Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [21]
The lack of an escape system aboard operational space shuttles—indeed, the very idea that NASA could even apply the termoperational to a spacecraft as complex as the shuttle—was a manifestation of NASA’s post-Apollo hubris. The NASA team responsible for the design of the space shuttle was the same team that had put twelve Americans on the moon and returned them safely to Earth across a quarter million miles of space. The Apollo program represented the greatest engineering achievement in the history of humanity. Nothing else, from the Pyramids to the Manhattan Project, comes remotely close. The men and women who were responsible for the glory of Apollo had to have been affected by their success. While no member of the shuttle design team would have ever made the blasphemous claim, “We’re gods. We can do anything,” the reality was this: The space shuttle itselfwas such a statement. Mere mortals might not be able to design and safely operate a reusable spacecraft boosted by the world’s largest, segmented, uncontrollable solid-fueled rockets, but gods certainly could.
It would be more than just the unknowns of a new spacecraft that TFNGs would face. NASA’s post-Apollo mission was also uncharted territory. Having vanquished the godless commies in a race to the moon, the new NASA mission was basically a space freight service.
NASA sold Congress on the premise the space shuttle would make flying into space cheap and they had good reason to make such a claim. The most expensive pieces of the system, the boosters and manned orbiter, were reusable. On paper the shuttle looked very good to congressional bean counters. NASA convinced Congress to designate the space shuttle as the national Space Transportation System (STS). The legislation that followed virtually guaranteed that every satellite the country manufactured would be launched into space on the shuttle: every science satellite, every military satellite, and every communication satellite. The expendable rockets that NASA, the Department of Defense (DOD), and the telecommunications industry had been using to launch these satellites—the Deltas, Atlases, and Titans—were headed the way of the dinosaur. They would never be able to compete with the shuttle on a cost basis. NASA would be space’s United Parcel Service.
But this meant that, of all the planned shuttle missions, only a handful of science laboratory missions and satellite repair missions would actually require humans. The majority of missions would be to carry satellites into orbit, something unmanned rockets had been doing just fine for decades. Succinctly put, NASA’s new “launch everything” mission would unnecessarily expose astronauts to death to do the job of unmanned expendable rockets.
As we TFNGs were being introduced, NASA had to have been feeling good. They had a monopoly on the U.S. satellite launch market. They also intended to gain a significant share of the foreign satellite launch market. The four shuttles were going to be cash cows for the agency. But the business model depended on the rapid turnaround of the orbiters. Just as a terrestrial trucking company can’t be making money with vehicles in maintenance, the shuttles wouldn’t be profitable sitting in their hangars. The shuttle fleet had to fly and fly often. NASA intended to rapidly expand the STS flight rate to twenty-plus missions per year. And, even in the wake of post-Apollo cutbacks, rosy predictions said they had the manpower to do it.
The shift from the Apollo program to the shuttle program represented a sea-change for NASA.Everything was different. The agency’s new mission was largely to haul freight. The vehicle doing the trucking would be reusable, something NASA had no prior experience with. The