NASA dreamed of building a spaceship that lifted off like a rocket and landed like a plane. However, not everyone was on board.
The article by David Zinman of Newsday that was reprinted in the August 22, 1971 edition of the Orlando Sentinel began with almost breathless, sci-fi prose:
It is 1979 and we are at Cape Kennedy.A giant rocket roars off its launching pad and climbs to an altitude of 50 miles. Then, it separates from its spacecraft. But instead of dropping off into the ocean, the huge, stubby-winged booster flies earthward like an airplane.
Pilots inside an interior cabin deploy turbo-jet engines and maneuver the rocket smoothly down to a landing strip. Within two weeks, it will be ready for another launch.
Meanwhile, the spacecraft, called the orbiter, has fired its own rocket engines and climbed into Earth orbit.
By 1978, the design for this new-style space vehicle — the Space Shuttle — was locked in and differed enormously from the fantasy Zinman laid out for readers seven years before; the orbiter piggybacking a “rocket aircraft” idea was replaced by a larger orbiter mounted to a sizable external tank, flanked by two solid rocket boosters. But still, the “two weeks turnaround” claim remained according to spaceflight literature of that time. In 1978’s Observer’s Book of Manned Spaceflight, written by veteran BBC aerospace correspondent Reginald Turnill, it was stated that orbital flight test missions were slated to begin in June 1979. Between launches from Kennedy Space Center and Vandenberg Air Force Base, the total number of projected Shuttle missions between 1980 and 1992 was listed at 487 flights.
The early Space Shuttle program was one of burdens and hopes, points and counterpoints. There were countless burdens in designing an entirely new space vehicle beset by public criticism, setbacks, and delays. Engines exploded, tiles fell off, and pundits argued that the program wouldn’t deliver what was promised. But it was also a hopeful time, and NASA — embattled by lessening national support since the Apollo lunar missions — promoted its new program tirelessly in its literature and the media. The Space Shuttle would make spaceflight routine, the agency underscored, making it economical and appealing once again to a public that had long since lost interest even in Moon landings. This is the story of how the Space Shuttle program was viewed during the 1970s as it was being developed through the eyes of the era’s media, experts, and a few astronauts.
Points and Counterpoints
In an interview, Shuttle expert Dennis Jenkins discussed how decidedly unpopular the Shuttle was during the decade it was being designed and championed. Jenkins stated, “Shuttle was not particularly popular during its development. The public had grown disinterested in space (after Apollo 11, even the news media sort of lost interest) and was not particularly enthralled with spending money (remember the 1970s were high inflation, high unemployment, and large, for the time, government deficits) on a program that seemed to offer little benefit to them. The White House and Congress were not impressed for all the same reasons. I truly believe Nixon approved the program for two reasons: he believed in a ‘great’ America, space was an area we could easily show our industrial power and the program promised many jobs, especially in California.”
Jenkins added, “The constant delays (the first flight was supposed to be in 1977/78 — a ridiculous ambition given [NASA] did not start until 1972) and reported problems (Space Shuttle main engines blowing up; tiles) did nothing to help the public relations or congressional aspects. Even the space cadets were not particularly happy about the Shuttle since they saw it as the reason Apollo/Saturn was canceled (ignoring the tremendous cost of that program, which was unsustainable).”
Other sources echo Jenkins’ assertion that the Space Shuttle was failing to find an audience during the 1970s. In the August 1971 Orlando Sentinel article, former astronaut — and by that time, a vociferous critic of NASA — Dr. Brian O’Leary stated that the Space Shuttle was a “commitment to new technology which would serve as a ‘make work’ project for NASA and its contractors in a crippled aerospace industry.” (It also bears mentioning that O’Leary waffled considerably on the topic of the Shuttle, and ended up supporting it, then not supporting it, then supporting it again. By the mid-1970s, O’Leary and other devotees of Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill’s space settlement vision believed Space Shuttle hardware, such as external tanks, could aid in building O’Neillian space habitats.)
Another astronaut who was about to leave the agency as NASA increasingly appeared like it would throw all of its chips on the Shuttle table was Dr. Philip Chapman, whose 1970 memo to fellow astronaut-scientists entitled “Icebergs Ahead” bluntly discussed the public’s increasing lack of support for spaceflight and what that meant for the embattled agency, which was then recovering from the near-disastrous Apollo 13. Chapman was not a fan of what became the Shuttle’s design. In a 2020 interview, he reported, “A major defect of the shuttle was that the orbiter could not be on the nose of the booster because it would be aerodynamically unstable (like mounting feathers on the nose of an arrow). That meant there was no escape for Challenger when the booster blew up. In the case of Columbia, during boost ice or insulation fell from the booster and damaged a wing, so that it broke up on re-entry. Thus the side mount of the orbiter was directly responsible for the deaths of 14 astronauts.” Chapman resigned from his NASA post in July 1972 after it became apparent the Skylab B space station would be canceled to make way for the Shuttle; if he had stayed at NASA, he likely would not have flown in space until at least 1982, if not later.
