Greed and go-fever: the tragedy of the Space Shuttle
The rumble. The power. The roar. Even a video of a launch can convey the enchanting spell the Space Shuttle cast on any spectator. With its alluring futuristic yet familiar looks and sheer vigor, it’s hard not to fall in love at first sight. And yet, with all that beauty, the Space Shuttle Program was pockmarked with fundamental flaws causing deadly consequences, resulting mostly from the juxtaposition of overambition, public relations, and reality.
The Space Race and moon fever of the 1960s saw an unprecedented amount of public support for space in the USA, with NASA's budget reaching an all-time high of over 4% of federal spending in 1966. All this enthusiasm and money led to President Nixon demanding post-Apollo space mission proposals in February of 1969, before humans had even set foot on the moon. The resulting plan was known as the Space Transportation System (STS). It involved space stations near both the Earth and moon, a sort of space tug boat to move payloads between Earth orbits, a space ferry for transportation between the Earth and moon, and reusable space shuttles for launching from Earth. The program also aimed to put humans on Mars by the end of the twentieth century at the latest.
But once humans did reach the moon and repeated this feat several times, the public adopted a ‘been there, done that’ attitude towards crewed spaceflight. And that’s where the trouble begins. By 1970, NASA’s budget had dropped to just under 2% of the federal budget. Congress, mirroring public opinion, wouldn’t fund the plan, and Nixon pulled the plug on all of its elaborate components except the space shuttle; it would operate merely in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), transporting crew and payloads, building the ISS, and servicing satellites.
NASA’s task was clear: convince Congress, convince the public, and get that funding back. To ensure the future of the program, NASA had to make some compromises – with more dire consequences than they may have realized. Firstly, they outsourced most of the building of the shuttle to outside companies, such as the United Space Alliance (consisting of Lockheed Martin and Rockwell International, which was later replaced by Boeing); up to 90% of the program’s budget went to its contractors. This system kept the money flowing from Congress through NASA into the pockets of these companies, creating more jobs in certain congressional districts as well as corporate growth, which voters – and who they vote for – love. In fact, they loved it so much that many of these contracts – and the corresponding money flow – have been taken over into NASA’s Artemis program.
As an additional insurance policy against cancellation, NASA dangled the shuttle in front of the considerably richer US Air Force, who eventually bit. The Air Force agreed to help NASA out with the development costs, but in return, demanded significant changes to the vehicle for their own uses. It is now known that the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) – a secretive and very rich US intelligence agency which has members in the Air Force and specializes in spy satellites – was heavily involved in the design of the vehicle.
Basically, the NRO wanted to launch spy satellites into polar orbit (orbiting the Earth vertically rather than horizontally): an especially popular method for intelligence satellites because as the Earth orbits perpendicularly underneath the satellite’s orbit, the satellite can scan over the entire Earth. However, to get these satellites into polar orbit, bigger launch vehicles are needed, as the Earth’s rotational velocity cannot be used as a boost during launch. Because the shuttle was reusable and was meant to land on a landing strip like a plane instead of ditching in the ocean, this change also demanded larger wings on the shuttle for increased maneuverability.
Therefore, the new design was much bigger and bulkier to fit the NRO’s needs, which didn’t help the cost; much of the shuttle needed to be covered in heat tiles for reentry – around 20,000 of them – which came at a thousand dollars a pop. Plus, the larger the vehicle, the more fuel it needs to get into space, and the more massive it will be. So, to deal with those costs, reusability (one of the primary goals of the project) was next to hit the chopping block. While the main shuttle (orbiter) remained reusable, it was adorned with a throw-away fuel tank and two (also reusable) boosters to help lift this colossal mass. Once the NRO was done with it, the resulting vehicle was far from its original design.
Here are its basic components:
Orbiter
There were 5 functional orbiters used over the course of the program: Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour (there was also Enterprise, a test vehicle not capable of spaceflight). The orbiter, which contained the crew and payload, would launch as a rocket and land as a plane on a runway. Therefore, it came equipped with wings and a tail rudder for maneuvering, as well as landing gear.
Engines
The orbiter has three RS-25 engines (also called Space Shuttle Main Engines - SSMEs), gimbaled, meaning they can move around and steer the shuttle. The engines are 229 centimeters in diameter, making them quite large; as such, they operate more efficiently in a vacuum than at sea level, but burn for the entire flight. They use liquid oxygen (LOX) as the oxidizer (a substitute for air the fire needs in order to burn; there is no air in space) and liquid hydrogen as fuel.
