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Space Shuttle Decision: NASA's Search for a Reusable Space Vehicle
Explains the Space Shuttle's origins and early development. Details the debates in the late 1960's and early 1970's among policymakers in Congress, the Air Force, and the Office of Management and Budget over the roles and technical designs of the Shuttle
- GenresSpaceHistoryNonfiction
Hardcover
First published April 1, 2002
About the author
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
25k books88 followersThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 15, 2021
Definitely a lot of information, and I'll keep this text for reference. However, reading it felt like going to lecture: lots of irrelevant details and tangents, and no summary of important points. I would have liked to see less of every budget negotiation, with long quotes and numbers, and more emphasis on the main points - I read through the book and would still have a hard time pulling out why Shuttle looked like it did. I also found the chapter on Boeing, Lockheed, and the SST interesting and timely, but it was many pages for something mostly irrelevant to the storyline.
November 28, 2020
A fascinating review of the Shuttle’s origin story, going from elemental concepts from the beginning of the 20th century, through the initial development of the space program, to the post-Apollo battles against declining budgets and unproven technologies. A story about how technology and bureaucracy go hand-and-hand in the fielding of major new programs. While the book can sometimes feel more like an official report than a popular history, overalls it’s very readable.
January 9, 2018
Exhaustive history of the space shuttle program, from the politics to the engineering. Heavy on the substance, light on the style. There's no better compendium for details on the processes that created the space shuttle program, though their may be a few less boringly written. Having said that, a must read for anyone deeply interested in the space shuttles.
December 9, 2012
The Apollo Program was a response to the United States' national humiliation: the Soviets upstaged the Americans by launching the first artificial satellite and sending the first man into space, so the Americans led by President Kennedy decided to do them one better and land a man on the moon. At enormous expense, so they did. Subsequent missions landed men in more places on the Moon, but public interest in them quickly waned. What should the American space agency have done next? Some NASA officials thought of landing men on Mars, using a rocket that heats hydrogen in a nuclear reactor, which produces more thrust than combusting it with oxygen. However, the political atmosphere of the late 1960s was already different from that which led to Apollo. Congressman Edward Koch, the future mayor of New York City, said, "I just can't for the life of me see voting for monies to find out whether or not there is some microbe on Mars, when in fact I know there are rats in the Harlem apartments." In order to send a mission to Mars, one needed to first launch a space station into low Earth orbit, and in order to supply the space station, to have some sort of reusable space shuttle. The nuclear rocket and the Mars mission were canceled; a Congressional amendment to cut all funds from the shuttle and the space station failed to pass by one vote. If NASA were to have a future, it should have had another source of support. It was the U.S. Air Force, which would use the shuttle to launch and service spy satellites.
Spaceflight is astronomically expensive. A critic of non-reusable spacecraft said that launching astronauts on top of them is like flying an airliner across the Atlantic and then throwing it away. This was a three-orders-of-magnitude understatement; a Boeing 727 cost $4.2 million and carried 131 passengers; a Saturn I-B cost $45 million and a Saturn V cost $185 million; each carried three astronauts. It would make more sense to have a spacecraft that could be launched more than once. The problem was that the Air Force had its own requirements. It wanted to launch spy satellites that would overfly the Soviet Union. Such satellites had to fly over the poles, and so had to be launched north or south. A launch north from Cape Canaveral would overfly the densely populated Carolinas, and a launch south would overfly unfriendly Cuba. So launches for the Air Force would have to be done from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, although none actually were. If a shuttle mission launched from there were to be aborted after a single orbit, the shuttle would be over the Pacific Ocean as the Earth had rotated underneath it. This meant that it needed large wings to fly back to land, which made it heavier; larger wings implied a greater heating rate, which required more thermal insulation, which made the shuttle heavier still. All in all, the Space Shuttle needed extreme engineering. The hydrogen turbopump was the size of an outboard motor, yet had greater power than the engines on the RMS Titanic. The need to withstand the coldness of liquid hydrogen and the heat of a rocket engine called for exotic materials and technologies - and remember that they were supposed to withstand them over and over again in order to save money!
