The Space Shuttle: Goodbye To A Slacker Space Program

Characterization of the NASA’s Space Transportation System, what we commonly call the Space Shuttle program, as nothing but a glorified Greyhound — even better yet, “space carpooling” — is common. Even today, as the shuttle program wraps up for good, it’s hard to escape a certain feeling of underwhelmed-ness, especially if you try to review all of the accomplishments of the program. (Give it a try.) What did the Space Shuttle do besides carry things back and forth? Well, obviously carrying things back and forth has its importance, but considering that our space program has long been a point of pride, what are the high points to which we can point proudly?

The final launch that will happen today (barring delays for weather or other exigencies), is an event made almost entirely of Lasts. The last training simulation. The last pre-mission quarantine of the crew. The last traffic jam on Route 1 heading for Cape Canaveral. The last countdown, and then a quick series of lasts as the last space shuttle makes the last mission: two hundred miles of vertical ascent covered in less time than it takes to eat a grouper sandwich, a streak of smoke heading eastward (using the rotation of the planet for added thrust) visible for miles.

After that, there are no more. The existing shuttles will be carted off to their various resting places, where they will be viewable as artifacts. NASA will stay in the business of tossing cargo into orbit with its various rockets, but if it’s a person that you need in near space, you’ll have to hire a Soyuz from Russia, or wait for the futurist/entrepreneurs like Richard Branson catch up. But for the shuttle program, it’s last last call.

It’s an instinctive opportunity for nostalgia. The Space Transportation System was planned for ten years, and has been operational for thirty. A wide swath of the population has grown up knowing nothing but the space shuttle, as far as space programs go. But it is hard to look at this as a triumphal moment, and not just because endings are messy.

From the earliest days, the shuttle program seemed to underperform, and expectations were low before the first launch. Representative of the leeriness is Gregg Easterbrook’s
detailed feature for Washington Monthly from 1980 that reads today as ominously prescient. In 1980 the initial launch was still a year away, and the program had been plagued with cost overruns and delays, all lovingly catalogued by Easterbrook. He also tells of how the mission of the shuttle program was purposely modest, to create a vehicle with no higher purpose than to carry things and people back and forth:

“First you have to get the horse,” said Dr. Jerry Gray, former NASA scientist and now public policy director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, “then you decide where to ride him.”

To call the space shuttle a high-tech eighteen-wheeler is not slander; it was the point all along. It’s a space shuttle, not a space limousine. After the moon had been attained, there was a scarcity of inspirational goals, and NASA, funds being squeezed by an administration with no ownership of the accomplishments that just happened, settled on plans for a (comparatively) low-cost, reusable launch vehicle that would ferry astronauts back and forth into low earth orbit. And that’s what the shuttle program did, eventually, less cheaply, less reliably and less safely than intended. Over 130 missions is nothing to sneeze at, but aside from carrying passengers to the International Space Station and repairing the Hubble Space Telescope, there’s not a whole lot of (nor has there been since the moonshot) need to put humans up there. The space shuttles can carry satellites into orbit, but the really good ones, the geosynchronous ones that are in an orbit that keeps them over one fixed point on the globe at all times, are placed 22,000 miles above the planet. The space shuttles could only go about 600 miles up, and NASA single-use launch vehicles (rockets, we call them) are just a cheaper way of doing it.

The space shuttle mission goals were predicated on the assumption, the belief, that there would be a need to transport men and women up and down the gravity well. And now, 40 years later, that need is primarily to man/unman the ISS, a project scheduled for decommissioning (de-orbiting, more like) in less than ten years. The reason that NASA decided not to replace the shuttle program with a NASA-run manned launch vehicle is that NASA forgot to create the necessity for one. (To be fair, a “Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle” was recently announced, scheduled to be mission-ready by the 2020s, if it survives the budgetary reluctance of the House Appropriations Committee.)

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The blind spot in the mission of the shuttle program was not unknown to NASA. In 1990, they released a Report of the Advisory Committee on the Future of the U.S. Space Program, which was not just a look forward, but also a review of the program’s first nine years. The chief concern of the report is a “lack of a national consensus as to what should be the goals of the civil space program and how they should in fact be accomplished,” a concern that was no doubt as true at the conception of the shuttle program as it is now. Should the space program be a delivery service for private satellites, or leading the charge into space-based manufacturing? Should manned vehicles be used at all, considering that technology had gotten to the point where automation could be more effective in extreme environments? The report naturally had its suggestions, all with acronyms, seemingly constructed to cover all the bases and satisfy all stripes of critics, which suggestions do not resemble 2011 at all.

The report also isolates perhaps the deepest flaw of the shuttle program, or at least the most important lacking ingredient:

Yet perhaps the most important space benefit of all is intangible — the uplifting of spirits and human pride in response to truly great accomplishments — whether they be the sight of a single human orbiting freely around the Earth at 18,000 miles per hour, or a picture of Uranus’ moon Miranda transmitted 1.7 billion miles through space, and taking some 2–1/2 hours merely to arrive at our listening stations even when traveling literally at the speed of light. Such accomplishments have served to unite our nation, hold our attention, and inspire us all, particularly our youth, as few other events have done in the history of our nation or even the world.

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I was born not three months after Neil Armstrong decamped from Apollo 13 11, dropping a [sic] on live television. When I was a little kid, astronauts garnered a big bite of the imagination bandwidth. We little kids played with astronaut toys and dressed up like astronauts when we went door-to-door on Halloween. We wanted to be astronauts when we grew up. The moon landing informed us that we had something to look up to and aspire to be — not just an explorer, and not a cosmonaut, that little linguistic sleight-of-hand connoting the competition of nations, no. We wanted to be an astronaut, with a fishbowl on our heads and an Old Glory patch on our uniforms.

The United States climbed space exploration and planted a flag in it like it was a mountain. In fact one of our noted alternative historians, Sarah Palin, claims that it was the space race in the ’60s that toppled all the Soviet Socialist Republics. Our post-Sputnik dominance of space was an unmistakable emblem of the preeminence of the United States, of the exceptionalism that is now ingrained, of Americanism. There are guns and there is butter, but who else could devote a tenth of their GDP to accomplish something unimaginable and mythic? Who else put boots on the ground on something that was literally not of this Earth? That was us.

And then came the shuttle program. Ambitions whittled down, and then perpetually over-budget, it limped into the ’80s. In the 30 years since, it has provided a fraction of the missions that were originally intended. And sadly, it also provided a generational moment as vivid as the moonshot, and then another one, mysteriously less vivid, less than ten years later.

Boomers got Apollo 11, the Xers got Challenger disintegrating live on televisions dragged in front of elementary school students to see the first teacher in space, and then the Millennials got the awkward apathy following the break-up of Columbia on re-entry in 2003. And whatever we will call the generation that are kids now, they will get silence.

Which silence starts today, assuming the Atlantis mission goes off as planned. Coverage will not be as hundred-year-flood as the most recent royal wedding. There will be coverage, and there will be odes spoken and songs sung, delivered by many people with expensive haircuts/teeth on television newscasts. Many will be watching the live NASA feed. It will be a passing curiosity. Saturday will be a slow news day in summer, as they can be. Maybe a baseball story will come out, or maybe something political. Maybe another trial in Florida. We seem to love those.

But we will watch, those of us old enough to care, if only for the awe-inspiring visuals, and the bittersweetness.

Brent Cox is a writer living in — you guessed it — Brooklyn. He is a proud contributor to the Awl. He will be appearing at the Cornelia Street Café in late July. He tumbls. That’s not a word.

1988 photo of Atlantis by NASA,, via Wikimedia Commons.