The Space Shuttle’s Final Countdown: 5 Questions for John Logsdon

John M. Logsdon

As an American space shuttle is scheduled to lift off for the last time this week, we look back at both the legacy of the program and the future of space exploration with John M. Logsdon, who founded the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs in 1987 and served as its director for more than two decades. He served as a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board in 2003 and the author of Britannica’s article on space exploration. He is also the author of The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest (1970) and John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (2010) and is general editor of the eight-volume series Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program. Dr. Logsdon kindly agreed to answer a few questions for Britannica Blog on space exploration from with Britannica science editor Erik Gregersen.

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Britannica: What were some of the accomplishments of the space shuttle program?

Logsdon: Between April 12, 1981, and the final mission of the space shuttle, there will have been 135 launches of what is formally known as the Space Transportation System (STS), comprised of the shuttle orbiter, external fuel tank, and two solid rocket strap-on boosters. There were four test launches, 128 operational missions, and two flights that ended in catastrophic disasters, each with the loss of seven crew members. Flown by a commander and a pilot, the shuttle could carry as other crew members a variety of scientists and engineers, opening up the experience of spaceflight to a broader range of participants. (Even a few politicians rode aboard the shuttle.) Many of those crew members came from other areas of the world, particularly Europe, Japan, Russia, and Canada, but also including Mexico and Saudi Arabia. The shuttle carried a variety of satellites and spacecraft to low Earth orbit and released them to carry out their missions. It serviced satellites in orbit, most notably the five servicing missions to the Hubble Space Telescope. The first of those missions provided corrective optics for Hubble’s misshapen mirror, thereby enabling the telescope to operate at its full potential. Subsequent missions extended Hubble’s capabilities and lifetime. These and other missions employed the shuttle’s Canadian-supplied remote manipulator system, known as Canadarm. The shuttle on a few missions carried in its payload bay a small pressurized laboratory, Spacelab, that provided research facilities for a variety of experiments. That laboratory was a European contribution to the STS. Other, smaller experiments were carried in lockers and other locations aboard the shuttle. The shuttle set the precedent for intimate international cooperation in human spaceflight.

Perhaps the most lasting accomplishment of the space shuttle was the launch of the various components of the International Space Station (ISS) and the multiple extra-vehicular activities (spacewalks) by shuttle crew members to assemble those components into a multiple-purpose research laboratory. Without the shuttle, construction of the ISS would have been impossible. Building the ISS required 36 shuttle flights; the shuttle (together with the Russian Soyuz spacecraft) was also used for carrying crew to the ISS for extended stays and returning crew members to Earth, and for carrying a wide variety of supplies to the ISS. In general, then, the space shuttle demonstrated the capability for a wide-variety of human-assisted research and engineering operations in space, gave a wide variety of individuals, not just test pilots, the opportunity to live and work in space, and was a focal point for productive international cooperation. The space shuttle was also a source of pride for the United States; images of shuttle launches are iconic elements of American accomplishment and technological leadership.

Liftoff of the space shuttle Columbia, April 12, 1981. Credit: NASA

Britannica: Was the space shuttle program a success? Was it worth doing in the first place?

Logsdon: Specifying the “success” criteria for the shuttle program is not a straightforward task. NASA estimates the total cost of space shuttle development and operation between 1972 and 2011 as $209.1 billion (2010 dollars). The cost of Project Apollo, carried out over a much shorter period of time, was $151 billion. Thus the shuttle is the single most expensive space project in history. Deciding whether the benefits of the shuttle described above were worth that high cost is more a matter of judgment than a simple cost-benefit assessment.

What is clear is that the shuttle failed to achieve several initial promises that were key to its approval in 1972 as NASA’s main undertaking after Apollo. Then-NASA Administrator James Fletcher told the Congress that year that the shuttle would cost $6.45 billion to develop and could be operated at a cost of $10.5 million per flight. NASA only slightly overran development costs, which is normal for a challenging technological effort, but the per mission cost of operating the shuttle turned out to be at least twenty times higher than was projected at the program’s start. This cost burden has been an obstacle to NASA’s starting other major projects during the period of shuttle operations. In announcing his approval of the shuttle, President Richard Nixon suggested that the shuttle “would revolutionize transportation into near space, by routinizing it.” The shuttle turned out to be an experimental vehicle with multiple risks inherent in its basic design, requiring extreme care to operate safely; its operation was far from routine. Failure to provide adequate attention to managing shuttle risks was a major factor in both the Challenger and Columbia accidents. Promises of lower costs and routine operation were not the only reasons for approval of the shuttle program. NASA needed a major engineering project to maintain the capabilities it had developed during Apollo, and Richard Nixon in advance of the 1972 presidential election was interested in maintaining aerospace employment in states critical to his re-election. More fundamental, as NASA Administrator Fletcher told the White House “For the U.S. not to be in space, while others do have men in space, is unthinkable, and a position which America cannot accept.” The shuttle did sustain both NASA’s engineering capabilities and has kept the United States in the leading role in human space flight for its thirty years of operation. These are benefits hard to quantify, but real nonetheless.

