[The Antiyuppie]

My 0.02, the Space Shuttle was a system that was crippled from the start, because they couldn’t afford to make the booster truly reusable (one design had it manned also, a lot like the Rutan system); they couldn’t make the orbiter reusable without major refurbishment either, due to technological and budgetary constraints. The turn-around time was not even close to what had been originally planned, and the per-flight cost was also much higher than originally planned. I don’t think it was considered to be “the answer” when it was completed; it wound up to be an interim design that kept flying because it was all that we had.

[MCSP2008]

Salve

Thank you for this great inside information. Now it seems a lot of things could be done better, but looks like politicians wanted to have some say.

Merci

[hopespringseternal]

A continually shrinking budget and growing requirements made it impossible to meet reusability design goals. Nixon pretty well destroyed any possibility of the shuttle succeeding and Carter nailed the lid on its coffin. It wasn't until Challenger that NASA came to terms with reality.

And it has probably only been in the last 5-10 years that NASA actually stopped actively sabotaging commercial space.

NASA should have been allowed to move forward with exploration after the moon, but instead they wound up running the shuttle. If you watch the science fiction from the time, everyone expected space exploration to grow. Instead it died on the vine.

Nixon should have killed Johnson's "Great Society" programs to fund space. He chose to do the opposite. Those programs are now bankrupting us, and we are missing the tax base a vibrant space industry would provide.