This year marks the end of the space shuttle era – the mostly reusable workhorse of the American space programme is finally coming to an end. The space shuttle program was initiated in the Nixon administration – the original contract was signed for $2.6 billion on 9 August 1972. President Nixon’s speech at the start of 1972 envisioned:
“an entirely new type of space transportation system designed to help transform the space frontier of the 1970’s into familiar territory, easily accessible for human endeavour in the 1980’s and ’90’s.”
The plan was to have a fully reusable spacecraft that would make going to space routine – launching up to 100 times a year, with a turn-around time of perhaps 2 weeks, and with much reduced costs. The reality turned out a bit different – the first space worthy shuttle- Columbia was launched 3 years late – on April 12, 1981. Of the components of the shuttle – the orbiter is reusable as are the two solid rocket boosters that provide most of the lift in the first few minutes of flight, but the large external tank burns up in the atmosphere each flight. The hundred launches a year was never reached – in total there have been 133 launches with only one more planned. And the two week turn-around never happened – the fastest turn-around time was with Columbia once being launched twice within 56 days. But with crew safety paramount there are pieces of hardware that must function perfectly –all the heat tiles must be inspected after every flight and it takes a person-week to replace just one of them. The result is high labour cost, with around 25,000 workers in Shuttle operations and labour costs of about one billion dollars per year. Looking at the total cost over the 30 years of flight and 10 years or so of development, the shuttle comes in at about 1.3 billion dollars per launch.
The very first space shuttle was the Enterprise – which was used to test the glide and landing behaviour of the design – it was rolled out September 1976, but never flew beyond the atmosphere. It was followed by Columbia (lost in 2003), Challenger (destroyed in 1986), Discovery (retired earlier this year), Atlantis (due to be the last shuttle in flight in early July) and Endeavour – built from spare parts originally intended for the other orbiters.
The successful missions included launching and servicing satellites, carrying parts for the International Space Station and even carrying three interplanetary probes into orbit before they headed off to Jupiter, Venus and to the Sun (via Jupiter). A variety of space science missions were also carried out – including some on Spacelab – a joint NASA/European Space Agency program that ran until 1998.
With the final launch of the last ever shuttle mission, those of us who grew up with it (I was 15 when the first one was launched, and still remember the shock when I heard of the destruction of Challenger) will feel like we are saying goodbye to an old friend.