Space Shuttle: Mission to Nowhere

Excerpt: NASA originally justified the shuttle fleet by saying it would make 400 flights at a price of about $110 million per launch, in 2016 dollars. In 1979 Science, the technical journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, predicted that the promised performance was all but physically impossible. The journal was shown to be right: The actual result was 135 flights at nearly $1 billion per launch.

The pleasant illusion of a relatively low-cost, reusable launcher started the United States down the path to the aimless space program it has today. The International Space Station was conceptualized to give the shuttle something to do; then the shuttle mission was repurposed to serve the needs of the space station. Today the ISS is the most costly object in human history, with a price tag well north of $100 billion: Its research contributions are negligible, and it has no practical value. The hundreds of billions of dollars poured into the shuttle and the ISS might have been invested in unmanned planetary and solar probes and telescopes, NASA’s most cost-effective projects; in programs that might protect the Earth against asteroids; or in propulsion research to cut the cost of reaching orbit.