Today the Space Shuttle Endeavor landed in KSC for it's 39th and final time in its 27 ( ) years of service. Unless the engineers unions have their way, after two more flights the Shuttle Program will finally be "completed" and NASA says it plans on focusing on actually moving beyond LEO.
Should the billion dollar flying Maytag repair van have been retired years (and years) ago? Or should we continue to rely on what is (arguably!) the most reliable method we currently have for lifting humans beyond the atmosphere without relying on even older Soviet machines?
On the one hand, it seems like NASA's R&D in the field of human spaceflight has completely stalled and stagnated ever since the 1980's in development, and ever since the late 60's early 70's in research. The space shuttle was developed in the quiet years post-Apollo, when NASA had to invent creative ways to keep people, or more specifically congress, interested in human spaceflight. Fantastical ideas about 'regular' humans in space, at least in LEO, were thrown about with with new Space Age sounding machines like the Space Shuttle, and the Space Station and buzzwords like "space tourism". All funded, and of course heavily regulated, by the American government.
Progress was made in the decades following Apollo, but the real drive of the early Cold War Space Race was lost. Focus had turned to more important things for both sides, for example, nuclear proliferation, modernization, testing and miniturization. NASA's budget decreased from 4.4% of the Fed in 1966 to 0.84% in 1980, or a decrease of about a 66% cut in funding (wiki). Without the funding and support from congress, R&D stalled and NASA was left with only one option: the Space Shuttle.
It seems the Shuttle has served us relatively well over the past 3 decades. 130 successful missions and only 2 unsuccessful. That's a 98.4% success rate. But how do we measure success for a 30 year manned space flight program? What has the Shuttle done to progress the field? Was the ~$175 Billion price tag and loss of 14 astronauts worth the return on investment: a tin can floating in LEO and expensive and out of date LEO repair van?
Either way we are down to relying on the even older Russian Soyuz, which is pretty reliable, only 4 men have died as a result of accidents about the craft, though one, the Soyuz 11 is a little disturbing (explosive decompression in outer space). Until private companies can successfully bring what the Shuttle promised yet never delivered, we are still stuck in a government controlled manned space age I suppose.
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