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. The shuttle was planned to not only visit Skylab, but also help with the construction of Skylab’s successor space stations. Using the Spacelab module (built by the European Space Agency), which was located in the rear of the shuttle’s cargo bay, the Space Shuttle could pull double duty, performing many scientific experiments originally intended to be carried out aboard full-fledged space stations.
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.
Still, the Space Shuttle fell short in many respects.
First — and perhaps most importantly — the program was wildly expensive. The average cost of a shuttle launch was a mind-boggling $450 million, far more than NASA had predicted. 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.
The hazards of the Space Shuttle