Politics of Failure

The development of the Space Transportation System

By Chris Manteuffel

Professor Houston Wood

Near Earth Space Exploration

In 1965, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was starting to look for something to do after its enormous Apollo moon-landing program concluded successfully. It dreamed along the lines of the classic 1950's Collier's magazine series of articles written by Wernher von Braun, famed space pioneer - space stations and trips to Mars. Part of that dream involved a reusable shuttle that could, in the words of one dreamer, deliver fresh eggs to the occupants of the space station.[1] 26 years later, the Space Shuttle launched for the first time. It was no longer part of an integrated national space system, but instead was the system. In practice, the Shuttle would turn out to be far more expensive than dreamed of back in the early 1950's, and would go much longer between flights. This was because of a conflux of factors. The shuttle program was started by dreamers who planned trips to Mars and wanted the shuttle as part of a balanced program that was even larger than Apollo. This group sold the shuttle as a sure fire winner, capable of lowering the cost to put payload into space to $100 per pound, and five orbiters flying a total of 50 times a year. Those who felt it was too far reaching, and that it should be cancelled as wasteful critiqued the shuttle. Though they failed to cancel the shuttle program, they did manage to kill all the rest of the integrated program and capped the amount of money that could be spent on the development of the program. This prevented the program from carrying through on its promises. In order for the shuttle to survive against these cost cutters, NASA needed to bring the United States Air Force (USAF) on board. The USAF asked for more technical capabilities than the original dreamers had asked for. So NASA, because of these three factors, was trying to do more with less than they originally planned. The result is the Shuttle program, as we know it today, which has yet to complete its 100^thsuccessful flight.

Section One: Sweet Dreams Are Made of These

The first ideas of manned reusable space flight came from the famed Collier Series. Wernher von Braun wanted a fleet of 7,000-ton reusable cargo shuttles to provide the logistical support for his immense space stations. Then, with a base in the space station trips to the moon and eventually Mars would occur.[2] Von Braun's neat, orderly plans were thrown into confusion by Kennedy's demand for the US to go to the moon and return by 1970. Von Braun's plan put men on the moon in the late 1970’s, far too late. Once Kennedy committed, the only option that would put us on the moon within his time frame would be a straight shot, without the station. With no station, there was no need for a shuttle to provide its logistics.

In 1965, before Apollo had its first flight, NASA started to look at what it would do after the Apollo program ended. The first attempt at such a program was called the Apollo Applications Program (AAP); it was to use improved and expanded Apollo hardware. It called for six space stations, on orbit assembly, trips to asteroids, and enclosed rovers allowing astronauts to stay on the moon as long as 30 days and cover 400 km.[3] This program was nicknamed "Tomorrowland" by some astronauts[4] because of its futuristic qualities. 1965, the year the AAP was started, was the high point of NASA's budget (in constant dollars). Starting with the next year, NASA's budget was cut. Realizing that without a moon landing there could be no AAP operations, money was taken from the AAP budget and given to the moon landing portion of Apollo. With this, AAP disintegrated. Over 40 launches and six space stations had been planned for, just in the space station side, the moon exploration side had planned for numerous other launches of uprated Saturn V's. After all the cutting was done, AAP got a couple of Apollo moon program left-overs, one Saturn V and three Saturn IB's, which were used for Skylab. Apollo Applications was not going to be a successor to Apollo.

The early impetus for space stations came because the technology did not exist to take pictures quickly and return them to earth quickly. The Air Force and CIA had discovered this with the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Their Corona spy satellites on orbit had to drop their film capsules down to earth before they could be developed and examined. The USAF had two capsules on orbit during the Czechoslovakia crisis, the first one to de-orbit showed no Soviet military preparations, the second one to de-orbit showed lots of military preparations, but de-orbited after the Soviets had invaded.[5] The Air Force planned to counter this problem with the Manned Orbiting Laboratory. Launched off the same Titan booster that carried Gemini's to space, the MOL would take two astronauts from a Gemini capsule launched separately. The military men on the Gemini would circle the earth from polar orbit, and the astronauts would observe the earth with binoculars (Gordon Cooper claimed to have been able to see houses from orbit with his naked eyes, so with binoculars and the excellent vision of the pilots they would be able to see very well[6]) and could also take pictures and develop them and interpret them, all in space.[7] Logistics would be provided by a simple and cheap expedient of taking old NASA Gemini capsules, and reusing them. All manned capsules NASA sent into Earth orbit or beyond used an ablative heat shield, which burned away from the craft in the atmosphere. The Air Force would reuse these capsules by attaching a new heat shield in place of the used one. They tested this cheap reusability technique with an already flown unmanned dummy, and the capsule worked just fine[8] (It should be noted that the USAF’s demonstration of a reusable Gemini shows that a reusable spacecraft need not have wings or wheels- a traditional Gemini capsule was reusable, if a bit awkward). However, the cost doubled from $1.5 billion to $3 billion, as it often does with spaceflight, and Congress eventually cancelled it, because by then the KH-11 was in the near future. The KH-11 spy satellite could transmit its pictures in near real time; though it didn't have the image quality of the KH-8's then in orbit, it could send the pictures immediately back to the ground. The only monument to the MOL project was its launch pad, Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6) at Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB), where the cancellation penalties had been larger than the cost of completing it once the program was cancelled. However, as soon as the complex was built it was mothballed.[9]