The original plan was to launch dozens of missions each year, which would offset the development costs of the shuttle. The problem was that the Air Force did not need so many missions: it was switching from small oft-launched Corona satellites to large rarely-launched Big Bird satellites. In actuality, 135 missions were launched over 30 years, of which two ended in disasters. Refurbishing the components after they came back to Earth was far more expensive and took far longer than originally envisioned. Heppenheimer says that President Nixon signed the order for developing the Space Shuttle because he wanted to go down in history as the U.S. President who made spaceflight routine and accessible to nonprofessionals. Instead, it became rare and several times more expensive per pound of payload than on non-reusable rockets. The Space Shuttle program became a pathological example of a bureaucracy surviving far beyond any reasonable justification for its existence. One can come up with many similar examples from the private sector, but they won't be as fantastically expensive.
Spaceflight is astronomically expensive. A critic of non-reusable spacecraft said that launching astronauts on top of them is like flying an airliner across the Atlantic and then throwing it away. This was a three-orders-of-magnitude understatement; a Boeing 727 cost $4.2 million and carried 131 passengers; a Saturn I-B cost $45 million and a Saturn V cost $185 million; each carried three astronauts. It would make more sense to have a spacecraft that could be launched more than once. The problem was that the Air Force had its own requirements. It wanted to launch spy satellites that would overfly the Soviet Union. Such satellites had to fly over the poles, and so had to be launched north or south. A launch north from Cape Canaveral would overfly the densely populated Carolinas, and a launch south would overfly unfriendly Cuba. So launches for the Air Force would have to be done from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, although none actually were. If a shuttle mission launched from there were to be aborted after a single orbit, the shuttle would be over the Pacific Ocean as the Earth had rotated underneath it. This meant that it needed large wings to fly back to land, which made it heavier; larger wings implied a greater heating rate, which required more thermal insulation, which made the shuttle heavier still. All in all, the Space Shuttle needed extreme engineering. The hydrogen turbopump was the size of an outboard motor, yet had greater power than the engines on the RMS Titanic. The need to withstand the coldness of liquid hydrogen and the heat of a rocket engine called for exotic materials and technologies - and remember that they were supposed to withstand them over and over again in order to save money!
The original plan was to launch dozens of missions each year, which would offset the development costs of the shuttle. The problem was that the Air Force did not need so many missions: it was switching from small oft-launched Corona satellites to large rarely-launched Big Bird satellites. In actuality, 135 missions were launched over 30 years, of which two ended in disasters. Refurbishing the components after they came back to Earth was far more expensive and took far longer than originally envisioned. Heppenheimer says that President Nixon signed the order for developing the Space Shuttle because he wanted to go down in history as the U.S. President who made spaceflight routine and accessible to nonprofessionals. Instead, it became rare and several times more expensive per pound of payload than on non-reusable rockets. The Space Shuttle program became a pathological example of a bureaucracy surviving far beyond any reasonable justification for its existence. One can come up with many similar examples from the private sector, but they won't be as fantastically expensive.
February 19, 2019
Took a very long time to read this because I put it down and never felt like picking it up again. But it gets at least 3 stars for being so in depth. This book is about the decision not about any of the actual missions or engineering. It's hundreds of pages of back and forth memos from people and departments and offices. It's incredibly boring unless you're into that sort of thing. Which is a shame really considering how detailed the damn thing is.
If you absolutely want to read about the nightmare of modern bureaucracy and governmental decision making, this book is for you. If you want to learn about the shuttle, there's probably a better book.
If you absolutely want to read about the nightmare of modern bureaucracy and governmental decision making, this book is for you. If you want to learn about the shuttle, there's probably a better book.
May 4, 2021
I love this book! This is an excellent pre-history of the Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle appears in its context, from the cancellation of Apollo to the aerospace recession of the early seventies and the civil rights movement. Before reading this book, I had never appreciated how the Space Shuttle was the result of political compromises and just as easily may never have come to be.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews