Shuttle, Houston: My Life in the Center Seat of Mission Control

by Paul Dye

The Shuttle program is over, and many of the details of how it worked are already lost. But future generations of technology will come along—they must come along—and our destiny to move off this planet will be achieved.

In fact, many of us believed that if we ever lost another Shuttle, the program would be terminated—we saw the writing on the wall that early on. America was losing its determination to do great things.

The Space Shuttle flight program lasted slightly over three decades—longer than the average human generation. There were many flight controllers at the end who weren’t born when STS-1 left the pad for the program’s first flight. They had never known a time when humans couldn’t get on a Space Shuttle and take it to space.

It ended not because the vehicles were no longer capable of doing the job, not because we couldn’t really afford it, but because we, as a nation, lost the vision, the leadership that had made the program work for so long.

Yes, there were immense risks. Over the span of 135 missions we lost two Shuttles and their crews. These are very poor odds when you compare them to the safety records that we expert of modern transportation systems. But space transportation today can’t be compared to the safety records of airliners, or ships, or any other type of terrestrial transportation. The energy involved in going to space is a couple of orders of magnitude greater, and therefore the risks are much harder to contain. Besides, those safer modes of transportation have ...

Early aviation had a dismal safety record. Most pilots died young, after only a year or two of flying. Fast forward to the early airliners—they had just as many problems, with crafts going down in bad weather or over dangerous terrain. Many lives were lost, but we didn’t ground all the aircraft and turn our backs on flying. Instead, we recognized that if we m...

Aviation was a novelty until men and woman did the hard work to make it useful. And now we can’t dream of being without it. Yet we walked away from thirty years of flying winged, reusable spacecraft because the national sense was that it was simply too dangerous, that there wasn’t enough benefit for the risk. That assessment was so very wrong.

The benefits of space exploration are seen in every hour of every day by anyone who lives in a technological world. Microelectronics, remote communications and sensing, our knowledge of the planet that allows us to make fuller and better use of our resources—these all come from the space program.

The real shame of retiring the Shuttle is not that we moved on to something else; it is that we moved on to something less.

I am also a believer that exploration is a good way for humanity to cooperate as we push back the boundary of the unknown. The established way of doing this has always been through governments. I believe that space exploration is too risky and too expensive for a commercial entity to take on alone—

If humankind wants to progress, we have to move into space. We probably will not be forced to leave Earth in any sort of time frame we can imagine, but we need to expand our realm to other planets that can give us more resources and the capability to live off of the home world.

I believe that because I believe it is in our nature to explore, to grow, and to push the boundaries of what we know. If we stop doing that, we will stagnate. We need to push ourselves out of this little valley in which we live, climb to the ridgeline, and look out across a broader expanse at challenges we have yet to see. There will always be frontiers—we simply need the will to go out and find them.