I'm with you on this one, 1600. In an era where the norm was to fire things into space using a 100m tall multi-stage, single-use rocket, the United States/NASA had the balls to try something radically different to any spacecraft that had come before - the idea of a reusable spacecraft was something quite extraordinary at the time.
The Shuttle program was initiated in 1972, with the first Shuttle mission - STS-1, onboard Columbia - lifting off in 1981. A further 134 missions and thirty years later, the program comes to a close with STS-135 - if the whole project was as useless, pointless and expensive as you make it out to be, Danoff, NASA would've canned the whole thing after a year or two. But 30 years down the track?
Going from a system that ultimately proved to be very reliable, with only one failed launch (Challenger, 1986) and one failed re-entry (Columbia, 2003) in 134 missions, to a significantly more agricultural two-stage rocket that first launched in 1966 seems to me like NASA's going back in time 40 years. Yes, Soyuz launchers are (relatively) cheap by space flight standards and one of the more reliable rocket families, but space flight should be the forefront of innovation. It is in my opinion the greatest technological achievement of mankind, and as such as the years roll by we should be seeing more and more advanced methods for shooting people up into space. Instead, what do we get? 1960s Russian rockets and the Delta IV (maiden flight 2003, but its predecessors also date back to 1960 and have only launched satellites thus far)...
I'm not going to lie, I'll be watching the stream of the launch with a tear in my eye. Rhyme not intentional.
You give the US government and NASA a little too much credit when you say that if it didn't make sense it would have been canned long ago. Shuttle is the single heaviest launch vehicle we have today. Saturn V (60s technology) was bigger and better. Going back to the 60s would be an
improvement in technology, it would take us
closer to your goal. The Saturn V was the pinnacle of the rocketry.
Think about what gets accomplished on a shuttle mission. A few low earth orbit experiments if we're lucky? Maybe take some supplies to the space station? Do you know how much real science we can do with something as expensive as a shuttle launch?
Each shuttle launch costs approximately $0.5 billion dollars. The Cassini-Huygens is one of the most expensive missions NASA has, and it only costs 6 times that. Cassini launched in 1997, has been discovering incredible things at saturn since 2004. Seven years of orbit at saturn, the discovery of sub-surface oceans on enceladus, piercing the shroud of Titan to study it's methane lakes and
putting a friggin lander on the surface, the uncovering the bizarre and captivating two-tone Iapetus, and understanding how it got that way... Seven years of discovery and understanding of the outer portion of our solar system for the price of
six shuttle launches.
The Dawn mission is an ion propulsion mission powered by massive solar arrays. The spacecraft uses the electricity from the sun to ionize and focus xenon flow to propel the spacecraft two two enormous asteroids in the main belt - Vesta and Ceres. Dawn will orbit both asteroids to better understand the formation of our solar system. Dawn launched in 2007 and will wrap up its prime mission in 2015. That entire mission is funded by the cost of a single shuttle launch. NASA will catalog two of the largest non-planetary bodies in our solar system and learn a great deal about the planetary formation for the cost of a single shuttle mission.
The Hubble space telescope originally cost only a single shuttle launch to build... and yet we launched the shuttle for the sole purpose of fixing it on orbit.... We spent half a billion dollars to repair a $400
billionmillion dollar telescope. And then.... we did it again! Another half billion dollars to service a $400
billionmillion dollar telescope. We launched Hubble inside the shuttle.... that's like launching two hubbles. So... just to keep track, we launched a shuttle to launch hubble (ridiculous), we launched another shuttle to repair hubble (ridiculous), and we did it a third time. We spent an extra 1.5 billion so that we could do it with shuttle.
Half a billion dollars is a ridiculous sum for what we do with our shuttle launches. It could fund real space exploration instead of messing around with weightlessness, so that we can capture images like this one:
...which have real scientific value. Instead of conducting experiments that might be do-able on board a KC-135.
....and for those of you who think it's impressive that the shuttle is re-usable? Consider just how much of it gets rebuilt and reconditioned after each use. The term "re-usable" is used very loosely here. We spend a fortune rebuilding them after each use.
