The Space Shuttle Was A Colossal Failure

Good riddance.

The shuttle was billed as a reusable craft that could frequently, safely, and cheaply bring people and payloads to low Earth orbit. NASA originally said the shuttles could handle 65 launches per year; the most launches it actually did in a year was nine; over the life of the program, it averaged five per year. NASA predicted each shuttle launch would cost $50 million; they actually averaged $450 million. NASA administrators said the risk of catastrophic failure was around one in 100,000; NASA engineers put the number closer to one in a hundred; a more recent report from NASA said the risk on early flights was one in nine. The failure rate was two out of 135 in the tests that matter most...


...[T]he shuttle not only failed its own mission but prevented NASA from doing much else. The shuttle was a flying money pit that prevented us from launching vastly more efficient programs, like the Mars rovers, and even other attempts at manned flight. The current boom in private spacecraft designs (for example) shows the kind of inventiveness and flexibility that NASA could have practiced or at least funded for the past few decades if not for the shuttle...


...The responsibility for instantiating this national fantasy fell squarely upon NASA. And when it became clear to realistic observers that the shuttle was a failure, NASA hid from that reality, as Soviet scientists did under Lysenko’s political pressure. The agency couldn’t face up to telling the nation that the embodiment of our shared dream was screwed up, and we had to start over. But NASA wasn’t playing the denial game alone: it was enabled by a country full of people who accepted the fantasy that the shuttle was a great national success.

So as we prepare to mothball the shuttles and send them off to their dotage at various museums, don’t be sad about the end of the program; instead think of where could have been now if we’d cancelled the thing 25 years ago. And make sure our future spaceships are based in and judged from this spot called reality.