Alternatives to shuttle development considered in the immediate post-Apollo period included using the Apollo/Saturn system for continued lunar exploration, launching a large space station as one unit using the heavy lift Saturn V, and other missions. The Nixon administration was interested in reducing the NASA budget, and as noted above, NASA was more interested in a new engineering project than in continued operation of existing system. (Ironically, building its program for the 1980s and beyond around the shuttle resulted in NASA becoming just the kind of operations agency that the agency wanted to avoid.) Thus continued production and use of the systems developed for Apollo was rejected, and the three remaining powerful Saturn V boosters became museum exhibits, the same fate waiting for the three remaining shuttle orbiters. In 1971, technical advisers to the White House suggested a variety of simpler systems for carrying crew and cargo to orbit, but their proposals were not accepted.

For a variety of reasons, then, the United States in 1972 committed to building its future in space for at least the coming several decades around a transportation system—a means—aimed at achieving a variety of goals. That system could reach only low Earth orbit, and thus definitively marked the end of human space exploration as long as it was the chosen U.S. means for reaching space. Primary among the program’s objectives, at least from NASA’s perspective, was to use the shuttle once it became operational to launch the pieces of a space station and assemble them in orbit. In a final assessment, then, the ultimate success of the shuttle is in large part tied to the payoffs from the International Space Station, and it will be some years before those payoffs can be measured.

The International Space Station and the docked space shuttle Endeavour. Credit: NASA

Britannica: How will the end of the space shuttle program affect the International Space Station?

Logsdon:The space shuttle was absolutely critical to completing assembly of the International Space Station; no other launch system could have both carried the large pieces of the ISS into space and allowed astronauts to join them together. Now that station assembly is finally complete, thirteen years after it began, there are a number of alternatives to the shuttle, coming from a variety of countries, for carrying cargo to the ISS. For the time being, however, only Russia will operate a crew transport system. Ending the shuttle program and extending ISS operations until 2020 thus results for some period of time for the United States – indeed, all countries participating in the ISS – having to depend on Russia for crew transport. The Russian Soyuz spacecraft is a highly reliable system with a proven track record, and to date Russia has not used its coming monopoly position in supplying astronaut transportation as a basis for exorbitant price demands.

The United States plans to replace the shuttle in its crew-carrying role with one or more new human transportation systems. These systems would be developed, hopefully by 2015 or soon after, through a NASA-industry partnership in which NASA would purchase crew transportation services on a “commercial-like” basis from a private sector provider which would assume at least some of the financial risks of system development. NASA would still have a major role in certifying that these privately-provided services met NASA’s safety and reliability requirements, but it would not have the degree of “hands-on” control that has been the past practice. Removing NASA from its central role in human transportation has been controversial, but at this point in time is the only approach being actively pursued. NASA decided several years ago to assign the cargo-carrying responsibilities for the ISS to U.S. private sector providers operating under contract to NASA. The two systems chosen to carry out this role are, as the shuttle is retired from service, behind their proposed schedule for initial missions to the ISS. The shuttle on its final mission is carrying enough supplies to support the ISS for at least a year; the hope is that one or both of the new U.S. cargo carrying systems will be in full operation by 2012. In addition, Russia, Europe, and Japan operate cargo-carrying systems to transport supplies to the ISS.

There are two areas in which the retirement of the space shuttle could have an impact on ISS utilization. One is the fact that none of the other existing transportation systems can carry heavy payloads back to Earth for a gentle landing. This lack of “down mass” capability could result in some limits on what kinds of experiments can be planned for the ISS. The other area involves the possible failure of some major system or component aboard the ISS, the replacement for which would be too large or too heavy to be carried to the ISS aboard another cargo transportation system. NASA has tried to minimize the possibility of this happening by pre-positioning a variety of spare systems aboard the ISS to guard against the possibility of a future failure.

Britannica: The Obama administration has proposed that while the private sector focuses on developing Earth-to-orbit crew transportation capabilities, NASA should be preparing for exploratory missions beyond the immediate vicinity of Earth to take place in the years after 2020. What is the status of this proposal?

