Ignition Protocol / Programme
Space Shuttle
Sold as cheap and routine access to orbit, and operated at experimental aircraft prices for thirty years. What it was really for was keeping a crewed programme alive after Apollo on a budget that forced a compromised design.
The Space Shuttle was approved in 1972, first flew on 12 April 1981 and stopped on 21 July 2011 after 135 missions. It was funded on a promise of about 54 million dollars a flight in 2011 terms; by 2010 the incremental cost of one flight was 409 million dollars, and the thirty year programme came to roughly 196 billion dollars in 2011 dollars.
How it went
The vehicle was shaped by the budget and by Air Force payload and cross range requirements, not by what would make a reusable spacecraft cheap to turn around.
STS-1 flew on 12 April 1981 and worked, which hid how thin the margins were on a vehicle with no crew escape system through most of its ascent.
Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after liftoff on 28 January 1986 with seven aboard, and the flight rate never came back to what the economics had assumed.
Columbia came apart on reentry on 1 February 2003 with seven aboard, and that accident is what set the retirement date.
The fleet finished assembling the International Space Station and then stopped on 21 July 2011, leaving the United States with no crewed vehicle of its own for nine years.
What it flew
What it cost, what it got
NASA counts 135 missions and 852 crew members flown, against two vehicles destroyed and fourteen people killed. It built the space station and it never once produced the economics it was funded on: about 196 billion dollars in 2011 dollars across thirty years works out near 1.5 billion a flight.
Sources
- Space ShuttleNASA
- Space Shuttle programWikipedia