After the failure of the AAP program, NASA started to look for a new worthy successor to Apollo. It needed something grandiose. George Mueller, head of the manned space flight office and a force behind the AAP, had a new grand vision. This one was an integrated Space Transportation System (STS), which consisted of several components. The largest would be space stations. He dreamed of two, one in polar orbit for observing the earth and one in a 29-degree orbit (due east from Cape Canaveral). Saturn V’s or their successors in the heavy lift arena would put those stations on orbit. To provide logistical support for those stations, there would be a fleet of shuttles. A group of space tugs, craft that couldn't re-enter the atmosphere on their own but could be serviced at the space stations, would allow the deployment and retrieval of satellites into orbits as high as geosynchronous or lunar orbit, depending on the stage of the plan. There would also be man-tended satellites, like the present Hubble Space Telescope, that would be serviced by the space tugs. The final component would be nuclear powered tugs, which could carry large loads around. A Mars mission could be made out of evolved versions of the space station as the habitation center and the nuclear tug for propulsion and power.[10] This was a comprehensive program, large, with a targeted final goal, though the goal wasn't announced with the same style that Kennedy had sent NASA to the moon with. The goal of Mars was left vague and ill defined, on purpose. Jack Webb, director of NASA, had been asked to pin down objectives for NASA after the moon landing. He didn't, for three reasons. Committing would give critics a target, they could argue that it was too expensive or impractical, or they could argue that Apollo was only an interim goal, and cut it instead of the future goal of going to Mars, and it would divert the "energies of top NASA leadership and key scientists and engineers, diverting them from concentrating on making Apollo a success."[11]

Before NASA got to the moon, director Jack Webb, a consummate politician who had 20 years of political experience, retired. Thomas Paine, who had been an executive at General Electric, replaced him. Paine did not have experience at politics, but he was a dreamer. He was taken by Mueller's dream and started to press for it. However, shortly after he took office, during a routine test Apollo One caught fire and three astronauts died. Once more realizing that there would be no follow-on's to Apollo without a successful landing on the moon, the studies for Mueller's dream were deeply cut. Congress also cut an unmanned program that would have sent rovers to Mars, because they viewed it as the first step in a trip to Mars that they did not want to pay for.[12] This was a shot across the bows of NASA, a warning that Congress was not in the mood for grandiose visions and grandiose expenses.

When Paine took his budget requests for the Fiscal Year 1970 (FY1970) to the White House, much had changed since the last time NASA had gone through a budget process. Paine was a liberal Democrat who had been appointed by Lyndon Johnson. When all of Nixon's other possibilities refused the post of Director of NASA, Paine was kept in the post. However, he was marginalized, a member of the other party. Nixon did not want to associate himself too closely with the space program, because another failure might happen, and he didn't want to be blamed. He was willing to accept the glory of the first moon landing, but he didn't want a failure blamed on him.[13] As well, NASA could no longer spend money like water. Nixon had campaigned on a fiscally conservative platform, and he was trying to save money. The new director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) (halfway through the shuttle procurement battle, Nixon reorganized his budget process, renaming the Bureau of the Budget the Office of Management and Budget. To avoid confusion, the organization will be referred to as the OMB throughout), Robert Mayo, asked all government agencies to examine their budget requests and locate possible cuts. Paine instead argued for a budget increase.[14] NASA eventually lost 45 million dollars in the budget. It "represented no more than NASA's fair share" but it still was discouraging.[15]

