1. First reusable space craft.
2. Frequency of flight at least as great as conventional rockets.
3. Catastrophy rate comparable to manned rockets.
4. Instrumental to establishing current space station.
5. Gave human interest to space program.

If was over budget, but the reality is that every tech stretching major government program ever devised, is overbudget, behind schedule and doesn’t deliver everything originally promised. No tech challenging Department of Defense program does any better and some do far worse. Substitute civilian space programs that were technologically edge pushing would have had the same flaws.

By any measure of its original objectives, it was a failure, but it was a beautiful technical accomplishment.

Also, pointing to satellites that were designed for the shuttle as proof the shuttle was necessary is a bit circular. They were designed that way, at least in part, because the shuttle was there.

But if we really needed more heavy lift, SpaceX is in the process of showing that a Minimum Cost Design approach to expendable boosters gives you heavy lift well beyond what the shuttle could do, at a fraction of the cost/lb. It’s a shame we didn’t follow Arthur Schnitt’s advice and go down that path 40 years ago.

And of course, from now on a least, it must be robots all the way in space.

We should work to get payloads to orbit cheaply (like with solids and one-use vehicles) and humans to orbit safely. The two should never have been combined. And low orbit for a space station was another mistake.

Maybe by the 22nd century we’ll get things right …

It’s not so much that the shuttle cost a lot — it did.

It’s more like our nation’s failure of leadership and imagination has cost a lot. Not just in terms of the Shuttle, but in terms of Space, science, education, health, quality of life, environment.

The shuttle is just an indicator, not a source.

But to just compare what they said it would cost with what it really cost seems one sided. Especially given the environment NASA is always in where people are constantly questioning why they should even be spending $1.

If the project has a lot of wasteful spending, it will go over-budget.
If the project is under-funded, it will go over-budget.

What I don’t know is what the percentage split is of these 2 realities. 50-50? 30-70?

Now if someone wants to show all the places money was actually “wasted”, so that we can prevent that in the future then that’s fine. I’m all for that.

This is a nitpick, but the “bell” of a rocket engine has little to do with combustion stability. The mixing and combustion of reactants is occurring inside the thrust chamber, upstream of the nozzle throat. The flow through the nozzle becomes supersonic at the throat, so no disturbance downstream, in the bell, can propagate back through that chokepoint.

As for the Hubble… building a series of space telescopes on a production line would have amortized the development cost across multiple satellites, and allowed the initial testing problem to be fixed in later units with no need for repair flights. Putting the satellites into high earth orbit with expendable launchers would have nearly tripled the effective observing capacity of each one, due to reduced pointing constraints, and would have ended up being no more expensive than the series of very costly shuttle repair missions.

As for skepticism in the 1980s: look back to the 1970s, there was skepticism there too:
http://thespacereview.com/article/1868/1

hm. i recall the scientifically oriented press being way skeptical of the shuttle as far back as the 1980s. even granting #3′s argument, i don’t think it is compelling to suggest that we needed to wait *this long* to learn from the mistake in terms of the risk-cost/reward proposition re: the shuttle. the main argument from the scientific community in the shuttle’s defense was that it was important to get more general funding for NASA from what i can tell.

If you stop at doing, you learn, at best, half a lesson. It’s as important, if not more, to take a “clear-eyed look”, as Mr. Zeeberg has, at the very real inadequacies and errors of the program that in future people may avoid falling into the same traps. I applaud him for being willing to take what is likely to be a very unpopular stance, and I hope others will come to agree in the fullness of time.

Doing things in an incredibly stupid way is not glorious. I’d like to think it isn’t quintessentially American, either. Without the Shuttle, maybe we could have afforded a real and progressing manned space program.

The Shuttle program’s most glorious moment was when Atlantis rammed the alien mother ship, in Footfall.
Problem is, that’s just a story.

My apologies for being less than perfectly objective about it, but we did a *lot* of work with the shuttles, even if they didn’t do what someone promised 30 years ago.

And people were proud of them. I’ll never forget standing there, watching Atlantis launch for the last time, with thousands around me chanting “USA”. At a time when we’re all supposed to be embarrassed about who we are, I’ve never seen or heard anything like it… and I fear I won’t again.