Crew cabin
This was the pressurized area of the orbiter. It had three decks: the first was the cockpit, with seats for the commander, pilot, and other crew members. Below that was the mid-deck, with more crew seats, a galley, storage, toilets, and bunks. There was also an airlock here, meaning it could dock with the ISS (that the space shuttle was involved with building until its completion and the program’s end in 2011) or Spacelab, a mobile laboratory the shuttle could bring with it.
Payload bay
Here is where the shuttle’s cargo was stored; it comprised a large portion of the vehicle’s middle section. The Remote Manipulating System, or Canadarm, was a crane-like structure that the crew could use to handle payload.
The orbiter’s engines themselves weren’t strong enough to lift the vehicle into orbit, so two boosters helped it out. At over three million pounds of thrust each, these produce more than double that of one of the most powerful liquid fuel engines, the F-1s used on the Saturn V.
The way these solid rocket engines work is that instead of keeping the oxidizer and fuel separate (and liquid), and having them combust upon coming together, the two are already mixed – but are in solid form. In this case, they were ammonium perchlorate (oxidizer) and atomized aluminum powder (fuel). The result sort of looks like a round cement block with a hole in the center.
Upon ignition, the flame travels through this hole, eating up all the solid propellant. But with their extreme power comes a significant caveat: once ignited, they cannot stop.
The engines are ignited electrically by the flight computer once the SSMEs are at 90% thrust, as a kind of insurance policy; you don’t want to set one of these off accidentally. After around two minutes of flight, the flame will have burned through all 11 segments of the solid propellant. The empty shell will jettison (detach), fall back to Earth, parachute into the ocean, and get refurbished, ready for its next mission.
To fuel the orbiter, a large external tank holding both the fuel and oxidizer was required. It consisted of a 29-meter tall liquid hydrogen tank at the bottom, and a 15-meter tall LOX tank at the top, as well as so-called umbilicals that transferred fuel and electronics.
There was also an intertank that contained flight electronics. It was connected to both the solid rocket boosters and the orbiter, providing some structural stability as well.
Seconds after the orbiter’s Main Engine Cutoff (MECO) at around 8.5 minutes into the flight, the tank would detach and fall back to Earth, resulting in damage from atmospheric reentry. These massive tanks were not recovered.
Alright, NASA thought; the shuttle was a little bigger, a little different, and a little more expensive than initially planned, but that’s workable. To convince Congress, though, the agency needed to compromise yet again. Their plan was to offer launches at below cost in the hopes that the reusability would result in more frequent launches – around once a week (up to 60 times a year). This frequency would make up for the underpriced costs. But it was not to be.
It was planned that one orbiter would have a two-week turnaround time for maintenance and repairs between missions. However, the fixing and testing of unexpected problems that occurred during flight resulted in months between one shuttle’s missions. These were due to the extreme ambition of the program, changes made by the NRO, and the very new, untested technologies that made the shuttle reusable, as opposed to previous expendable vehicles like the Saturn V.
Because of these issues, turnaround time grew from the predicted two weeks to an all-time minimum of 54 days. They also might have glossed over that due to the lack of a proper abort system for the crew, everything about the vehicle had to work absolutely perfectly. This all led to astronomical labor costs and, of course, delays, making the program highly unreliable. After starting launches in 1981, by the mid-1980s, NASA had accepted launching only around a maximum of 24 times a year, burying their initial plan of frequent launches and further snowballing the cost.
But NASA needed this program, and badly. Not only did they want the public interest for spaceflight and resulting budget increases, but the agency also bore on its shoulders the weight of restoring the US to its pre-Vietnam, moon-landing level of glory, according to sociologist Diane Vaughan. Therefore, the idea of including public citizens on shuttle flights was pushed for as early as 1982, a year after the program’s first launch, while it was still in its ‘embryonic’ stage. In addition, NASA showed a pattern of ignoring and becoming desensitized to existing or repeating problems on the shuttle in order to maintain public image and increase launches: a practice coined as ‘normalization of deviance’ by Vaughan.