The Constellation program’s Ares I-X test rocket lifting off. Credit: NASA

Logsdon: Does the end of shuttle missions mark the beginning of a transition to a new era of human space exploration? The answer to that question is not yet clear. No human has traveled beyond low Earth orbit since the final Apollo mission, Apollo 17, in December 1972. In 2004, President George W. Bush laid out what remains a worthy goal: to “implement a sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar system and beyond.” The first step was to have been a return to the Moon by 2020, but the program to develop the capabilities to achieve that goal, called Constellation, in 2009 was deemed by an expert panel “unexecutable.” In response, the White House proposed cancelling Constellation, thereby abandoning the “Moon by 2020” goal. However, in April 2010 President Obama called for a continuing commitment to space exploration, saying, “If we fail to press forward in the pursuit of discovery, we are ceding our future and we are ceding that essential element of the American character.”

To replace Constellation, the White House put forward a new strategy for human spaceflight, initially focused on developing leading-edge technologies, including new rocket engines, in-orbit propellant transfer techniques, and improved life-support systems. After a few years, these technologies would have be injected into a new generation of launch vehicles and spacecraft. Widespread Congressional and industry opposition to delaying new hardware development quickly appeared, since such a delay could mean the loss of NASA and industry jobs and the associated experience and capabilities. Apollo-era astronauts voiced their skepticism about the viability of the new strategy, and particularly of taking NASA out of the lead role in crew transport.

Rather than fight hard for its proposals, the Obama administration last fall accepted a Senate-developed compromise that mixes in a confusing fashion some elements of its new strategy with actions that ratify much of the shuttle era status quo of the past 40 years, in particular the use of shuttle hardware as the basis for a new heavy-lift rocket. The result has been a very high level of uncertainty regarding the future of human spaceflight in the “post-ISS” era. While Congress continues to push for a fast start on new exploration hardware, in large part to preserve existing aerospace jobs, NASA has proposed a more evolutionary approach to developing a new spacecraft and the heavy lift rocket and other capabilities needed for weeks- or months-long human space missions. If the NASA approach is pursued in a sustainable fashion, it would lead in the decade after 2020 to flights to various destinations in deep space. But if Congress does not commit to this plan or something similar, there is also a real possibility that the end of shuttle missions could mark the start of a slow countdown to the end of our country’s human space flight program.

Britannica: There is a consensus that the U.S. government needs to get the Federal deficit under control. Does this mean that an expensive program like the space shuttle will be a thing of the past?

Logsdon: Currently, the total NASA budget is approximately 0.5 per cent of overall Federal spending, less than 1/10th of NASA’s budget share at the peak of the Apollo program. The Obama administration has proposed holding the NASA budget level at $18.7 billion for the next five years. Of this amount, just over $8 billion is to be devoted to human spaceflight, even after the end of the shuttle program. This amounts to 0.2 per cent (1/500th) of Federal spending. While on the basis of these figures cutting the NASA budget would seem to offer little in the way of reducing the Federal deficit, what NASA does is a small (~1.5 per cent) but meaningful share of the $1.24 trillion “discretionary” portion of the overall Federal budget, and thus an attractive target for budget cuts. However, even in the current fiscal climate there seems to be little pressure to cut the NASA budget much below its current level.
At this budget level, NASA clearly cannot successfully carry out all the human and robotic missions space advocates wish to see accomplished. Rather than cut major missions or areas of activity, NASA has struggled for many years to do too many things with inadequate resources. If NASA is to have future success, it will have to lower its ambitions in some areas of space activity and pursue a more-slow paced but affordable and sustainable program. The circumstances that produced the national commitment to Apollo and led to a massive mobilization of human and financial resources to achieve that commitment will not reoccur.

What does this situation foretell for future human spaceflight efforts? NASA plans to spend over the next decade approximately $5 billion per year on space station operations and other related efforts. This leaves $3 billion per year for developing human spaceflight capabilities between now and the end of the space station program, and then some larger amount for future exploratory developments and missions. This budget appears adequate for a reasonably paced human spaceflight effort carried out on a sustainable basis for the coming decade and beyond. One way of supplementing the government budget for human spaceflight is to involve other countries in sharing the costs of developing and operating new capabilities. This approach has been followed in the International Space Station, where Europe and Canada have provided laboratories and Russia has provided a number of modules and other capabilities. All fifteen countries that are part of the station partnership share in paying the costs of ISS operations and utilization. Finding a way to carry out missions of human exploration on a global basis is likely essential to future success.

Human spaceflight is itself a discretionary activity, something to date undertaken by governments on behalf of their citizens. The funds needed for a viable program are well within the capabilities of the U.S. economy and would not stress the Federal budget. The future of the U.S. human spaceflight effort thus depends on the willingness of the American society and its representatives in Washington to allocate a small share of the Federal budget to maintaining the United States in a leading role on what President John Kennedy almost fifty years ago described as “this new ocean.”

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