Shuttle Development¶
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Shuttle Development
NASA began thinking about what would happen to the space program after the moon landings even before the first Apollo flight. Dreams about space stations and exploring the planets go back to the days of Hermann Oberth in the 1920s, and articles in Collier magazine by Wehner von Braun in the 1950s. When President Richard M. Nixon took office in 1969, he established a President’s Space Task Group chaired by Vice President Spiro Agnew chartered with the task to determine NASA’s future. This group came up with three options depending on how much money the government was willing to spend on the space program. Each of the proposed options consisted of two or more of the following pieces: a manned Mars expedition, a lunar space station, an earth-orbiting space station, and a reusable space shuttle. President Nixon eventually rejected all of the options.
After intense lobbying by NASA Administrators Paine and Fletcher, along with Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Casper Weinberger, and realizing the potential problems from out-of-work Aerospace engineers in the 1972 election, Nixon approved the development of the Space Transportation System (STS). Once the program was initiated, design studies began. The original concept called for two components, all manned, recoverable and reusable - a booster section about the size of a Boeing 747, and an orbiter section about the size of a Boeing 707. Due to budget constraints imposed by OMB, and the need to meet defense launch requirements, the STS evolved into the present system: a manned orbiter, with two recoverable solid boosters, and an external fuel tank. The first orbiter, named Enterprise after the Star Trek TV series spaceship, rolled out of its production plant in September 1976. It began free flight tests from the top of a Boeing 747 mother ship at Edwards Air Force Base in the summer of 1977. First orbital tests were planned for the early 1980s.