Chapman was by far not the only Apollo-era astronaut who viewed the Shuttle as a non-starter. Apollo 9 and Gemini 4 commander Jim McDivitt, who served as the Apollo Program Manager until he resigned from NASA in 1972, emphasized in his chapter of Don Shepperd’s The Friday Pilots why he did not stay with the agency to usher in the Shuttle program: “This was a non-starter since the program was grossly over-promised and underfunded.” McDivitt retired from both NASA and the U.S. Air Force before December 1972’s Apollo 17, Apollo’s final lunar mission, entering private industry.
In his last book, The Light of Earth, Apollo 15’s outspoken command module pilot Al Worden also had some things to say about the Space Shuttle. Worden underscored that he didn’t personally believe Apollo was scuttled for financial reasons: “NASA said it was because it was needed to focus on designing and building the shuttle. I know they diverted that Apollo money to the shuttle program, but I think there was also an element of concern that we could destroy all the good stuff we’d done by having one bad accident [with Apollo]. We had weak management back then. It was what I call maintenance management. We already had the Apollo program planned out and scheduled. The only thing they could do was delay a flight or kill the program. So they killed the program. I think that was a testament to the lack of leadership we had at NASA at the time.”
Worden also did not like what he saw as the Shuttle was being designed and developed. The launch vehicle he had flown during 1971’s Apollo 15 — the Saturn V — had survivable abort modes. If something awful had happened to his Saturn V in flight, its Launch Escape System (LES) could have been activated, rocketing him, commander Dave Scott, and lunar module pilot Jim Irwin back to safety; they would have cussed a bit (okay, a lot), but they would’ve survived. Shuttle? Not so much.
There was also the issue of the Shuttle’s center of gravity. Worden explained, “The shuttle…didn’t have centerline thrust, which I found incredibly foolish. With an off-line thrust, as the shuttle headed for orbit and the enormous external tank grew lighter, the center of gravity of the whole stack kept changing. The engines had to be constantly canted to compensate. To keep the whole thing balanced, the heavier liquid oxygen tank had to be placed above the much lighter liquid hydrogen propellant tank. The piping of those tanks had to withstand a lot of additional stress because of the constantly shifting forces caused by this off-balance design.” Worden claimed that Rocco Petrone, a former Apollo program manager, was so unhappy with this design that he resigned: “He did not want to be involved in something that could be very bad for NASA.”
If given the opportunity, would Worden have flown the Shuttle if he hadn’t resigned from NASA in 1975? In his words: “I briefly pondered what might have happened had I stayed at NASA. At one time, the shuttle’s first flight was planned for 1978. That would still have been seven years of sitting around, testing, designing, and other office work. If I had not made a flight already, there is no question I would have stuck around. As it was, with all the shuttle delays, it would have been over ten years of waiting for a second flight. It would, however, have been my first command, so that would have been enticing.”
“Real-World Untested”
While there was a minor exodus of Apollo astronauts from the space agency, by early 1978, NASA had hired a new class of 35 Space Shuttle-bound astronauts, boasting the first African-American, Asian-American, and women candidates. Around this time, the agency began emphasizing to the media that the Shuttle was a low-cost spaceflight alternative that could function as a combination spaceship and cargo vessel carrying satellites, laboratories, and space station modules. “Regular” people — like you and me — also had a chance to fly aboard this spacecraft, which would land routinely just like a commercial airliner.
Moreover, a launch date was just around the corner. A March 25, 1978 article by Geoffrey Hugh Lindop of Gemini News Service that appeared in the Kansas City Times gushed that the first launch would take place on March 31, 1979; in fact, by 1980, NASA was on track to have accomplished seven Shuttle flights. Roughly around this time, astronauts Fred Haise and Jack Lousma began preparations to fly STS-2A by the end of the year to save Skylab, which was starting to descend from orbit thanks to elevated solar activity.
Astronaut Mike Mullane, who was selected as part of the 1978 astronaut class, had followed the Shuttle Program’s early milestones through the pages of Aviation Week & Space Technology, as many had. In an interview, he reported, “In the mid-70s, I didn’t know any more about the shuttle other than what I read in Aviation Week, so I didn’t have any specific attitude/opinion about its design and construction. I always assumed the design and construction were ‘solid.’ After all, I thought, the space shuttle team comprised the same people who put Americans on the moon six times, the greatest engineering accomplishments in the history of man. How could there be any doubt of similar success with the Shuttle?”
Just a year before the Gemini News Service article was published, as NASA was working alongside Star Trek icon Nichelle Nichols to recruit a more diverse astronaut corps, the agency shrewdly maintained in the press that the Shuttle was a cost-efficient alternative to, say, the Apollo Moon missions and expendable human launch systems. The Saturn V, for example, wasn’t reusable in the least, and all of it was “thrown away” in the ocean or Earth’s atmosphere during launch. The Shuttle would be mostly reusable, save for the external tank, and change everything. A January 12, 1977 UPI article excitedly maintained, “The federal space agency is moving into the orbital transportation business on an unprecedented scale, standby fares, discounts and all. Its ‘truck’ is the space shuttle rocket plane set to make its first flight into space in 1979. Because it is reusable, the manned space shuttle is expected to reduce the costs of spaceflight and make orbit more accessible to scientists and businessmen alike.” The price per flight? Reported to be approximately a cool $19 to $20.6 million per flight, a bargain compared to Project Apollo, which totaled nearly $30 billion between 1960 and 1973.
