon. Still, NASA hoped a reusable spacecraft could lower costs dramatically, making space travel almost routine. The agency envisioned launches occurring roughly once a week.
But alarms were raised early on. Space policy writer Gregg Easterbrook labeled the shuttle a "death trap" in 1981, before it ever flew, and argued that the program should be shut down. Then the 1986 explosion of the Challenger put the program into permanent go-slow status. By the early 1990s, it was clear that the shuttle would never become the practical workhorse of NASA's dreams.
So why didn't they just retire it? Perversely, the high cost of the program was one key to its long survival. Some 15,000 contractual employees and 2000 civil servants were needed to keep the shuttle running. Many of those contractors and workers were strategically distributed across a belt of politically potent states from Florida to California. And those states' congressional leaderssuch as Texas senator Kay Bailey Hutchisonwere dependable defenders of the shuttle. Ironically, a leaner, more affordable space vehicle probably would have garnered less support in Congress.
In the end, the shuttle's legacy encompasses both the best and the worst of NASA. The agency was courageous to launch the project. But later, NASA's inability to admit the shuttle's failures revealed a worrisome tendency toward bureaucratic inertia. If the United States is to be a space-faring nation, our space agency needs to be far more nimble.
On the route to innovation, entrepreneurs know that even good ideas usually have to be tweaked, modified and sometimes abandoned. "When something is attempted for the first time, there will be failures," shuttle commander Col. Eileen Collins recently told PM. "That is part of the flight test process." The program had many successeslarge crews executed complex missions, including facilitating the building of the International Space Station and keeping the Hubble telescope in service. And even the shuttle's failures delivered valuable lessons, from the damage debris could cause to heat shields to the need for an effective escape system. Collins, who flew four missions (including the first after the loss of Columbia), says, "We learned so much about what to design in or out next time."
Right now, NASA seems to be pursuing a smart strategy: turning partly to private industry to build and launch new generations of spacecraft. In the early days of airmail, the U.S. Post Office flew using its own planes and pilots. But a 1925 law mandated that the Post Office simply set a rate it would pay private companies to carry the mail. Aviators like Charles Lindbergh and entrepreneurs like William Boeing seized the challenge, launching an era of aviation breakthroughs.
Instead of specifying particular spacecraft designs, NASA needs to define its missions, then take bids from private contractors that can innovate quicklyand retire unsuccessful experiments just as fast. Today, private companies routinely launch satellites at competitive prices, while innovative outfits such as XCOR Aerospace, SpaceX, Orbital Sciences and Armadillo Aerospace are building new launch vehicles. And businesses are already competing to carry paying passengers into space. In the future, NASA may be just one client among many hiring their services.
As the shuttle prepares for its final flight, let's remember to salute the innovation of its design and the dedication of the astronauts who flew it. The shuttle was a bold experiment. But it kept flying far too long. We can do better next time.
Additional reporting by Alyson Sheppard.