This tragically came to a head in 1986 with the Challenger disaster, when the vehicle – the shuttle Challenger and its boosters and tank – exploded a minute after launch, resulting in the deaths of all seven of its crew. Onboard were six NASA astronauts and one schoolteacher, Christa McAuliffe, as part of the Teachers in Space Project. The aim of the project was to increase interest in space, particularly among children. A highly publicized event, it was covered nationwide by CNN and watched by many students in school with NASA’s specially-made satellite feed. It was a PR dream and all neatly scheduled out; the pressure to launch was immense. But Roger Boisjoly, an engineer at Morton Thiokol (the company that built the boosters, now a part of Northrop Grumman) noticed a problem.
It concerned the right booster, or to be exact, two of its O-rings. O-rings, made of flexible rubber, prevent gas or fuel from escaping by sitting in a groove between two compartments, sealing the joint. But on previous launches, they had partially eroded. Boisjoly begged those in charge to not go ahead with the launch, as the cold temperatures on the day would cause further stiffening of the rubber, minimizing their elasticity and ability to seal the vehicle. However, Morton Thiokol’s contract was up for review, and they wanted to launch. Besides, nothing ever happened before, so what could go wrong? Boisjoly was overruled, and the launch went ahead.
It all happened very quickly. As the seal failed, a flame licked out of the affected right booster and burned through one of the struts connecting it to the large middle fuel tank. This caused the tail end of the booster to twist outwards, and its nose pierced the tank. The tank carried both LOX and liquid hydrogen, causing the propellant to mix all at once, and the whole thing went up in flames, including the shuttle (orbiter). Harrowingly, the astronauts probably survived the initial explosion and may have been conscious until the crew cabin hit the water.
You’d think that would be the last of this normalization of deviance, but it seemed that ‘go-fever’ – management (not engineers) favoring quick launches at the cost of safety – was still infectious at NASA. In 2003, avoidable tragedy struck again with the Columbia disaster. This time, the orbiter’s demise and the deaths of seven astronauts happened during reentry. At launch, protective foam from the external tank struck the orbiter’s heat protection tiles on the left wing, damaging them. This was nothing new; it had happened before, but like the O-rings, because previous consequences were not disastrous, it was ignored.
Incidentally, Columbia was refurbished by Boeing and the United Space Alliance prior to its final flight; while protection was added to protect the orbiter from debris, Boeing spokesman Dan Beck stated ‘he was unsure whether there was work done to the tiles on the wings.’ Staff were aware of the situation, but nothing could be done about it in orbit. Upon reentry, the damaged heatshield failed and the hot atmosphere ripped the wing apart, which then destroyed the orbiter. A combination of depressurization, trauma, and hot debris is likely to have killed the astronauts. The two disasters made the shuttle program the deadliest space program in history.
During an investigation of the Challenger disaster, physicist Richard Feynman stated that ‘for a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled’. While that advice seems to have been forgotten leading up to Challenger and Columbia, it sums up the Space Shuttle Program quite well: born from the simple goal to maintain a presence in space, but severely weighed down by PR, funding, and bureaucracy.
Though we have the space shuttle to thank for the ISS and many other achievements, it may have been just a little too versatile. The thing is, it didn’t really have a universal goal to unite all parties involved. Everyone wanted something a little different. NASA wanted funding and to dazzle the public, leading to rushed, sloppy operations (hell, they even let senators take a spin in the shuttle in exchange for congressional support). The NRO wanted a specialized satellite launcher, not a spaceship, leading to a suboptimal, flawed vehicle. Companies such as Morton Thiokol just wanted their payday without the hassle of safety precautions. And the US government wanted to relive its Apollo days without going to the moon again.
This lack of unity led to the program costing over 200 billion dollars: 450 million per launch (1.6 billion including maintenance, buildings, wages, etc). What everyone seemed to have forgotten about, though, was the nature of space itself; despite all of its fascinations and opportunities, overlooking the very real danger it poses can have unforgivable consequences.
But when space is taken as inspiration instead of as a mere side effect, it changes everything. Take the Apollo program: yes, the motivation might have been socking it to the Russians, but reaching the moon was the one common goal for everyone involved. Establishing such a common cause before beginning the project would unify the process instead of tearing it into different directions. Perhaps, instead of toning down the space program in the face of waning public interest, a common goal, such as going further than ever before – to the moon, Mars, or beyond – could recapture the people’s imagination. Sort of like how a country’s athletes winning the Olympics brings about a sense of national pride, sending humans to the moon, Mars and beyond can unify us as a planet and grant us profound perspective, leaving bureaucracy and other earthly nuisances in the dust.