More than 30 years later, when Space Shuttle Atlantis rolled to a stop on the runway July 21, , the shuttle program officially came to a close. First conceived during the heady and well-funded time around the initial Moon landings, the Space Shuttle was intended to provide NASA with a low-cost means to bring humans and payloads to low-Earth orbit. All these potential benefits of the shuttle were piled on top of one key promise: rapid turnaround of the spacecraft between flights.
Some NASA personnel even anticipated that a shuttle would be able to carry out back-to-back flights within just a week or two. Many of the predictions for the Space Shuttle came true: the fleet helped build the ISS, docked with the Mir space station , made extensive use of Spacelab, and carried many important payloads to orbit — including the Hubble Space Telescope , the Chandra X-ray Observatory , and interplanetary probes Magellan , Ulysses , and Galileo , among others.
By any yardstick, NASA can be proud of these accomplishments. First — and perhaps most importantly — the program was wildly expensive. While the shuttle was proposed to make disposable rockets a thing of the past, it did exactly the opposite. Most customers who wanted to put satellites into orbit found conventional rockets to be a cheaper alternative.
Second, the proposed launch schedules and turnaround times for the shuttle fleet were essentially fantasy. The fastest turnaround for any shuttle in the history of the program was 54 days.
And after the Challenger disaster, the fastest turnaround was 88 days — a far cry from what NASA officials thought they could accomplish. Slower turnarounds meant fewer flights, which meant less access to space for paying customers, further driving business away from NASA. Safety was also an issue of paramount importance for the Space Shuttle Program. By the mids, much of the American public thought that spaceflight was routine. NASA was even launching astronauts into space wearing just simple coveralls and helmets, having ditched the pressure suits used in the Mercury , Gemini , and Apollo programs.
This forever dispelled the notion that spaceflight was routine. The shuttle was revealed to be a high-risk, experimental vehicle — something most astronauts had known all along. Still, the space agency took its lashings and made the changes required to get the shuttle flying again. Yet again, the entire crew — this time featuring the highly publicized first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon — was killed. Former president George W.
In that same speech, Bush broached the idea of a new Crew Exploration Vehicle to bring the United States back to the moon and eventually take it to planet Mars.
It would aid in completing the new space lab but would not assist in the new Constellation project that would take astronauts out of low Earth orbit. It was a sad decision to end the Space Shuttle, but Frost deemed it logical. So now, it is important that the United States has an independent capability of being able to launch people to space.
Demo-2 will be the first time that the Dragon spacecraft takes astronauts into space, and if the demonstration mission goes to plan, SpaceX is contracted to supply six more flights to the ISS. The return of launches to U. Boeing is slightly behind SpaceX though, with the company hoping to conduct a manned test flight of the Starliner in Read more. Two of the shuttles had even experienced failure, however, the rate of failure was still equivalent to all other launch vehicles.
There is also a level of innate hazard when it comes to space travel; however, with every disappointment, there has been a considerable improvement in terms of reliability for subsequent flights.
This was one of the factors that made people question the decision to end the project. The main concern was that the program was excessively costly.
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