In addition to those achievements, the shuttle program has helped humanity establish a foothold beyond our home planet for the first time - a major milestone, some analysts contend. And hundreds of experiments performed aboard the shuttles themselves have provided scientists with new insights in a range of fields, from biology and medicine to physics and materials science. And shuttle missions repaired and upgraded Hubble multiple times, enabling scientists to see the universe as never before.įurther, the $100 billion International Space Station, which could provide big research dividends down the road, has taken shape largely as a result of the shuttle's efforts. While the shuttle program hasn't lived up to the great - and, in hindsight, unrealistic - expectations NASA laid out for it in the early 1970s, it has delivered significant returns over the years, many experts say.įor example, the shuttle has lofted many important pieces of hardware into space, such as the Hubble Space Telescope. The mission featured the deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope, the first of NASA's Great Observatories to reach orbit. The space shuttle Discovery launched on its STS-31 mission on Apat 8:33 a.m. "It was the lack of political will to give NASA more money." "It wasn't the space shuttle that was preventing us from exploring further," said space history expert Robert Pearlman, editor of the website and a contributor. The agency got $18.45 billion in fiscal year 2011, less than 0.5 percent of the federal budget. By 1972, Nixon had cut it to $3.4 billion (1.6 percent of the budget).Īnd in the four decades since, NASA's budget has continued to decrease as a proportion of national spending. In 1966, NASA's budget was $5.9 billion (4.4 percent of the federal budget). Īs a result, there was not enough money to do these things, either. "There was no political will to continue flights to the moon, or to go off to Mars," Logsdon told. But Nixon thought all of the proposals were too expensive, so he green-lighted just one aspect of them: the shuttle. Those steps involved building a shuttle and a space station, then using the station as a jumping-off point for return trips to the moon and, eventually, manned missions to Mars. All of them advocated an integrated program aimed at getting astronauts to Marsin a series of steps. Rather, the vehicle was viewed as a piece of infrastructure to enable more ambitious exploration down the road, Launius said.īack in 1969, the space agency presented President Richard Nixon with several proposals for its post-Apollo direction. It's not as if NASA dreamed up the shuttle as part of a plan to restrict astronauts to low-Earth orbit for 30 years. Bush's moon-oriented Constellation program, which President Barack Obama cancelled last year. The new path Griffin referred to was laid out by President George W. "We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can." "It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path," then-NASA chief Michael Griffin told USA Today in 2005. Indeed, some NASA officials have voiced dissatisfaction with the agency's post-Apollo focus on the shuttle and the International Space Station, which shuttle missions have helped build since 1998. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). "It kept us limited to low-Earth orbit," said space policy expert John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington Universtity and author of "John F. Instead, since 1981, the shuttle has kept zipping around the planet over and over again, just a few hundred miles above Earth's surface. But it's been four decades since the last manned lunar landing, and in that time, NASA has made little discernible progress toward the next logical giant leap: getting people to Mars. After all, NASA's Apollo programput boots on the moon in 1969, just 12 years after the space age began. There is merit to that argument, experts say. (Image credit: NASA)Ī chief criticism of the shuttle program is that it prevented more ambitious manned exploration missions. Astronaut Paolo Nespoli snapped this view and others during the first-ever photo session of a shuttle docked at the space station. The space shuttle Endeavour and International Space Station shine front and center in this amazing (and historic) photo of the two vehicles docked together as seen from a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
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