Vice President Spiro Agnew, when looking over his responsibilities, noted that one of the Vice-Presidents tasks was to chair the little known National Aeronautics and Space Council, which was supposed to be the space policymaking body, but had never done anything important. Agnew, looking, like all Vice-Presidents, for something to do, tried to turn that body into an important organ. He convened the Space Task Group (STG), which consisted of three men and their staff, along with Agnew. One of the men was A. Lee DuBridge, the President's Science advisor, another was Paine, and the third was Air Force Secretary Robert Seamans, who had until shortly before Webb's retirement been the number two man at NASA. NASA's section of the panel was enthusiastic about space exploration, and ended up endorsing Mueller's dream. There was talk of million pound space station's, nuclear reactors to power stations and rockets, and bases on the Moon.[16] It was very much the result of the dreamers of NASA, the hard core true believers in the glory of the space program. Seamans, representing the Air Force, and DuBridge, representing the scientists, wanted less emphasis on manned spaceflight and desired a more balanced spaceflight program, with more emphasis on unmanned research flights. Both men supported space shuttles as a way to make space access cheap, but did not support the stations or the rest of Mueller's dream.[17] Mayo, head of the OMB, sat in on the discussion as an observer, but was not a member.[18] And so Seamans and DuBridge would have controlled the panel except for Spiro Agnew. NASA had made a serious attempt at influencing him, giving him tours led by astronaut’s and trips to launches. Their attempts to sway the other members of the STG by similar means had not worked, but they had Agnew firmly in their pocket.[19] With the panel split 2-2 the observer, Mayo, offered a standard government approach, to make no decision and let the people above them make the choice. They offered three proposals, funding for NASA at 4 billion dollars a year, with no commitment to Mars, funding at $5-6 billion a year, and a commitment to Mars with no fixed date, and $7-10 billion a year, aiming for Mars by 1981. The normal course for such a decision, when given three choices, was to choose the middle one, and Paine and Agnew felt victorious that the middle program included a commitment to Mars. It also committed the nation to Mueller's dream with its space stations and tugs.[20] Paine, in charge of fleshing out the various plans, set them up so that all three options would end up with men on Mars, one in 1981, one in 1983, with the lowest funding totals allowing NASA to reach Mars in 1986. With respect to the STG "the members with the most experience-Seamans and DuBridge-favored the most modest initiatives. Paine, the man for Mars, had held his posts within NASA for barely a year and a half. Agnew, most enthusiastic of all, had never dealt with space at any serious level".[21] The final reports of the STG were similar to the previous work of Mueller, the AAP, in that both were ‘Tommorrowlands’ which were destined never to become ‘Todaylands.’

This became clear during the battle for the FY1971 NASA budget. In FY1970, NASA had been given 3.7 billion dollars. The original OMB proposal for FY1971 gave NASA 3.5 billion dollars. This level was below the lowest target level proposed by the Space Task Group in their original report.[22] Nixon had decided that he couldn't afford a trip to Mars, and told Agnew to move the trip to Mars from the "recommended" list to a new category, "technically feasible".[23] Another option was added to the STG report, for a lower budget that stayed in Earth orbit.

Paine then began to look at his actual budget. His various departments requested a total of 5.4 billion dollars. He trimmed that down to 4.2 billion dollars. The OMB at the same time tentatively was giving NASA $3.5 billion. That would mean no commitment to either the station or the shuttle. Paine filed an appeal, which went to Nixon. Nixon was willing to give them $3.7 billion, but no more. Paine still felt that this was too low, he wanted more than that. Instead, he was told that he would be given $3.6 billion dollars. Then it was discovered that government revenue would not be as high as expected, so an across the board 2.5% budget cut was implemented. Nixon's final budget sent to Congress had $3.4 billion for NASA.[24] It was down almost a billion dollars from what Paine had wanted. When it went to Congress, there was 110 million dollars earmarked for shuttle and station planning and studies. Congressmen didn't like that, fearing that it was the first step in a commitment to Mars that would cost billions and billions. The money survived in the House 53-53 (under house rules amendments need to have a majority to be attached) and the Senate 28-32.[25] That was for a measly 110 million dollars with no commitment to build. If NASA was going to get its spacecraft, which would take billions of dollars, it would need to retool the program and get more political support.

Section Two: Off we go, into the wild blue yonder, Climbing high, into the Sun

The Space Station had always been the cornerstone of space development up to now. In 1969 5.8 million dollars had been spent on Station studies, while only $1.2 million had been spent on plans for the shuttle.[26] However, in looking at the plans, NASA realized that the station needed the shuttle, but the shuttle could stand alone on its own. The shuttle could deliver other payloads into space, and even serve as a sort of poor-man's station, staying on orbit up to 30 days. NASA could deliver its payloads into space on the shuttle, but there was another key player who had a lot of payloads going into space: the USAF. The Air Force had several unmanned boosters for putting their payloads in space, among them Titan and Atlas, which NASA had borrowed to send astronauts into space. The Air Force was willing to go along with NASA and drop its Expendable Launch Vehicles (ELV), to provide the Shuttle political support, but in exchange it expected the Shuttle to have its requirements in mind. Whenever the USAF and NASA went head-to-head over a requirement, the military always won, because it did not need NASA, but NASA needed its political support to let the Shuttle program survive.

