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The ironic thing is that Congress cancelled the Apollo program and approved the Space Shuttle program and that was even more expensive

There's no contradiction here. It's resolved because, relative to its original promise, the STS program was a complete failure. Yes, it did wind up doing a bunch of useful stuff. But it didn't achieve nearly as much as was promised, and what it did do cost vastly more than anticipated.

Source: my grandfather. He was a project manager on the Hubble, and specifically on the ill-fated mirror, this being simultaneously his greatest pride and greatest embarrassment. We talked about this stuff often. According to gramps, and not denying that there were major errors in the Hubble mirror management, they wound up getting screwed by the STS failures. It was always understood that the mirror wouldn't be perfect because they expected to be unable to perfectly compensate for the deflection of the mirror due to gravity while it was being manufactured. The STS promised the ability to deliver the Hubble to orbit to test it, and bring it back down again to correct if necessary. In the end, something like this was eventually required, but only many years later, and not in the fashion that the initial STS mission would have allowed.

> And of course, there was John Glenn, monitored inside and out, blood tested, urine sampled, entire organism analyzed for signs of accelerated aging. Close observation of the Senator suggested that there might not be any medical obstacles to launching the entire legislative branch into space, possibly the most encouraging scientific result of the mission.

From https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm, which contains far better analysis of the politics of the STS program than I can provide.

hey, i got to learn about deconvolution in undergrad because of this. pre-fix hubble data can be corrected in software fairly reliably and i learned a lot messing around with it.

You seem to be stating two contradicting things, that the Saturn V was too expensive to be maintained and that the space shuttle was even more expensive and yet continued operating for decades. If the space shuttle was never pursued we could reasonably assume that its budget would have gone into a launch system like the Saturn V or even just kept cranking Saturn Vs out on the assembly line. If they were the case then it seems like many of their plans would have played out, the continued moon missions at least.

Part of that was the alluring promise that the shuttle would be cheaper.

But that was doomed by the design requirements tug-of-war between government agencies, being a bit too early and ambitious, and the drop in flight rate and commercial and defense payloads after Challenger.

The shuttle is still an interesting science experiment in what it did teach us about reusability in space craft, failures included. At the time reliable booster recovery and reuse seemed unlikely and command module reuse seemed the best way to drive costs down. The shuttle was a good command module design for reuse based on available data at the time (even with all the design by committee compromises), but proved to be difficult and expensive to maintain/refit between missions.

Today we've seen incredible advances in booster recovery and reuse in part spurred by learnings from shuttle reuse including the learning about how expensive heat shield maintenance/refitting turned out to be on the shuttle.

(A bit of an aside, but ironically and sadly the Challenger disaster didn't "fail hard enough" to drive costs down or do much to reimagine the shuttle program: that problem was a dumb booster problem that had nothing to do with the shuttle directly and could have happened to any payload. (It was still terrible that it happened to that shuttle and its crew, specifically, of course.) It's curious to wonder if something more like the Columbia disaster, which did more reflect shuttle maintenance issues, may have had an interesting scientific impact if it had "switched places" in a different timeline.)

There was a near miss of heat tile damage from a foam strike very early in the STS program - STS-27 but it was on a classified military payload flight and the whole thing was ignored.

I wouldn't quite say "covered up" but the damage would have been a lot harder to hand-wave away if this had been a normal mission with all the media coverage those got.

> You seem to be stating two contradicting things, that the Saturn V was too expensive to be maintained and that the space shuttle was even more expensive and yet continued operating for decades.

It was worse than that. NASA never received sufficient funding for the STS. So they turned to the miltary who wanted it and were willing to fund it.

However, the military needs were also what made the space shuttle so stupidly hard to engineer. Think about how much harder all of the current commercial space programs would have it if they also had to engineer switching to a polar orbit. That's why the STS has those stupidly big engines.

So, because Congress neither gave the project sufficient funding (would take money from my favorite pork barrel!) nor allowed the project to shut down (don't you dare take away pork barrel from my district!), NASA created a vehicle that killed a bunch of astronauts.

The shuttle was originally intended to be launchable into polar orbit from Vandenberg AFB, but it never happened [0]. I rather doubt anybody ever seriously contemplated a transition to polar orbit from a Florida launch; the shuttle couldn't carry enough fuel for that. (One cannot launch a rocket into polar orbit directly from Florida for safety reasons. That's what Vandenberg is good for; there's no inhabited land south of it.)

[0] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27506/vandenberg-afbs-...

>But the Saturn V as a launch vehicle was simply too expensive.

Sure, at that moment in time. You are, however, discounting the abilities of clever people to innovate and improve the $/kg performance. I prefer to think we engineers are pretty good at reducing the effective cost of tech over time.

However, none of this is about Saturn V vs Shuttle vs some other platform. If NASA remained the sole customer over that period, there would not have been adequate incentives to drive that cost down. In that situation I think improvement would have been slow independent of platform choices.

It is the telecommunications age creating scaled incentives that has led to cost efficiencies and companies like SpaceX (and many others) competing to drive those costs down. Lacking the current scale of global incentives, SpaceX and others still wouldn't exist. They certainly couldn't have acquired the necessary funding back in the 70s.

NASA could have gotten the price down to whatever the lockheed's is now. Or should I say up?

Up. Politics is a major detriment to NASA's efficiency.

