A few years back I moved my home office/library into much more spacious accommodations in the finished basement of the house I owned at the time. During the course of the move I was able to reorganize my library and pull boxes of material out of storage that had not seen the light of day in years or sometimes even decades. These included what is now an entire bookcase full of old NASA publications, photographs, and reports, as well as clippings from newspapers and magazines going back over forty years when I was in elementary school.
Besides being astounded at the volume of material I managed to save when I was young (never mind having survived years of sometime less than ideal storage), I found much material I had forgotten I owned. Among my rediscovered finds was an article dated January 29, 1972, from a local newspaper I saved shortly after I turned ten years old. In some ways this particular article changed my life but it also reminded me of promises unfulfilled and opportunities lost.
A newspaper article from the author’s collection dated January 29, 1972 about the newly authorized Space Shuttle program.
The article was published about three weeks after President Nixon had announced his decision to proceed with the development of the Space Shuttle as America’s next major space initiative. The article described how the Space Shuttle, which was the size of a common DC-9 jetliner, would make access to space routine allowing non-astronauts like reporters, artists, and women to journey into space by the 1980s (you have to remember that this was 1972 and women in space was a novelty then). It would even be possible for tourists to travel into space. It was estimated that a 175-pound male, or a 135-pound female with 40 pounds of luggage, would be able to make a trip into space for only $17,500. Experts claimed that by the turn of the century that the cost could be slashed in half. In 35 or 40 years—that would have been 2007 or 2012—there could be a hotel in orbit around the Earth. The entire tourist package, including transportation by the Space Shuttle and a week-long stay in an orbiting hotel, could cost only $8,000 to $9,000 dollars. Assuming they were referring to 1972 dollars, that would be around $48,000 to $54,000 today.
This 1972 illustration shows the Space Shuttle mission profile for the option which used a pair of reusable solid rocket boosters. Click on image to enlarge. (NASA/MSFC)
The piece continued about how routine access to space would spark new human exploration of the Moon and beyond. Rocket expert Wernher von Braun, who led the effort to develop and build the Saturn Moon rocket, was even quoted as predicting that the first child would be born on the Moon before the year 2000. The article went on to describe in detail a flight on the Space Shuttle from preparations for liftoff to entering orbit to returning to Earth by landing on a conventional runway. The Space Shuttle would then be refurbished and ready to fly again in two weeks to start the process all over again.
This concept artwork from c1975 illustrates how the Space Shuttle can deliver payloads into low Earth orbit – the capability that inspired the author to design his own satellite. (NASA/JSC)
Even by the age of ten I knew I could never be an astronaut. I could not pass the requisite medical exam because of my color blindness. But I figured I had a shot at being a tourist. However, it was not the vision of being able to fly in space myself that fired my imagination at that time. It was the claim that the Space Shuttle could reduce the cost of sending a payload into orbit down to $100 per pound and eventually even less. I figured that I could use the Space Shuttle to orbit my own 100-pound satellite that could remain in orbit for years for $10,000 or less. This started me down the road of trying to design my own satellite and its mission: what instruments it might carry, what orbit it would have, how would it transmit its data, and how it could be maneuvered. These would turn out to be some of the key skills I ended up using in my career today.
Space Shuttle Atlantis is seen as it launches from pad 39A on Friday, July 8, 2011, for STS-135 – the final mission of the Space Shuttle program. (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
Well, as we all now know with the last mission of the Space Shuttle now several years behind us, few of the promises made about this innovative space plane at its inception or the benefits resulting from its introduction ever came to pass. While the headline prediction that women would be able to fly into space came true (as full-fledged astronauts, not paying tourists), it was more because of the evolution of our society’s view of women than due to the evolution of our technology. The Space Shuttle never was able to deliver on its $100-per-pound-to-orbit claim, and flying it was never “routine” enough to allow anyone other than intensively trained astronauts to fly. Far too many design compromises resulting from the lack of sufficient funds during development, coupled with wildly overoptimistic expectations, were ultimately to blame. While the Space Shuttle certainly was the most complex flying machine ever built, it was never more than an extraordinary experimental aircraft. In the end, the Space Shuttle should have been just the first step towards the ultimate goal of routine access to space and replaced after a decade or so of service with a less experimental and more robust craft. Instead, it seems to have turned into a dead-end program that has stranded us in low Earth orbit for a third of a century.
