Perhaps naively i always saw the space shuttle programme as a science-driven project, a step away from the militaristic and political nature of the Space Race the previous two decades.
However, on yesterday's front page video of the first shuttle test flights people were commenting about how it was heavily driven/pressured by the US Air Force in its development and design, role and missions. Others claimed that this military involvement impacted on the safety and cost-effectiveness of the programme.
Can anyone shed some light on whether all this is true?
Maybe this is well-known in the USA, but i'm from the UK and had never heard about this before. I tried to look online for some information but most of it was either limited, glossed over or ignored.
Thanks.
Great question. My father was active duty Air Force and played a part in training many of the shuttle astranouts daily. I too am interested in reading an answer.
With that in mind, may I ask a couple clarifying questions? Was the shuttle program a failure? Can one also include a brief summary of how the shuttle program came to be? Was it deemed a failure from the start since planetary/lunar exploration was delayed in favor of skylab /budgetary concerns during the Nixon administration?
In addition, I have a question for the mods. I talk to father regulary and would love to ask my dad about his work in the Air Force in conjunction with the Space Program. Can I share his answers to this sub, and in doing so, should I post here or should I do so in another thread? How would you like to see it cited? Is a conversation to informal? Should it be a proper interview.
Greatly.
The key point is to make the distinction between the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the Air Force itself. The regular Air Force paid for rocket & space technology development but not spy satellite design & development. That money came from the NRO.
The NRO came about in the early 1960s because the three main service branches (Army, Navy, and Air Force) could not agree to share national space intelligence gathering assets. The Air Force and Navy each had programs to build their own spy satellites, some manned. The X-20 is the preeminent example of the Air Force's space efforts, a hypersonic glider that could gather intelligence while placing satellites in orbit. The Air Force's Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) planned to use a Gemini B capsule to gather the same intelligence at lower cost after MacNamara's cancellation of the X-20 as its budget increased.
As for the shuttle, the regular Air Force desired a reusable spaceplane from the days of the X-20 Dynamic Soarer (Dyna-Soar). The Air Force also bore the responsibility of building the launch vehicles to place NRO satellites in orbit. NRO requirements drove much of the Space Shuttle's design, especially payload weight and cargo bay dimensions.
NRO requirements also influenced the selection of Vandenberg AFB and Cape Canaveral (Patrick AFB) as launch sites, as the agency needed to launch satellites into geostationary (Patrick, Vandenberg), LEO equatorial (Patrick), polar (Vandenberg) and highly-elliptical/retrograde orbits (Vandenberg). Additionally, the Air Force funded a Space Launch Complex (SLC-6) at Vandenberg for use with NRO and military payloads that never saw use because of the Challenger disaster. Interestingly, the AF also wanted to use SLC-6 with the MOL back in the 1960s.
So far as how it contributed to its perceived failure? The two shuttle disasters slowed down launches and rockets have always been more cost-effective at deploying payloads than the Space Transportation System (STS). Rockets are cheaper, simpler, more reliable, and tailorable to specific missions. The shuttle proved to be an expensive white elephant. Read the article from 1980 posted below for early criticism of the program.
A great article criticizing the shuttle in 1980. Not necessarily relevant but very illuminating about the shuttle's design process:
http://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.html
Do you have a link I might be able to follow-up on the supports or otherwise documents the perceived failure of the program?
I linked it in the other thread you mention, but I would recommend this interview with Maxime Faget, the former Manned Spacecraft Center director of engineering and development, from the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. He talks about this about 3/4 of the way down the page, beginning with the following paragraph, but the whole interview is fascinating.
At that time, the NACA needed help with Congress, so they negotiated with the Air Force to use the thing, and the Air Force said, "Well, we'd be glad to use it, but you've got to make the cargo bay much larger and you've got to carry a lot more cargo than you're anticipating," which, again, made the feasibility of two stages completely reusable very, very difficult. The first stage got to be, with weights at landing, of 800,000 pounds. So you can imagine just—and even with those big stages, there didn't seem to be an awful lot of weight margin for growth, weight growth, and people were rather uncomfortable with the idea of going ahead with that.
If you're really interested in this question then I'd recommend reading Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her. It goes into pretty extensive detail about the military's involvement with the development of the space shuttle.