I'm seeing a lot of misinformation in this thread. I am a young Aerospace engineer working on Orion, and i wanted to clear some things up. And honestly most of this info is easy to find with a simple Google search. I'll just give a summary.
The shuttle WAS an engineering marvel, even into the 2000s, that is a fact. And it's fine to admire it as such.
There was NOT anywhere near enough political will at the end of Apollo to move forward with more moon missions or a mission to Mars, etc. The US had won the race, it was over, at least in the eyes of the people making the financial decisions.
Funding to NASA was drastically lowered (as a percentage of annual federal budget) PRIOR to the shuttle's final development. The shuttle had to be redesigned multiple times becoming less and less ambitious each time due to dwindling national and political interest/support and thereby funding. Eventually NASA had to cut a deal with the USAF in order to even build the shuttle. The air force put additional constraints on what the shuttle had to do, again limiting NASA.
The USAF ended up backing out of the deal very late in the process, leading to a shuttle with USAF constraints and requirements but no USAF missions.
The end product was a vehicle that, while an impressive feat of engineering, was NOTHING like the original designs(especially in scope), didn't have a super clear purpose, had limited support from the beginning, had a fraction of the Apollo budget, and had HUGE expectations following the success of the Apollo program.
There were some design issues that in hind sight could have been solved better, but design flaws were NOT the primary problem with the shuttle. Ultimately, the shuttle did what it's final design intended for quite well.
Having studied both the engineering aspects of the shuttle, and specifically the Challenger and Colombia disasters, as well the management decisions prior to the disasters, it is my opinion that the Primary cause of BOTH disasters was far and away the poor decisions made by Non-Engineer Managers. Most of the decision making managers had little to no engineering experience, and in both cases actively ignored the concerns of the engineers. Engineers said DONT launch prior to Challenger, but managers more concerned with launching on time ignored them. In Colombia, engineers had repeatedly complained about the foam strike, but management refused to address it. Engineers knew that the foam caused damage particularly on launch of the final Colombia mission, and one Engineer tried to get access to a DoD telescope to inspect the damage, but management stifled the attept.
Ultimately, we did learn tons from the shuttle program, many things that are hard to quantify. True, the shuttle did not live up to many people's expectations, but they were unrealistic expectations made by people who don't understand the complexity of rocket science and or didn't realize that NASA funding (again, as a fraction of federal budget) had been dramatically reduced.
The shuttle did not "hold back" progress in space exploration. People did. The American public did. They voted with a list of priorities that didn't include space exploration. I won't debate the importance of the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, the antiwar movents, the social welfare moments, the war on drugs, the war on terror, etc. The fact of the matter is that almost 2 full generations simply didn't care enough about space exploration.
Don't quote me "per launch cost" and such, as those numbers can be manipulated in a myriad of ways. I've seen the costs and done the math. The shuttle did not reduce cost to LEO significantly but was NOT definitively cost inefficient. Saturn V could NOT have done all the things the shuttle did. We would have had to develop 2 or 3 separate systems over the 70s-00s in order to achieve what we did with the shuttle, and total cost of such undertakings would have almost certainly exceeded what was spent on the shuttle program.
Ultimately, this popular idea that the shuttle was a failure, is unfounded. People making this claim clearly are misinformed. The people who make this claim and perpetuate it seem to have little scientific/Engineering/ or even historical knowledge, so be careful who you listen to.
The shuttle was an under-funded and under-supported program without a clear and consistent goal or purpose, and yet it still accomplished many impressive things and flew for 30 years. The public was not interested in providing support for the program, and yet had expectations higher than for Apollo. The shuttle gets a bad rap, when really is the American people (and people worldwide) who are to blame for our species stagnation in space exploration.
I just hope my generation doesn't make the same mistake.
Sent from my iPad
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