There were numerous differences between the two organizations over what the shuttle should do. Maxime Faget (pronounced FA-JAY), an aerodynamics expert who had led the design of the Mercury capsule and had played large roles in the design of NASA's other capsules, lead the NASA internal design team. Faget's initial design (MSC-001) was simple and cheap. It matched Faget's conservative engineering principles. However, it did not meet a couple of very important USAF requirements. The USAF's then current intelligence satellites weighed in at nearly 30,000 lbs., and if they were to have a margin for growth that would need to be at 40,000 lbs. There was more than that, however. Intelligence satellites from the US are sent into polar orbits. This is because at the proper angle they are exactly sun synchronous- it's the same time everywhere they look down at, so it will never be dark when they want to look at something. The Soviets never used polar orbits, and the Americans didn't for their short-lived Corona satellites, because the sun doesn't change quickly (only about a degree per day), as long as the satellite isn't going to be up for more than a month or so, polar orbits do not matter[27]. Once the USAF committed to the KH-11, with its ability to stay in orbit for years at a time, they needed to be in polar orbit. Polar orbits take more energy than launching due east, because in a due east launch, the earth spinning under the shuttle adds extra velocity. In order to get 40,000 lbs. to a polar orbit, like the Air Force wanted, the orbiter would have to be able to get 65,000 lbs. to an orbit due east from Cape Canaveral.[28] Faget's MSC-001 had a payload capacity of just 15,000 lbs. to the "reference orbit" of due east from the Cape[29].

Another major source of contention that the Air Force added was over aerodynamic cross range. Once the orbiter entered the atmosphere, how far would it be able to move side to side? Faget wanted a cross range of 200 miles or so.[30] His design for the craft had simple straight wings like a 1940's era plane. It would re-enter like a Mercury capsule (which Faget had also designed), base first, generating very little lift, turning the kinetic energy of the craft into a shock-wave in the atmosphere[31]. However, the USAF wanted to launch into polar orbits, which changed things greatly. After a 1960's incident where a failed rocket killed a cow in Cuba, generating a wave of Castro-led protests against the US, the State Department banned polar launches over landmasses. This left the one site in the continental US where polar launches could work as Vandenberg Air Force Base[32]. The Air Force would reactivate the MOL launch pad of SLC-6 and launch shuttles from it. However, the Air Force wanted extra capability. It wanted to be able to launch, release a satellite, and land in just a single orbit. As well, certain types of abort situations call for Abort Once Around (AOA)- going into an orbit not high enough to stay, but just high enough to once around the planet. Now, while the shuttle is orbiting around the planet, (about 90 minutes), the Earth is moving beneath the planet. In order for the shuttle to return to where it started, it had to be able to move over a thousand miles in the atmosphere. Faget's design was fine for a due east launch from the Cape, as there were plenty of landing sites in the continental US that it could choose from on an AOA but in a Polar launch from VAFB, it would have nothing but water beneath it.[33]

This cross range requirement meant severe weight penalties all over the system. First off, almost all of the cross range was achieved in the hypersonic part of the landing path. The small, light, straight wings of MSC-001 were optimized for subsonic travel, indeed, Faget's landing profile called for them and the entire orbiter to be in a stall position until after the orbiter was out of the hypersonic envelope, where the orbiter's nose would swing down and the wings would provide lift. However, if more lift was needed, as it would be to achieve that much more crossrange, the wings would have to optimized for hypersonic and subsonic travel. That meant bigger, heavier delta wings, which would provide lift from the moment the atmosphere became dense enough to allow it. Those wings would need much more thermal protection, because they were vastly larger. However, staying in the hypersonic region for a longer period of time (as they would generating lift while flying in it), causes far more heating on the orbiter.[34] The total heat load was about 5-7 times more for the high cross range than the low cross range, and take be about 150% more Thermal Protection System (TPS) mass.[35] This TPS would in turn require heavier supports than the smaller amounts of TPS used to protect a low cross range orbiter. The Air Force was demanding severe changes to the plans of the dreamers. For over a year after NASA officially told him stop designing his low cross range designs, Faget continued to turn out low cross range, straight winged, small payload designs[36]. The Air Force, as always, won out over NASA, and one of Faget's designs that did meet the USAF requirements was chosen as the baseline for the shuttle.

Section Three: The Lovers, the Dreamers, and Me

With the Air Force on board, testifying in support of the shuttle, there were no more close calls for the shuttle program itself. It sailed through Congress, never again coming as close to death as it did in the battle of FY1971. However, the question of funding and what the shuttle would be like were still up in the air.

For a while, NASA wanted a smaller payload bay, one 12x40ft, as opposed to the larger 60 foot length that the Air Force wanted (NASA wanted 15 feet in width as it would give them flexibility to build a space station module by module, the width of the payload bay was the only key parameter driven by NASA requirements). The Air Force responded that if it had to keep an ELV around to launch the larger payloads anyway, it wouldn't be getting any benefit out of the deal with NASA. NASA immediately folded on the issue, though others would bring it up later[37].

Those who would bring it up later were the OMB. They were demanding that the shuttle justify itself economically. This would be a major point of contention for the shuttle up to January, 1972, when Nixon made the final decision to go ahead with the Shuttle. The OMB did not demand a simple dollar for dollar justification. Instead, they required a more complex justification that recognized that a dollar in hand today is worth more than a dollar in hand tomorrow, because the dollar I have today I can invest at interest (inflation was ignored in the economic analysis). Tomorrow the dollar I have today will be worth a dollar and a cent, instead of just a dollar. The OMB determined the interest rate for the calculation based on national priorities- items that had a high national priority only had to justify themselves at a lower interest rate, while items that were lower priority had to justify themselves based on a higher interest rate. OMB planners saw the Shuttle as low priority, so they forced all justifications to use a very high 10% interest rate.[38] This made it very difficult for the shuttle program to justify itself. It would be spending billions of dollars in 1970 dollars, and all the money it would saving the government on launch costs or making from commercial ventures would be in less valuable 1980's dollars.[39] The only way to make that work would involve saving truly immense amounts of money.