A view of the International Space Station in low Earth orbit as seen by the departing Space Shuttle Atlantis on July 19, 2011 as the STS-135 mission was wrapping up. (NASA/JSC)
As for myself, I never became a tourist in space, just like virtually everybody else of my generation. The Russians have sold seats on the Soyuz for a week-long stay on the International Space Station for tens of millions of dollars per passenger, which is a factor of 500 more than was promised when I was ten years old and well out of my price range. Of course there are private spacecraft in development that could send tourists into space for significantly less, but those will be just short suborbital flights for now and not week-long vacations in orbit, which now seem farther away than they did over four decades ago.
SPAS-II/IBSS shown shortly after it was released on May 1, 1991 from the Space Shuttle Discovery during the STS-39 mission. (NASA)
Of course I never got to use the Space Shuttle to launch my own satellite into orbit but I did play a minor, peripheral role with the payloads flown on a couple of Shuttle missions. Around 1986 I participated in some early design studies for the optics of NASA’s Broad Band X-Ray Telescope (BBXRT) that eventually flew as part of the Astro 1 mission on STS-35 in December 1990. And in 1993 I was a member of a team that analyzed data returned by the Infrared Background Signature Survey (IBSS) instrument on Shuttle Pallet Satellite II (SPAS II) deployed and later recovered during the STS-39 mission launched in April of 1991. In addition to those missions, I also got to participate in various capacities in a handful of other satellite projects over the past quarter century not connected to the Space Shuttle as well as use satellite remote sensing data to support yet other projects. Most recently, I have been working on the CyMISS (tropical Cyclone Measurements from the ISS) project where the crew of the International Space Station photographs powerful storms so that we can study them in 3D (see the CyMISS Page). So in the end, while the Space Shuttle never did deliver as advertised, it did indirectly get me to where I am now.
This mosaic shows Tropical Cyclone Gita as viewed from the ISS on February 13, 2018 in support of CyMISS. It was created by remapping the original 240 photographs taken by the crew of the ISS to approximate an overhead view before stitching them together and covers an area of 1,200 by 800 kilometers. Click on the image to view a high resolution version with a scale of 500 meters/pixel. (A.J.LePage/Visidyne/JSC-NASA)
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Related Reading
“When I Thought My Dad Was an Astronaut”, Drew Ex Machina, July 1, 2014 [Post]
“Plans for a Command Module of My Own”, Drew Ex Machina, May 31, 2014 [Post]
“Vintage Micro: The Amateur Space Telescope”, Drew Ex Machina, April 16, 2014 [Post]
I’m glad we’re finally turning a corner where we can acknowledge that the Space Shuttle is disappointing. The machine is beautiful, and the technology on board is still fascinating, and there was little spared effort in its design, but it turns out going into space strapped to the side of the rocket is a dead end. And that’s okay!
At the Shuttle’s retirement I saw a lot of articles ribbing the new capsule concepts as some kind of regretful regression to the designs of the ’50’s and ’60’s, which is a problem. Sexy or not, capsules work.
Ten year old kids can seriously think of the Moon and Mars again, not just LEO!
I’m right there with ya, brother.
My dad was an Apollo engineer and helped build Skylab as well. We lived in Cocoa beach, and we went out to the Bananna River to watch all the launches, though I was little enough that I only remember A-17. NASA laid everyone off after Skylab, and my dad was forced to start a new career from scratch at 42. When the shuttle launched for the first time, we were right back on the Bananna River in the same place. I was 13 or 14, I think.
The feeling was electric, after reading half a decade’s wild promises and hope, and to see it all come to nothing. I was walking across the USF campus in Tampa when the Challenger exploded. I was between classes, walking across the campus and watching when it did, you could easily see it from there even though we were 100 miles away, and, well, I was a wreck afterwards.
And in the 35 years since then, it’s like we’ve been in a holding patern. I’ve grown to hate the damn thing I had so many hopes for.
“The Space Shuttle never was able to deliver on its $100-per-pound-to-orbit claim, and flying it was never “routine” enough to allow anyone other than intensively trained astronauts to fly. ” And politicians.
Yup. Entirely true. The thing was a poorly-conceived inefficient murder-machine that cost 6x more per pound to LEO than the “Wasteful” Saturn V did
I also collected numerous space newspaper articles into scrapbooks and had a huge collection of NASA publications in my library as a teenager, but that all came to an end when I joined the US Air Force as a jet engine mechanic. I was forbidden to take AF jobs on launch vehicles due to poor eyesight. The aerospace industry took a dump after the first gulf war so I left it behind completely. Now I am retired and I cannot take advantage of the new jobs created by Musk and Bezos, so I just watch it all from the sidelines.