As Mullane became more fully entrenched in Shuttle development after his selection, he too had some doubts about the program: “After [our] selection, our class toured all the major NASA centers and their contractors to see everything coming together and, again, I assumed the finished product was going to be the best that humans could build. But would the ‘best that humans could build’ actually fly? Of that, I did have doubts. Our training was opening our eyes to the incredible complexity of the machine, and every engineer knows the more complex a machine, the more things that can go wrong, sometimes catastrophically…like engines exploding. In our training, we had seen videos of just such explosions ending a couple of shuttle main engine development tests.” Mullane is likely referencing these RS-25 failure films, which have been compiled on YouTube.
As the proposed launch date(s) passed and the actual launch date approached, Mullane’s private concerns intensified: “It also bothered me that the shuttle would fly its first mission manned. That was a very notable exception to all of NASA’s earlier manned programs. In Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, the rockets and capsules were tested in actual flight before any crew flew them. But the only thing with the Shuttle design demonstrated in actual flight conditions were the [Approach and Landing Test] flights which proved the vehicle would glide to a landing from 30,000 feet. Every other shuttle mission flight regime…launch, orbit, and reentry…was validated solely in vibration tests, wind tunnels, computer modeling, and other ‘lab’ type of analysis. It was real-world untested.”
By mid-1978, thanks to the RS-25 engine explosions Mullane had witnessed and ongoing issues with the thermal protective tiles, it was evident that a late 1978 mission to save Skylab was out of the question; by March 1979, when Columbia was delivered to Kennedy Space Center missing a large number of its protective heat shield tiles, most figured that a launch date before 1980 was unthinkable. Enter 1981, the year the Shuttle would finally fly.
A Shuttle stack that looked very different from the proposed one in the August 1971 Newsday/Orlando Sentinel article sat upon Launch Complex 39A at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center in early 1981. Columbia even became a “cover girl,” making the front pages of March 1981’s National Geographic alongside the headline “When the Space Shuttle Finally Flies.” Columbia missed its inaugural launch target date on April 10 that year thanks to a computer synchronization issue. But two days later, on April 12, the orbiter finally lifted off on a yellow-orange column of solid rocket booster flames augmented by the main engines’ blue shock diamonds, finally spaceflight-ready. While the first flight helmed by John Young and Bob Crippen was far from picture-perfect, the crew returned alive — and NASA’s gamble, for the moment, seemed to have paid off. (Thankfully, the main engines that made Mullane apprehensive worked.)
Jenkins remembered, “The first flight, of course, brought renewed interest. The economy was better; Vietnam was over and largely forgotten, so the public showed much more interest, although nothing like early Apollo. Congress and the White House (especially Reagan) were more supportive. Even the space cadets sort of embraced the program. So the early 1980s were probably the high point for Shuttle from all perspectives.”
Mullane’s perspective as an astronaut was understandably more complex than the public’s. He related, “After the first couple of missions, my confidence grew that there was a future for us TFNGs [“Thirty-Five New Guys,” the nickname for his astronaut group]. But a design aspect of the operational shuttle era, which never crossed my radar when I was reading about the program in AvWeek as a non-astronaut, now, as an astronaut, came to the fore…the lack of a crew escape system. I’m sure that concern was rooted in my Air Force flying career, where I always flew in jets with an escape system (ejection seats/pods). In fact, in 1976, my life was saved by the last-second use of the ejection system on a crashing F-111 fighter bomber. But on all my shuttle missions, my fear factor was off-scale ‘high’ on launches because of this design feature…the lack of an escape system. (The ‘off-scale’ high reference is how we described a meter that had passed the marked highest number.) The machine HAD to work, or we were dead. It was only at MECO [main engine cutoff, the final milestone before reaching orbit] that I began to relax on my missions.”
This lack of a viable crew escape system — and survivable abort modes — would tragically be demonstrated later that decade. As Jenkins remarked, “Challenger, of course, changed everything.” But as of April 1981, the Shuttle seemed to have fulfilled its early promise simply by just existing and working. The Reagan-era media also viewed the Shuttle as a way to gain the upper hand in the still-ongoing Cold War. An April 15, 1981 article by New York Daily News’ Joseph Volz enthused shortly after Columbia’s first landing at Edwards Air Force Base, “If nothing else, Columbia will provide a comparatively cheap and efficient means of hauling military equipment into space — spy satellites in particular.” And for a little while, the Space Shuttle fulfilled some of the hopes and dreams of a nation starving for spaceflight.
Big thanks to Dennis Jenkins and Mike Mullane for agreeing to be interviewed for this article.
This article title is derived from the song “The Burdens and The Hopes” by composer Matt Morton from the Apollo 11 Original Motion Picture Soundtrack.
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