George Mueller had planned to make the shuttle cheap with automated checkout systems. Inside every subsystem would be a testing feature, which would examine the subsystem and report whether it was working or not. This would mean that instead of the army of ground crew needed by the Saturn V's, only a small group would be necessary, like in the airline industry.[40] In the original North American Rockwell (who went on to win the Shuttle contract) proposal, they called for only 200 personnel to provide maintenance and launch operations.[41] Lockheed, in doing studies for both NASA and the Air Force, noted that NASA was calling for a 1,500 man group, while the Air Force was calling for only 400 people to service the shuttle. Lockheed, noting NASA's requirements, said it was "hard to envision such an expenditure" for a cost effective system.[42]

Another way that the Shuttle would be cheaper would be because its engines would require little maintenance between flights. As originally designed, the Space Shuttle Maine Engines (SSME) were supposed to go 100 starts and 10 hours of firing without major overhaul. A single J-2 engine, of the type used on a Saturn rocket, had once gone 103 starts and 6.5 hours of firing time without overhaul, and that engine had not been designed with re-use in mind.[43] It was perfectly conceivable to everyone involved that once the designers started looking for reusability, it would be even better. A third area George Mueller believed would make the shuttle cheaper than ELV's was simple low maintenance heat shield tiles, which did not need refurbishment after every use.[44]

With just those three factors for savings, things did not look good. A study by the think-tank Mathematica showed that the only way that the fully reusable two stage shuttle that NASA wanted to build (the shuttle would have a reusable booster that had a crew of two who would fly the booster back to the launch site, leaving the orbiter to push the last bit to get into orbit) would justify itself at near the 10% rate would be if the Shuttle flew 55 times a year and the DOD (the USAF was not the only military service interested in launching satellites, just the largest user of such services) flew 30 missions a year. The DOD flight rate then was about 15 missions a year, and it would be going down as new satellites that could last much longer in orbit were sent up. At the lowest flight level looked at, 28 flights a year, 15 of them DOD, the interest rate would have to be set at the incredibly low level of 1.5% in order for the shuttle to break even.[45] Any higher and the shuttle could not economically justify itself. The OMB was not going to lower the interest rate, so NASA was going to have to commit itself to a lot of flights in order to justify itself.

Searching for a new economic argument, Robert Lindley, in charge of the economic arguments in favor of the shuttle, proposed a new method of saving costs. This was the so called "Payload Effect". The shuttle would make the cost of its payloads less. No longer would designers have to scrimp and save for every single pound and to make the satellite fit the small space on an ELV. That would save on engineering costs and on manufacturing costs. As well, testing costs could be cut down because the satellite could be tested in the shuttle, and if it didn't work it could be taken back down to earth and reused.[46] The shuttle could also recover satellites and allow their refurbishment for later use.

The OMB did not buy NASA's arguments for economic justification. For one thing, the DOD was going to be launching fewer payloads in the future, and NASA was going to be launching fewer payloads in the future as well (NASA would not be getting the budget it had in the past, so it would not be able to fly as many payloads in the future). The OMB felt that payload effects were speculation (that the shuttle would meet its design goals) with speculation on top of that (that would change 20 years of experience in satellite design).[47] On orbit refurbishment wasn't enough to make a satellite at the end of its design life useful again, and bringing them down and then putting the refurbished one back up meant paying for two launches instead of one to put a new built craft up. With the failure of NASA to justify its design economically, they went back to the drawing board.

Neither the OMB nor the other critics of the shuttle program had ever doubted that it could lower launch costs exactly as NASA said it could. They had doubted whether those lowered launch costs would be worth the investment that they required.[48]

Shultz, the new head of the OMB, sent a letter to Low, Paine's replacement as head of NASA, telling him that he was marking NASA down for 3.215 billion dollars in FY1972, a drop from the already small FY1971 budget. Low responded they could handle that by canceling Apollo 17 and NERVA, the nuclear rocket that would have powered the nuclear tug and the Mars craft, but NASA wanted a 3.411 billion dollar budget. Four months later, he was told that his budget would actually be 3.206 billion dollars, with Apollo 17 and NERVA both surviving (NERVA, protected temporarily by a powerful Congressmen, would die the next year), and the Shuttle bearing the brunt of the financial difficulties.[49] NASA had wanted 220 million for the shuttle, but ended up getting 100 million dollars for the program.[50] These kinds of cuts would take a large bite out of the Shuttle program, at a critical stage.