I havent read the article yet but from my understanding the issue of cost of Saturn V wod have been mitigated by scaling up production.

I read a recebt biography about Von Braun and IIRC the entire project was designed to scale up, and all of that was hastily thrown away for the ineffective shuttle program.

One problem about technology development is scaling too early.

The transistor, integrated circuit, surface mounted component robotic pick and place machine, laser and fiber optics. In the software world, countless of ideas. Open source too. Whole generations of software developers. All those were needed for the information age, not just throwing money to scale up Sage or Sabre or VAX or anything.

In rocketry one big needed technology before scale up can happen is reuse. Probably also intact abort and other technologies.

One should look at the operational capacity, not the theoretical capacity. Who cares if you have an airplane that can theoretically do Mach 3 if it's being repaired in the hangar and you need it now? In airplane lingo a plane like that is called a "Hangar Queen"

Falcon 9 is a huge step in the operational direction. But more is needed. Can one do two flights in 24 hours? Can one save the second stage too? Just the fairing? Or can one make the second stage cheaper? Or salvage it in orbit?

This is why newer space startups like Stoke are aiming to produce totally reusable second stages. The goal is commercial airline-like refuel and relaunch.

> In rocketry one big needed technology before scale up can happen is reuse.

There are other ways to reduce cost, such as cheaper rockets, more efficient fuels, etc. Whatever SpaceX does isn't the only possibility or a necessity.

Those also help, certainly.

This is a pattern you see a lot in sechnology. Often the second version of something significantly learsnf rom the first. Take something like C#, which really corrected a lot of the problems Java had.

A more physical example is the rail network in the US. It's often asked "why don't we have high speed rail in the US?" Being a nation of autophiles obviously doesn't help but it's not as simple as putting higher speed trains on existing track. It's not even as simple as replacing the existing track with track that can take a higher speed train.

The rail network we had is an artifact of the performance constraints of 19th century trains for the most part. Top speed is the most visible constraint. But the grading, turning angles, etc are all a function of much lower constraint on top speed.

We'd probably be better off if we had no national rail network at all, which is pretty much the situation China was in. Admittedly there are other factors in China's rapid HSR deployments (eg streamlining planning and acquisition of land).

But I digress. Timing is hugely important in scaling.

This is very true, and also reminds me of our telephone system, or Japan - which someone described as "living in a futuristic version of the 1990s".

Yeah, but if we had just kept investing in faxtech innovation, it might have turned out pretty awesome. Just saying.

Most accurate description of living in Japan I've read!

The US low speed rail network works pretty well for freight. Despite some occasional bottlenecks and delays, it's still superior in certain ways to rail freight in China and the EU.

As for HSR, do we really need it? It might make sense in the northeast corridor but it's hard to make a business case elsewhere. The California HSR project has turned into the usual government megaproject boondoggle with long delays and cost overruns. Even if it actually gets built I'll probably never ride on it.

The Shuttle was amazingly effective. It succeeded in most of its original mission objectives. It conducted hundreds of scientific missions, launched and repaired Hubble, and built the ISS (originally Freedom).

The "cost" of Shuttle launches was calculated as NASA's entire manned spaceflight budget divided by the number of scheduled launches. They paid salaried staff all year no matter how many launches happened. That cost was trending downward as the number of launches increased prior to the Challenger disaster. After return to flight after Challenger NASA cut the launch schedule but had to pay the same infrastructure costs so Shuttle flights got more "expensive".

> My point is that whatever NASA wanted to do after Apollo was never going to happen and wasn't sustainable

There was a project to make the Saturn V partially reusable, see

http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum29/HTML/000880.html

I don't think that even the moon landing itself was 'too expensive' for such an achievement. Going to the moon will be remembered for a long time by future generartions as an example of what humanity can achieve. What are $1 billion against that?

>The ironic thing is that Congress cancelled the Apollo program and approved the Space Shuttle program and that was even more expensive (in $/kg to LEO terms).

Highly relevant:

"Human Space Exploration: The Next 50 Years" by Michael Griffin, NASA Administrator, March 2007. He wrote that had the agency continued using Apollo-Saturn instead of developing the Space Shuttle, "we would be on Mars today <https://np.reddit.com/r/space/comments/5324ud/human_space_ex...>

I question the assertion that it was too expensive given the costs of programs like the F-35, Afghanistan, Gulf War 1 & 2, or Reagan’s SDI program.

Apples and oranges. You are comparing NASA spending to military expenditures (F-35, Afghanistan, Gulf War 1 & 2, or Reagan’s SDI program). In 2020 the US GDP was 20.94 trillion USD [1]. In the same year, NASA's budget was $22.6 billion [2], less than 0.11% of GDP, while US military spending was around 766.58 billion USD [3], roughly 3.66% of GDP. Other sources place US military spending 16%-21.9% of GDP from 1996 to 2015 [5].

In other words, NASA's budget was approximately 3% of the military budget (and maybe as little as 0.5%). NASA's budget has been less than 1% of the federal budget since 1975 [4].

[1] https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272473/us-military-spend...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File:NAS...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

An interesting aspect of the Shuttle mission was the military dual-use. Scott Manley's video "The Most Important Space Shuttle Mission Never Happened" is a great explainer of a specific planned but never executed mission, the requirements of that drove many of the shuttle's design tradeoffs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q2i0eu35aY