The Space Shuttle's Swan Song

The world's most famous spacecraft retires this year, leaving behind only uncertainty.

When the space shuttle Discovery landed for the final time in Florida last week, it marked the beginning of the end for NASA’s 30-year-old Space Shuttle Program. NASA’s two remaining orbiters – Endeavour and Atlantis – will fly their last missions in April and June, respectively. If all goes as anticipated, these two flights will end an impressive run of 135 shuttle missions, but also one marred by two tragic public disasters.

How will we remember and interpret America’s space shuttle technology? Thanks to years of successful missions and public relations, the shuttle program has forged a special place in the American cultural imagination. Symbolically, this complex technical system has been made to stand for innovation, freedom, strength, resolve, and hope. For most, it elicits admiration and approval for the pursuits of science and technology. It turns the daring people who travel inside of it into heroes.

But before the slow military trumpets and solemn lockstep snare rolls get too loud, it is worth taking a closer look at some of the shuttle’s less-appealing attributes: its military origins and applications, its failure as an economic venture, and those ever-looming safety risks. This view is especially important as the United States enters a new era of space uncertainty, one in which new technologies and political configurations for space transport are being planned, tested, and decided upon.

America’s space shuttle technology has a history, and importantly, it is a military one. Despite consistent efforts to brand NASA and its space ventures as “civilian” and primarily “scientific,” U.S. space missions have always had deep connections to military goals and the vast resources of the military-industrial-academic-complex. The space shuttle is only one example of these important, enduring linkages.

The space shuttle is essentially a high-tech descendant of German rocket-powered glider technology that was specifically designed for warfare. The first piloted rocket-powered glider was developed in 1943 for the Luftwaffe to intercept Allied bombers. Though that ended in a failure that killed both the pilot and the program, the concept survived the war. It was transferred to the U.S. along with a large contingent of German aviation and rocket experts as part of Operation Paperclip.

In the U.S. after the Second World War, small groups of scientists working for various branches of the armed services began to think about how best to get soldiers to and from Earth orbit as part of the protracted Cold War contest. In 1954, a proposal for the X-15 – a joint United States Air Force (USAF) and NACA (NASA’s previous incarnation) space plane that rocketed to very-high altitudes and glided back to Earth – was submitted to NACA, and approved for development. The name on the proposal was Walter Dornberger, a former high-ranking Nazi who, during the war, ran Wernher von Braun’s horrific prisoner-staffed V-2 rocket factory. Like von Braun, Dornberger escaped punishment because of his scientific and managerial expertise, and was brought to the U.S. and given powerful positions in the USAF and later at the Bell Aircraft Corporation.

Starting in 1962, the X-15 quietly carried a few military men to the edge of space, but these accomplishments were obscured by NASA’s high-profile rocket-and-capsule-based Project Mercury. Seeing space as a potential theatre of operations, the USAF kept working on vertical-takeoff, horizontal-landing space planes. In 1969, just as NASA was sending humans to the moon, then-president Richard Nixon approved NASA’s Integrated Launch and Re-entry Vehicle, the project that became the Space Shuttle Program.