Up until this point, early 1971, all of the seriously considered designs were two stage, fully reusable designs, using a first stage booster that carried a crew of two that would fly up and launch the orbiter, then come back down. However, Grumman and Boeing, working together, came up with a solution that broke the mold and showed the way to all future developments. What they did was take orbiter's stocks of hydrogen, and move them outside the vehicle, into tanks that were jettisoned once the orbiter was finished with them. This had two effects; it lightened the orbiter, both because it would not be carrying the tanks and their supports up into orbit and because it made the craft smaller, and therefore needed less TPS.[51] This lightened orbiter also needed a smaller booster to put it into orbit. It would appear to have a higher per flight cost because the hydrogen tanks would have to be rebuilt each time. However, Grumman proposed that the external tankage would reduce cost per flight, because though the external hydrogen tanks would cost 740,000 dollars per flight, the lighter orbiter and booster would use less propellant.[52] As well, the smaller orbiter and booster would cost less to develop. Engineers at other companies quickly realized that if the idea of an external tank worked so well for hydrogen, it would work for oxygen as well. Pretty soon all designs had large tanks slung under them, toting the fuel the orbiter needed and then burning up in the atmosphere.

The budget cutters proposed a new space vehicle instead of the shuttle. The shuttle, with its manned reusable booster, was too expensive to afford on the 3.5 billion a year budget that was all NASA was going to get for the foreseeable future. The frugal side wanted a smaller craft that would carry a much smaller payload. They wanted either a shuttle that was shrunken down to have a smaller payload bay, and therefore would need a smaller booster to bring it into orbit, or an unpowered glider that relied on an ELV to carry it into orbit.[53] The smaller shuttle would be unable to fulfill the USAF requirements, which would force the USAF to keep its own ELV's in service. The later vehicle would be part of an austere space program that would occasionally send astronauts into orbit to show the flag, but would not be a serious space program. Neither program was likely to save much money, just a little bit. The smaller shuttle would save on booster development costs, due to its need for a smaller booster, but would have still been almost as expensive to design. The infrequent launches of the glider would not save any money per flight. It would have a full ELV thrown away after every use, but more important were the personnel costs. As the shuttle program found out during the stand-down after the Challenger disaster, the vast majority of the manned space budget pays salaries, not for materials. And those people have to be paid the same salary whether the flight rate is 50 flights a year or 1 flight a year. This fact had formed the crux of NASA's argument that it could save money based on its high flight rate.

The shuttle had come full circle. Where once NASA's small design had been forced away by outside influences, now outside influences were trying to get NASA to accept just such a smaller, trimmed down craft. NASA tried to keep the full size shuttle, but was not doing a convincing job of defending the shuttle. Salvation came from the outside. Mathematica, the company NASA used to do studies on the economic benefit of the shuttle, found that there was one type of shuttle that could be economical. That was a shuttle design that used two unmanned strap-on boosters that were dropped in the ocean. The development costs for that were low. Solid Rocket Boosters (SRB) of that size existed already. With an external fuel tank they could get even a full size orbiter into space, and the development costs would be significantly reduced.[54] NASA was not responsive at first. The man who realized the superiority, Klaus Heiss, recalls "There were still many people in NASA who believed they could sell the Administration an $8 billion to $10 billion two stage flyback system. At the other end of the spectrum … OMB seemed to be drawing back toward some kind of advanced expendable system."[55]

The severe disadvantage to this system was that the boosters ended every mission submerged in seawater. However, NASA downplayed those problems. They did test a rocket motor and found that, after disassembly, cleaning, and re-assembly, a rocket would work fine.[56] While the OMB seemed to be pressing for a smaller, less capable system, NASA was trying to get the full size system. NASA officials were willing, however, to go as low as a 14x45 ft payload bay with 45,000 lbs. payload capacity (on a due east launch from the Cape). The heavier missions that the USAF wanted to launch would have to have to go up on their own ELV's that they would keep in service. Monday, January 3^rd, 1972, at 6PM, all of the principal players in the shuttle decision at the political appointee level and below met in OMB director George Shultz's office to have a final discussion on the size of the orbiter. No one who wasn't there knows what went on in the meeting, but what is known is that at the end of the meeting, Shultz had decided in favor of the full size shuttle. He took this to Nixon and Nixon approved it.[57] The shuttle was going to be built, and built to handle all DOD payloads. Politics had played a role in Nixon's decision. Though by the election of 1972 only 9,000 or so people would be working on the shuttle, many more would soon be working on it, and almost all of those workers were in key battleground states, magnifying the importance of their votes.[58]

Section 4: Washington, We Have a Problem

Going over the budget was always a major possibility in the aerospace business. Apollo had been estimated in mid-1963 to cost 12 billion dollars. By 1969, it had cost 21.35 billion 1963 dollars.[59] By contrast, the shuttle would get very little extra money. When it ran into technical problems, instead of getting more money, it had to cut something else. The design that started life as the compromise between what the frugal people were willing to pay and what the dreamers wanted became more and more compromised. NASA estimated that the shuttle would cost 5.15 billion 1971 dollars, and it ended up costing only 6.744 billion 1971 dollars.[60] However, the Apollo program had lost none of its important capabilities. The shuttle could fly, but it had none of the advantages that both the dreamers and the economists expected.

