The Short Life and Violent Death of the Space Shuttle Dream, 1972–86

As the nearly forty-year-old Space Shuttle program draws to a close, the historical community is only beginning to grapple with the legacy of America’s longest and most controversial human spaceflight project.  Conceived as a program for routine, inexpensive access to low-Earth orbit, the Space Shuttle combined a variety of cutting-edge technologies and harnessed the skills of some of America’s finest engineers and astronauts.  Years before it flew, it attracted fans and critics by the thousands, who helped to steer the Shuttle’s development and condition expectations of its role in national space policy.  Flying first in 1981, the Shuttle garnered numerous successes while simultaneously disappointing virtually every community it was intended to serve: astronauts, engineers, scientists, corporations, the military, and the public.  For the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, America’s “space truck” was to be one element in a system of technologies that would facilitate interplanetary exploration, international cooperation, and the democratization of space travel—even space tourism.  With its large internal volume and redundant crew positions, the Shuttle promised to be the first spacecraft average people might fly into orbit.  At the same time, though, NASA’s astronauts and their allies resisted the loss of crew seats to nonprofessionals.  Pressured to meet cost and scheduling objectives and increasingly vital to the American space program, the Shuttle quickly weakened under the weight of unreasonable expectations.  Five years after the Shuttle Orbiter Columbia’s first flight, mounting problems combined in a public relations disaster that not only took the lives of seven astronauts, but ended the dream of easy access to space for a generation.

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