Touchdown was at 10:57:54 GMT, not 09:57:54 GMT. I was watching in the UK

Yeah, where local time is currently BST (i.e. GMT + 1:00). So was touchdown at 11:57 UK time?

And as for extra complexity, any engineer would gladly accept it in the form of liquid-fueled engines over ‘simple’ but risky unthrottleable SRBs any day.

Risky and unthrottleable and manufactured so far from Cape Kennedy that they had to be built in pieces to make shipping them there feasible. And coincidentally to necessitate having joints that had to be sealed with O-rings.

The shuttle is a big impressive machine, but it’s also a horribly compromised deathtrap that has stood in the way of spaceflight for three long decades. SpaceX is within a whisker of proving you can develop a cheap safe man rated HLLV for less than one year of NASA’s manned spaceflight budget. Something NASA has denied for as long as possible to protect its budget and monopoly.

To be fair, it’ll be some time yet before SpaceX has a manned vehicle with anything like Shuttle’s payload capacity.

Much as I admire the sheer technical achievement of the Shuttle program and the dedication and skill of those who made it possible, I can’t help seeing parallels with Concorde. Both were technical marvels that inspired a great deal of national pride, both were copied by the Soviet Union, but neither delivered on the promises of their proponents and both ultimately proved to be a dead end as a transportation system. Perhaps supersonic passenger transports and reusable winged space planes will have their day some time in the far future? I don’t know.

There are some key differences between Shuttle and Concorde, though:

Concorde achieved what it set out to achieve. Its use was not widespread because the USAians (the main target market) refused to let it fly supersonically in their airspace. Also, Concorde’s range was too limited so it could not access the Far East and Australia without several refuelling stops. (But in 1959 – 1960, when the early development work was being done on Concorde, no passenger aircraft had a particularly large range).

Although Air France only ever ran Concorde at a loss, British Airways did turn a profit from their Concorde flights (mainly by making the whole thing an exclusive experience and charging an arm and a leg for the tickets).

The shuttle is a big impressive machine, but it’s also a horribly compromised deathtrap that has stood in the way of spaceflight for three long decades. SpaceX is within a whisker of proving you can develop a cheap safe man rated HLLV for less than one year of NASA’s manned spaceflight budget. Something NASA has denied for as long as possible to protect its budget and monopoly.

For three long decades (I’m repeating this because some people have trouble remembering) shuttle based missions and infrastructure has consumed TWICE the budget of everything else NASA has done, including science – which in turn has provided the lion’s share of NASA’s good publicity and the contents of this particular blog.

Think how much could have been done if NASA had build something like the Falcon Heavy, or any of the alternative comercial options suggested during Phase A of the shuttle development concept that would have been cheaper than NASA’s own in house monstrosity.
history.nasa.gov/SP-4221/sp4221.htm
And that’s before we get to the parts about launching hopelessly out of date satellite designs and the 1,000 mile cross range requirement so the USAF could poke at equally out of date Russian satellites…

Thank dog it’s gone. I hope the SLS is aborted and the whole legacy LC-39 complex finally get it’s well deserved national park and world heritage site status. Maybe then the NASA manned space programme could move on and do something useful – which is to say step aside and let someone else do the job they’ve repeatedly proven they’re not capable of.

If this is the end of the shuttle, is it also the end of Hubble, and dare I say, also the ISS?

It’s not the end of Hubble per se, but there will be no more servicing missions or upgrades to Hubble. Once Hubble’s present systems fail, that will be it.

As for the ISS, though, the clue is in the first word of its name. Other nations have manned spaceflight and will continue to visit and supply the ISS. (Well, OK, mainly Russia in this case, but there you go).

I hope manned space flight has a new renaissance; I suspect it’ll have to wait until China has a clear lead and the West/the USA suddenly realises that all their wonderful drone-based weapons technology won’t work so well if someone else has complete control of orbit and the corresponding recon satellites.

Yeah! ‘Cos then we might have to resort to diplomacy!

The House is not gutting NASA. They are considering some cuts in committee.

Erm … IIUC these are the biggest cuts since 1968.