The three areas that George Mueller had identified as critical to low cost operations, airline style checkout systems, reusable engines, and reusable TPS, all failed to meet expectations. As problems came up, NASA had to cut another area to solve that problem. The SSME's proved to be a serious stumbling block. It was not until December 17, 1979 that three engines (none of them exactly like the engines that would fly) had a completely successful test. According to the original plans, the shuttle would have already been in space by then. Three flight capable engines did not successfully complete a mission demonstration test until January 1981, three months before STS-1 flew into space.[61] The delays and problems with the SSME's were caused by the severe complexity of the design. The hydrogen turbopump, for example, produces 75,000 horsepower in the size of an outboard motor.[62] This is more than a quarter of the horsepower produced by the nuclear powered aircraft carrier Nimitz.[63] The turbopump has to spin at 36,000 rpm without lubrication, because lubrication would evaporate in the vacuum of space.[64] After each use, the engines have to be removed from the shuttle and taken apart, refurbished, and then put back together. [65] This is exactly what Mueller wanted the SSME to avoid.

The money for the automation never appeared at all. Mueller had planned for each system to be able to monitor itself and report any failures. Airlines were just beginning to explore such systems when the decision was made, and such systems were at first not very effective.[66] Given the budget squeeze NASA was under, it could not afford such a system. The Saturn program took 20,000 people to prepare a rocket for launch.[67] The shuttle takes 24,000 to prepare for launch.[68] Plans to lower that number significantly never succeeded. As for Mueller's third item, reusable TPS, that was mostly achieved. While the TPS still takes lots of maintenance, and has continual problems with water (which make it difficult to operate from Florida), in comparison to the other turn-around needs, the TPS system is workable.[69]

A problem that appeared after the program had weathered its political battles was the SRB's. While in theory they have cost the advantages of reusable parts, in practice they don't. That's because after every use they are submerged in seawater. In order to make sure that they aren't damaged, the workers have to completely disassemble the SRB and then reassemble it. This goes through the motions of manufacturing it for each and every use, and the personnel costs are much larger than the material costs. In fact, because of economies of scale, some theorize that it would be cheaper to simply mass produce throw-away SRB's. However, no engineering study has been done on this, so no solid numbers are available.[70]

The parties looking for the shuttle to be cheaper than it was were soundly disappointed by the result.

The Defense Department spent about 5 billion dollars to prepare SLC-6 for the shuttle.[71] It was preparing to phase out the Titan and other launch vehicles by 1987. There were special DOD only classified facilities for most key facilities in the shuttle chain. A special DOD only mission control room existed, for example. When SLC-6 became operational, DOD planned to move all of that out to VAFB, mission control, mission training, and orbiter preparation. The orbiter Discovery (chosen because it was the lightest[72], and every pound counted going in to polar orbit) would be permanently based in VAFB.[73] NASA had also developed special carbon-fiber wound SRB's that were lighter (an amazing 28,000 lbs. lighter) but more expensive than the standard SRB's.[74] Mission 62-A (NASA adopted a naming scheme with its ninth flight that was STS-ab-c, STS stood for Space Transportation System, a is the last digit of the FY the mission was planned for, b was one for launching from Cape Canaveral or two for launching from VAFB, and c was a letter was the order the missions were planned to go in. Thus, mission STS-62-A was the first mission planned for FY 1986 to launch from VAFB. It would also have been the first mission in any FY to launch from SLC-6) was planned for late 1986. By then STS-51-L, known popularly as the Challenger disaster, had occurred. The Air Force, never thrilled with the idea of the shuttle, left the program. They went back to their Titan's and Atlas's, and continued launching their satellites. They did have some payloads that could only be launched on the shuttle, however, and those went up in various DOD missions after the Return to Flight in 1989.

The Air Force had been scared by the three year delay after the loss of Challenger. During that time it had only one photo-intelligence satellite up.[75] The nation had been blind in one eye as far as strategic reconnaissance went. The Air Force preferred its ELV's, which failed more frequently than the shuttle (about 10% of the time instead of 1%) but were much faster to recover from failure. The Department of Defense continued interfacing with NASA. For example, the recent Shuttle Radar Mapping mission on STS-99 that mapped the majority of the planet to within a few feet was sponsored by the Department of Defense. But they no longer send their spy satellites up on the shuttle. In fact, after Challenger, a rule was enacted that no commercial payload that was not already earmarked for the shuttle could be sent up on the shuttle. This double loss of commercial and defense payloads destroyed most of the reasons for the high launch rate that NASA had wanted. The record for launches in one calendar year is 9 from 1985, and except for ISS construction, that record is not likely to fall. The Department of Defense was willing to leave the shuttle program.

