--- title: NASA's Final Shuttle: The End of an Error? description: It's never been hard to blame Richard Nixon for stuff. Communist witch hunts? Nixon. Illegal war in Cambodia? Nixon. Massive corruption and the decades of... canonical: https://time.com/archive/6934948/nasas-final-shuttle-the-end-of-an-error/ author: Jeffrey Kluger article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2011-07-05T04:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-23T04:47:05.449Z article:section: Health og:title: NASA's Final Shuttle: The End of an Error? og:description: It's never been hard to blame Richard Nixon for stuff. Communist witch hunts? Nixon. Illegal war in Cambodia? Nixon. Massive corruption and the decades of... og:url: https://time.com/archive/6934948/nasas-final-shuttle-the-end-of-an-error/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt4cdb3b8ffdf69288/698a4e44e6e84a34ff2b20ff/360_nixon_shuttle_0701.jpg?branch=production&width=750&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: 360_nixon_shuttle_0701.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: NASA's Final Shuttle: The End of an Error? twitter:description: It's never been hard to blame Richard Nixon for stuff. Communist witch hunts? Nixon. Illegal war in Cambodia? Nixon. Massive corruption and the decades of... twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt4cdb3b8ffdf69288/698a4e44e6e84a34ff2b20ff/360_nixon_shuttle_0701.jpg?branch=production&width=750&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Health](/section/health/) # NASA's Final Shuttle: The End of an Error? by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/) Jul 5, 2011 4:00 AM UTC  President Richard Nixon, right, and NASA administrator James Fletcher discussing the space-shuttle program in San Clemente, Calif., on Jan. 5, 1972 President Richard Nixon, right, and NASA administrator James Fletcher discussing the space-shuttle program in San Clemente, Calif., on Jan. 5, 1972NASA by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/) Jul 5, 2011 4:00 AM UTC It’s never been hard to blame Richard Nixon for stuff. Communist witch hunts? Nixon. Illegal war in Cambodia? Nixon. Massive corruption and the decades of political cynicism that followed? Nixon and Nixon. That’s a little glib, of course. Bad wars, crooked pols and red-baiting were all around before the 37th president. And give the man his props too — for the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the EPA, the opening to China, all of which were genuine Nixonian gems. Then there was the space shuttle, which bears Nixon’s stamp as indelibly as all the rest. It was on Jan. 5, 1972, that Nixon brought the shuttle program into being with a presidential order and an appearance alongside NASA administrator James Fletcher. And this Friday, the 135th and last shuttle mission is scheduled to be launched, ending a program in which five ships carried 777 passengers into space, traveling a collective half a billion miles — or out past the orbit of Jupiter. These shuttles built the International Space Station, carried the Magellan, Ulysses and Galileo probes aloft and sent them on their ways to Venus, the sun and Jupiter respectively. They lofted the Hubble Space telescope too — easily the most productive scientific instrument ever built — and made occasional servicing runs to it, with astronauts conducting surgically precise repair work on the $1.5 billion instrument in the impossibly challenging environment of space. [(See incredible pictures of space, shot by an astronaut photographer.)](http://lightbox.time.com/2011/06/09/our-beautiful-planet-images-from-space-by-an-astronaut-photographer/) But there’s the other side of the shuttle too. The $500 million price tag every time one took off, the months of maintenance and prep work needed between flights, the temperamental electronic and hydraulic systems that scrubbed launches time and time again, the thermal tiles the ships would shed like dry leaves. And, finally, there are the 14 astronauts who lost their lives when first Challenger and later Columbia soared aloft but never returned home. _Video: 30 Years of the Space Shuttle: What Now?_ It’s easy both to hate and love a ship like that. Conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer, who yields to no man when it comes to finely crafted crankiness, distilled that kind of cognitive dissonance splendidly once when he wrote that the space shuttle belongs in “the Museum of Things Too Beautiful and Complicated to Survive.” The fact is, the shuttles almost didn’t exist at all. A reusable, low-orbit space truck was hardly the initial direction NASA was planning to go in the triumphant afterglow of the Apollo program. It wasn’t even the initial direction the Nixon administration advocated. Not long after taking office, Nixon appointed a space task force to determine the future of cosmic exploration, chaired by Vice President Spiro Agnew. The group came back with an ambitious long-term plan that included the establishment of a near-Earth space station, further explorations of the lunar surface and a manned landing on Mars by 1986\. [(See a photo history of the space-shuttle program.)](http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2081213,00.html) “If there is any doubt that a manned landing on Mars has become the next grand objective of the U.S. space program, a reading of the Space Task Group report should dispel it,” wrote one commentator in the January 1970 issue of the _Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists_. “The report … not only designates Mars as the next port of call for astronauts, but also shapes most of the total space program in the next 16 years.” But Nixon wanted none of it — nor of much of the remainder of the existing lunar program either, which was supposed to continue through Apollo 20 but was canceled before its final three missions could be flown. There has always been speculation in space circles that Nixon’s antipathy for the lunar program was based on the fact that it was an idea initiated by President John F. Kennedy — whom Nixon never quite quit resenting. Maybe that’s true; the man who gave us a White House enemies list was clearly not above pettiness. But it’s also true that it was Nixon who was in office when Apollo 11 landed, and thus Nixon who got to perform the presidential touchdown dance — phoning the astronauts on the lunar surface, appearing on the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet to welcome them home. Apollo had effectively become Nixon’s program and any future Mars initiative would have been his baby as surely as the early space push was Kennedy’s. The more prosaic explanation for Nixon’s wariness was money. The Vietnam War was still consuming an outsize portion of the federal budget and inflation was roaring — at 6% in 1970 — prompting Nixon to take the now unthinkable measure of imposing wage and price controls in the summer of 1971\. Throwing money at Mars at a time like that might simply not have seemed tenable. Instead, we’d