The JWST is over budget.

So what? This might just mean that the original budget was wrong. The key consideration is what will it cost from here, and is it worth it?

. . . it was an EXPERIMENTAL vehicle with unecessary complexity from the get-go that robbed the shuttle system of any chance it had to demonstrate low-cost access to orbit, fast turn-around operations, robust and reliable performance and, above all, reasonable safety.

And if it had not been required to launch big, heavy military satellites, it could have been a far smaller and lighter vehicle with no need for strap-on boosters at all.

I am glad for all the science NASA is does. We worked out a lot of kinks for manned space flight and now it’s time for the businesses to take it forward. NASA gets to work out kinks for inter planetary travel.

Actually, I think the Planetary Society has made a pretty good start on suggesting ways to solve those problems.

I live on the east coast, and got up early this morning just to watch the landing on NASA tv. They mentioned after she landed that she’s traveled over 5 million miles.

And in all those miles, was never more than 500 miles from the Earth’s surface.

I am no great fan of the Shuttle or of manned spaceflight in general.

I also am no big fan of Shuttle, but I am a fan of human spaceflight. I just wish we had the collective political will to go somewhere.

The original idea was for a space plane that could go up and down at low cost and with enough capacity to carry big military satellites.

The big military satellites were not part of the original design concept. The “requirement” to launch military satellites is the principal reason we ended up with the hideous compromise that was Shuttle.

Although a lot of its components were technically reusable, it required extensive refurbishment between trips. No commercial satellites were carried after the first few launches. (Why risk the lives of 7 persons and a quarter of the fleet for a communications satellite?) Fortunately the military needs largely disappeared. Altogether, it has done far fewer trips than intended, at a much higher price.

I agree.

It can only reach LEO – anything going beyond that has to leave the passengers behind. Nobody went to L1 to fix SOHO. Nobody is going out to L2 to fix the JWST.

True. Even assuming JWST ever gets launched.

We can send unmanned spacecraft to places that man could never go – to comets, the surface of Venus, the limits of the Solar System. Telescopes can operate untended in space for years at a time. Hubble has been an enormous success but there will never be another one like it.

Yeah, let’s hope we never launch another telescope that needs glasses!

He expects people to respect his knowledgeable opinion on ANYTHING? HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!!!

Best laugh I’ve had all week.

Michael seems a tad dishonest in claiming to read Phil’s many blogs (plural), including Bad Astrol…oops, Astronomy. I suppose he expects people to respect his knowledgeable opinion in all other matters on the basis of this cute come-on.

The (independent) Augustine Comission correctly declared the Constellation Project to be repeating the same failings of the Shuttle and Station. Obama was right to draw the Comission, then heed its warning:

http://www.nasa.gov/offices/hsf/meetings/10_22_pressconference.html

Go ahead, read it.

Obama has done no favors for the space program. Will be glad to see you acknowledge that.

Those who learn nothing from history….

A lovely article, Phil, but may I point out one thing?
Touchdown was at 10:57:54 GMT, not 09:57:54 GMT. I was watching in the UK.

How nice of you to couch it that way, “larger development budget”. But it WASN’T a “larger development budget” originally. It was JUST a budget to build the original reliable, cost-effective and safe system. It was deemed too costly, so it was REDUCED. So I’m deluded in thinking that spending a sufficient amount of money to build the right system wouldn’t have led to happier outcomes? Do you suppose underfunding makes no difference to the outcome? Who’s deluded here?

“The fully reusable system originally envisioned would have been even more complicated than the system we ended up with.”

You’re wrong. That’s not what most of the NASA engineers who were charged with figuring out an alternative way of getting it up there with the low funding level were themselves saying back in the early ’70s. Perhaps you think all of them were deluded and all of their initial feasibility studies were wrong too.

You confuse “complication” with “complexity”. The fully resusable system originally envisaged might well have been more COMPLEX (after all, one needs to outfit the fly-back booster with a crew cabin and controls, etc., by system and engineering necessities that are entirely welcome), but it would certainly not have been more COMPLICATED by ridiculous measures to remain within the shoe-string development budget, COMPLICATED by trying to figure out how they could just get the orbiter into orbit.