The program also disillusioned the true believers in space flight, those who had started the whole project. They had wanted a spacecraft that could truly make spaceflight routine, one that could reach the magic $100 /pound rate at which, they believed, space would open up and commercial passenger flights to space would become reality. Parts of the integrated system they wanted exists, but in such small, half-hearted qualities that it seems more of a joke about what might have been than an actual step in the direction that the true believers want. Man-tended space craft exist, but the only real example is the Hubble Space Telescope. Even the later members of the NASA Great Observers program weren't designed to be man tended. Almost a quarter century after NASA's last space station it finally has a crew up in its next space station. But the International Space Station (ISS) isn't the space station the dreamers wanted. Instead of being a path to the planets, the ISS is a lab. They will conduct tests and hopefully show that humans can adapt to space, but it will be a long time before the large stations and the planetary exploration teams that the true believers feel are man's destiny in space exist. Some dreamers feel that the shuttle is more of an obstacle to their goals than a step, worrying that NASA is blocking the future development of better reusable spacecraft with the established bulk of the shuttle. This is a minority of true believers, most of whom accept the shuttle as the best compromise possible, given the political considerations of the time. But like all dreamers they wish that reality wasn't.

Conclusions:

NASA's budget suffered severely during the shuttle procurement decision. Casper Weinberger, who served as deputy director of the OMB for part of the Shuttle procurement battle, explained why NASA was always being cut "The real reason for sharp reductions in the NASA budget is that NASA is entirely in the 28% of the budget that is controllable. In short we cut it because it is cuttable, not because it is doing a bad job or an unnecessary one."[76] In addition, after men had walked on the moon, at the end of the turbulence of the sixties, many officials felt that the space program was an unnecessary luxury. Then Congressmen Ed Koch of New York said he didn't understand why NASA wanted to "find out whether or not there is some microbe on Mars, when in fact I know there are rats in the Harlem apartments."[77] The one time Congress posed a serious challenge to the Shuttle program budget was when NASA's appropriations bill was linked to that of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, inviting Senators to take from NASA and give to the inner cities.[78] The nation had been behind Kennedy when he sent it to the moon, but it never really got behind anything else in space. Those truly committed to spaceflight in NASA convinced themselves that the rest of the country was behind them just as it had been for Apollo. Instead, they found that the country didn't care, and the level of support they were getting was not enough for their dreams. In the end, in order to get anything, NASA had to promise more technical capability (the Air Force demands) on a smaller budget, by a factor of two, than its plans had called for. That it got anything at all is a tribute to the managers and engineers who worked for NASA and its contractors. That it didn't meet its objectives is, in hindsight, inevitable.

Glossary

AAP Apollo Applications Project

AOA Abort Once Around

DOD Department of Defense

ELV Expendable Launch Vehicle

FY Fiscal Year

ISS International Space Station

MOL Manned Orbiting Laboratory

NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration

OMB Office of Management and Budget (nee Bureau of the Budget)

SLC-6 Space Launch Complex 6, VAFB

SRB Solid Rocket Booster

SSME Space Shuttle Main Engines

STS Space Transportation System

TPS Thermal Protection System

USAF United States Air Force

VAFB Vandenberg Air Force Base

Bibliography:

Note: Special thanks to Henry Spencer and Dwayne Day for providing valuable insight and guidance on this project.

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This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age. Modern Library: New York. 1998

Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy. “America: A Spacefaring Nation Again”. L5 Society: Tucson, Arizona. July 1986.

Collins, Michael. Liftoff: The Story of Man’s Adventure in Space. Grove Press: New York. 1988.

Chaikin, Andrew. A Man on the Moon. Time Life Books: Alexandria VA. 1999

Day, Dwayne. Email Interview, November 12, 2000.

Heppenheimer, TA. The Space Shuttle Decision: NASA’s Search for a Reusable Space Vehicle. NASA History Series: Washington DC. 1999

Jenkins, Dennis. Space Shuttle: The History of Developing the National Space Transportation System. Walsworth Publishing Company: Marceline, Missouri. 1996

“A Loss of Altitude.” Craig Pauley. Air & Space Magazine. October-November 1998.

“The Nine Lives of SLC-6.” Air & Space Magazine. December-January 1997.

“Shuttle Pit Stop.” Greg Freiherr. Air & Space Magazine. October-November 1990.

Toppan, Andrew. Haze Gray and Under Way. http://www.hazegray.org

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http://www.friends-partners.org/~mwade/spaceflt.htm

[3] Space Stations: Heppenheimer, 60-63; Lunar Portion: Wade

[70] “America: A Space faring Nation Again”

[75]Deep Black 302-3 It is also interesting to note that the delays caused by a failure involving loss of human life were given as one of the reasons for the cancellation of MOL (Heppenheimer, 204)