Why the Space Shuttle was the wrong craft at the wrong time

But soon this “space race” was no longer simply about beating the Russians to the moon and furthering mankind’s understanding of space, as it had been under President John F. Kennedy.

Now the focus was on other, less glamorous applications like geopolitical reconnaissance and defense-sector employment as space travel became embedded within larger national political principles. There was money to be made from the space program — just not necessarily in space.  

“This was a space enterprise of profit, power, and politics, not idealism,” writes Hersch. “Clad in a kind of muscular nationalism, the space policy of the so-called New Right sought taxpayer funds to pay private companies to develop expensive new space weapons in the hope that these subsidies would be recouped through commercial spaceflight activities using the same technologies.”

In January 1972, President Nixon directed NASA to start development on a new reusable Space Transportation System (STS), or what came to be known as the “Space Shuttle.”

But his rationale for green-lighting the project had little to do with the democratization of space as he had suggested. “The shuttle ultimately won Nixon’s support for the most mundane and self-serving of reasons: he saw personal political benefits in its construction,” writes Hersch.

Not only was the shuttle viewed as a way to assuage anxious voters worried that America was losing its prestige amid the ongoing debacle in Vietnam, but it would also be a major benefit to aerospace employment in California, Nixon’s home swing state that was critical to his reelection.

Designed during the Cold War — and inspired by Nazi rocket planes like the Silbervogel and the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet —  the shuttle was also seen as the ideal vehicle to spy on Russia. Indeed, the US Air Force insisted initial designs were reconfigured so that the cargo capacity was large enough to hold a telescopic camera the size and shape of a school bus.

The initial design received some tinkering, so much so that “the shuttle underwent physical transformations between 1969 and 1972 that muddled its design, until reusability and even basic safety were fatally compromised,” adds Hersch. 

A decade on, when the shuttle took its maiden flight in April 1981, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were already poor and rapidly deteriorating. To that end, the role of the space shuttle remained key in national security. Along with conventional astronomy experiments, classified missions were used to launch surveillance and communication satellites for agencies such as the US National Reconnaissance Office and the Central Intelligence Agency.

But while the initial success of the shuttle might have showcased America’s ability to outmaneuver the Soviets in the space race, the vast majority of its missions were carried out long after the Cold War ended and were spent engaged in scientific research, not peering furtively behind the Iron Curtain.

Still, argues Hersch, in many ways the shuttle was the wrong craft at the wrong time. “The shuttle was a knowingly flawed solution to a problem, later billed as a success, but no amount of post-construction remediation could fix its flaws,” he writes.

Those defects, created by a combination of institutional pressure, political interference and poor risk management, made the two space shuttle disasters – Challenger, which exploded just 73 seconds after launch in January 1986, and Columbia, which disintegrated re-entering the earth’s atmosphere in February 2003 — not entirely surprising.

Both events resulted in the death of all seven astronauts on board but neither led to the immediate cancellation of the shuttle program. “Instead, the lost astronauts of Challenger and Columbia became martyrs to American technological greatness, with the nation honoring their loss without calling into question the necessity of their deaths,” writes Hersch. 

Columbia was a case in point.

When it was struck by debris on launch in 2003, it was suggested that the astronauts could carry out a spacewalk to repair the damage to its crucial insulation while in orbit before its return. 

Still, “bean counters” at NASA denied the request, citing “calculations indicating high risk and low probability of success,” writes Hersch. It was, he adds, “decision-making by statistics.” Sadly, the statistics were ultimately not in Columbia’s favor.

Despite the tragedies, the shuttle continued to fly for another seven years after the Columbia disaster, existing as what Hersch calls “a working monument to bad design” that operated “under the growing weight of its own history”. 

It launched and repaired satellites, conducted scientific research and continued its key role in helping to build the International Space Station.

The final shuttle mission, carried out by Atlantis, touched down on July 21, 2011, bringing the curtain down on the program’s 30-year service.

But, as Hersch argues, the writing was always on the wall. 

“Throughout the shuttle’s last two decades, a legacy of fear hovered over it,” he writes.

“After January 1986, the shuttle’s balky fragility and propensity for problems became its enduring identity; flying the craft during the 1990s and 2000s often meant merely keeping it flight-worthy, a task shared by thousands of workers and contractors at NASA, but for which astronauts bore the greatest risks.”

The problem was that the space shuttle was simply too expensive to be jettisoned immediately. 

In other words, it was a classic example of sunk-cost fallacy.

“As America’s only human spacecraft, the shuttle became among the first of a series of institutions ‘too big to fail’,” writes Hersch. “So long as NASA flew the shuttle, less money would be available to fund alternatives, but lacking any alternatives, the shuttle still needed to fly.”

Certainly, the costs of the space shuttle program continued to spiral and by the end of its 135-flight life, almost $200 billion (in 2010 terms) had been spent.

“As a human spacecraft, as a partially reusable experimental vehicle, and as a heavy-lift launcher, the shuttle was a palpable (if pricey) success,” writes Hersch. 

But “as a transformative vehicle to change the paradigm of space exploration, though, it was a stunning disappointment.”