In other words, “complicated” = “unnecessary complexity”. Complication, unlike necessary complexity, is NEVER welcome. The STS system we got was LOADED with it. The system we ended up with was more COMPLICATED than engineering necessity called for. It was so overloaded with complication that it cost more to operate per launch than the expendable 100% liquid-fueld Saturn boosters and it destroyed 2 out of a fleet of 5 vehicles killing 14 astronauts.

And as for extra complexity, any engineer would gladly accept it in the form of liquid-fueled engines over ‘simple’ but risky unthrottleable SRBs any day. Also, compare the original launch configuration ability to return both components safely back to runways to the hopeful return-to-launch-site fantasy contingency that the STS system relied on in the event of a launch emergency. While you compare them, remember Challenger.

A “bigger development budget” expended on the configuration we ended up with as you imply is silly. I was talking about spending what it actually took to build the original system, the one that COULD have been more reliable, cost effective and safer. Yeah, we would have been in a far more happier place today. In the space business, one does it right or not at all. If one can’t afford to do it right, it is irresponsible and dangerous to think one can get away with doing it on the cheap and by cutting corners.

As Ron1 points out: “As to the future of spaceflight, I hope the word’s of Richard Feynman are kept in mind, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, because Nature cannot be fooled.””

And that’s why Constellation was broken from the beginning too.

We can’t cheat our way into space on the cheap. Development is going to cost what it costs. With proper and sufficient funding, we CAN achieve a robustly reliable, economic, routine and safe access to space. It’s been done and amply demonstrated. But the shuttle launch system we ended up with was never anything more than a finnicky experimental contraption…BECAUSE we didn’t invest what it actually took to do it right…we have suffered the inevitable consequences and arrived at an unhappy outcome.

The shuttle is directly responsible for my interest in astronomy, actually; it launched the Hubble, and the Hubble’s amazing images made me want to know more about what’s out there. For that, I’ll forever love the Shuttle.

In the immortal words of Anonymous: Good night, sweet prince.

Although I have no recollection of the Mercury missions, I do remember following most if not all of the Gemini missions. I definitely remember the Apollo 1 fire and closely followed the later Apollo missions. I stayed up late watching the Apollo 11 astronauts walking on the moon (I would have been 12 years old). Apollo 13 was quite a shock and then a relief when they made it back home.

Moving on past the Skylab missions and Apollo-Soyuz, we come to the first Shuttle mission. I didn’t watch the launch although I did see the landing on TV.

Shuttle missions soon became routine and I didn’t really follow them all that closely although the plan to launch a school teacher into space caught my attention and I watched that whole process unfold quite closely. I missed the launch and then very soon discovered to my horror that the Challenger shuttle had exploded after liftoff. There was something about the timing of the event coupled with how NASA and the media had come to treat Shuttle missions as routine that made the event feel like a necessary reminder of the risks of spaceflight.

Once the shuttle started flying again, I found myself following the various missions more closely. I was on a commercial flight from London to North America when Columbia disintegrated during re-entry and learned about it when I overheard some comments from other passengers as I was getting off my plane (presumably, they heard about it in a phone call that they participated in while waiting to deplane). I really started to wonder if humans needed a tragedy every couple of decades to remind us that “reaching for the stars” is not without risk.

Now we come to the end of the Shuttle era. The situation is a lot more complicated than it was when the moon landings ended although there is definitely still reason for optimism. There seems to be little doubt that the human race will continue to send people into space if for no other reason than actually “being there” is not something that a robotic spacecraft can do (this is not to disparage robotic space missions but actually having a human there to _experience_ “being there” matters a lot to me).

While I used to dream of getting into space myself someday, that’s a dream that now belongs to my descendants. Hopefully the day will soon come when humans again dare to dream the sort of big dreams and commit themselves to the sort of effort that led humans to the moon forty years ago.

http://www.century-of-flight.net/Aviation%20history/space/enterprise.htm

I was there.

I was there.