go the practical route, and a space shuttle would provide the way. [(See pictures of the space shuttle Endeavour docked in space.)](http://lightbox.time.com/2011/06/07/unprecedented-image-of-space-shuttle-released/) A reusable orbital vehicle, Nixon promised in his 1972 statement, “will revolutionize transportation into near space, by routinizing it. \[The vehicle will\] be recovered and used again and again — up to 100 times. The resulting economies may bring operating costs down to as low as one-tenth those of present launch vehicles. \[The trip to and from space will be\] safer and less demanding for the passengers, so that men and women with work to do in space can ‘commute’ aloft.” So how’d all that work out? The answer to that question, which was impossible to know at the time, was probably already baked into the overall plan — and the recipe was never very good. The grand — and so far unattained — dream of all orbital engineers is to design a craft that can take off either from a rolling start like an airplane or an upright posture like a rocket, fly to orbit and come back down without shedding any hardware along the way. [See NASA’s 3-D photos of the sun.](http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2048103,00.html) [See why space exploration is grueling work.](http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2014843,00.html) What makes this so-called single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) concept so elusive is the stubborn, circular nature of the thrust and weight problem. Getting to orbit without shedding parts requires a very powerful engine and a lot of fuel. But a very powerful engine and a lot of fuel add extra weight that must be lifted — which requires an even more powerful engine and even more fuel and on and on. Light, composite materials, very efficient engines and highly energetic fuel bring the goal closer — indeed, they’re part of the design of any good booster — but never quite within reach. In this case, the problem very much _is_ rocket science — and it ain’t easy to do. The solution for the shuttle was to bolt the orange whale of the external tank onto the belly of the orbiter and tack two solid rockets onto the tank. That might have been the only way to get the 89-ton ship moving fast enough to achieve orbit, but it did present the inconvenient problem of positioning the crew directly next to three massive loads of compressed explosives instead of atop it as you would on a traditional rocket. If, say, an O-ring begins leaking superheated gas or a chunk of killer foam falls from the external tank, the astronauts and their spacecraft are directly in harm’s way. That those two things both happened — with the most disastrous consequences possible — is a matter of historical record. That they were both precisely foreseeable is much less certain, but there’s no doubt that smart people knew the ship presented a new portfolio of risks. [(See pictures of the space shuttle Endeavour’s final landing.)](http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2075040,00.html) Then too there was the very idea of reusability. To hear the shuttle’s most enthusiastic supporters tell it, turning the vehicle around between flights would mean little more than hosing it down, gassing it up and putting a little air in the tires — and if the reality had been anything like that, the economies of scale might have brought the price-per-pound of payload down to the one-tenth level Nixon promised. But a crewed vehicle requires complex life-support hardware, redundant safety systems and an overall degree of care that an unmanned booster can do without, and it takes a long time to get everything properly checked out between flights. Nixon might have foreseen a spacecraft that could fly to space 100 times, but the most well-traveled of the five shuttles was Discovery, which made only 38 trips in 28 years. Challenger, the least flown, managed just 10 before its destruction in 1986\. The greatest number of missions ever flown in a single year was nine, in 1985\. As the lags between flights grew longer and longer and the cost of renting payload space remained high, customers fled back to the commercial boosters like the Atlas and Delta. That pushed NASA to cut corners and rush launches which, in the case of Challenger, was a proximate cause of the disaster, as the ship lifted off during a Florida freeze when its O-rings had become dangerously brittle. By the time the shuttles were certified to fly after all of the post-Challenger investigations were complete, they would be used largely as space trucks for the military or for NASA’s own missions, such as space-station construction. [(See stunning images of the universe to scale.)](http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2079745,00.html) Now, with the space station built and the shuttles gone creaky (the first of them rolled off the assembly line in 1979), nothing will quite become the overall program like the ending of it. And yet it will be impossible not to miss the cursed vehicles at least a little. There was always a just-do-it-ness to the decision to fly the shuttles. Tiles fell from one ship and the next one was glued together better and rolled out to the pad. Launches were scrubbed for this or that glitch six or seven times in a row, and the astronauts would gamely suit up for try No. 8\. Seven people died and the crews kept coming. Seven more were lost and still they came. The astronauts and the flight controllers were, by any measure, better than the ships they were given to fly, but the shuttles we had were the shuttles we were capable of building at the time. Two of the missions may have ended in tragedy, but assuming Atlantis returns from its final flight safely, 133 will have concluded with a safe, rolling stop on a familiar earthly runway. We will never get back the billions we spent on the program, and the lives that were lost are lost forever. Still, when the ledger is tallied — when all of the technological, scientific, mortal and moral variables are factored together — we might, just might, end up on the plus side of the page. It’s probably fair to give both Nixon and NASA a pass on this one — provided we all learn from the mistakes we’ve made. [See photographs of Mercury, the closest planet to the sun.](http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2078148,00.html) [See Hubble’s greatest hits.](http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1984100,00.html) ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6934948/nasas-final-shuttle-the-end-of-an-error/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6934948/nasas-final-shuttle-the-end-of-an-error/"},"headline":"NASA's Final Shuttle: The End of an Error?","datePublished":"2011-07-05T04:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-23T04:47:05.449Z","description":"It's never been hard to blame Richard Nixon for stuff. Communist witch hunts? Nixon. Illegal war in Cambodia? Nixon. 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