Can't live with it, can't live without it.
Twenty years after its first flight on April 12, 1981, the space shuttle continues to amaze and disappoint. It imposes a ruinous tax on our civilian space program, tying us to an expensive, limited, fragile and risky transportation system. But it is the only large, astronaut launch vehicle we have, and no replacement is in sight.
We are mired in the shuttle trap.
The rest of the world envies the United States its space shuttle. The Soviets built a cheap imitation in the 1980s and conducted unmanned test flights before giving up. The Japanese and the European space consortium flirted with a manned, recoverable launch vehicle before thinking better of it.
No other nation has anything like the shuttle, nor is it likely that a competitor will be developed in the foreseeable future. The United States monopolizes the world's most sophisticated launch vehicle. But this technological wonder exacts a high price.
It costs $40 million a ton to lift cargo to low-Earth orbit aboard the shuttle. Astronauts, food, water, experiments, tourists, luggage - all cost $20,000 a pound to travel that first 200 miles into space. And they must fly aboard a cranky, aging, frail technology whose on-time flight record is worse than that of the commercial airlines.
The space shuttle is a technological marvel the United States can ill afford to sustain.A pricey marvel
Try a thought experiment.
If each shuttle flight cost $1 trillion, we would stop flying. If each flight cost $1 million, we would be building more shuttles at a profit to keep up with demand for commercial launch services.
But each shuttle flight actually costs about $1 billion. NASA says it is about half a billion, but they count only marginal costs, not the overhead of maintaining the Johnson Space Center in Houston or the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, to say nothing of the vast infrastructure around the country that supports manned spaceflight.
If you add amortization of development cost - NASA said in 1971 the shuttle would pay these off in the first 12 years of operation - then you approach $1.5 billion as the real cost to the taxpayer of each shuttle flight.
But for purposes of comparison, let's just say $1 billion a flight. That is at least an order of magnitude from the desired cost. Order of magnitude is technical jargon for a power of 10. It has been the most consistent benchmark of launch vehicle performance since the Apollo program first sent men to the moon in the 1960s.
As NASA contemplated its post-Apollo future, it discovered that Apollo's Saturn launch vehicle would be prohibitively expensive in servicing a space station. Using the Saturn, it would cost more to resupply the station every year than it would to put it up in the first place.
What was wanted was a space shuttle, or a space transportation system, as NASA then called it, that could fly to and from low-Earth orbit 10 times more cheaply than Saturn.
In fact, NASA came to promise that the shuttle would fly 100 times more cheaply than Saturn.
In practice, the shuttle proved to be more expensive to fly than the Saturn it replaced.
Desperate calculus
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, both NASA and the Department of Defense called for an order of magnitude reduction in launch cost - NASA for its space station and the Pentagon for the Strategic Defense Initiative and now the Ballistic Missile Defense.
Instead of $1 billion a flight, they needed something on the order of $100 million a flight. At $10 million a flight, the world would beat a path to our launch pad, and the real promise of space would move within reach.
It is ironic, then, that NASA used the economic argument to sell the shuttle in the first place.
The shuttle, NASA promised, would fly cargo to low-Earth orbit for less than $100 a pound. The claim was demonstrably false at the time, but President Richard Nixon and Congress bought in, and NASA spent the 1970s building a launch vehicle that could not possibly do what was claimed for it.
As soon as the shuttle began flying - the first mission was flown by Columbia, with commander John Young and pilot Robert Crippen at the controls - the program's promises came home to roost.
The craft was far more expensive to operate than predicted. Its components failed short of their projected life expectancies. Refurbishment after each flight was longer and more costly than anticipated. And there were simply fewer shuttle flights per year than in the economic model that NASA had used to sell the program.
Fewer flights meant that overhead costs were spread more thickly than predicted. The only way to bring down costs per flight was to increase the flight rates. This desperate calculus culminated in the shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986 that killed seven astronauts.
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