Space Forum / Shuttle / April 2008

Bob, you forgot PR. PR is always number one.

DF

I'm not certain the mindset existed.  No claim surfaced that 'people
knew then' until a former NASA official stated it during the CAIB
investigation.  Other than his somewhat contradictory statements,
there is no evidence to support his claims, and amply evidence to
doubt them.  

For instance he (the NASA official) claimed that 'NASA knew the
shuttle would not fly until 1981'.  How it was known that there would
be such grave problems with development *before the design was even
completed*, and the reason for selecting the 1981 date, remains
unexplained.

Lastly, the gentlemen to whom you are replying has a massive axe to
grind against NASA.

D.

Well, the mindset way back then was to keep our manned spaceflight program
going after Apollo/Saturn ended in 1972 and to sell the shuttle to the
Congress, the White House and the OMB as the cheap way to do manned
spaceflight. Nixon's OMB was holding NASA's feet to the fire to reduce the
cost of human spaceflight which during the Apollo years was viewed as
horrendously expensive. The Cold War was still roaring along and the Soviets
were launching their Salyut space stations just as Apollo was ending. Ten
years earlier, in 1961, Apollo was born out of fear that Sputnik I and
Gagarin's flight (April 1961) were threatening technological breakthroughs
by the Soviet that had military implications. Now, in 1971, with Apollo
ending, Salyut looked similarly threatening. We needed a new manned
spaceflight capability, and NASA's shuttle was touted as the low-cost way to
go.

So, to satisfy the OMB and the Nixon White House,  a mythology was invented
about the cost effectiveness of reusable launch vehicle (RLV) hardware.
According to this rationale, Apollo/Saturn was expensive because that
program used ELVs. The shuttle would have much lower operating cost, $10M
per flight (in FY71 dollars, about $40M per flight in today's bucks) versus
the more than $1B cost for a Saturn V launch because the shuttle is an RLV.
NASA and the shuttle contractors hyped the "airliner-like" operability
expected of the shuttle, relying on the notion that, since the orbiter
looked like an aircraft, had wings and wheels, and landed on a runway
instead of splashing down, most people would buy the notion that the shuttle
should have "airliner-like" operating costs. Each of the competing shuttle
contractors added a major airline corporation to its team as window-dressing
to promote this hype and crapola about shuttle "airliner-likeness".  Of
course, all of this hype about RLV cost effectiveness was sheer speculation
since in 1971 nobody had any flight experience with any type of manned
reusable launch vehicle/spacecraft. And there was plenty of previous work
dating back to the mid-1960s that cast doubt on the notion of RLV
cost-effectiveness. NASA and Air Force big-wigs testified before
congressional committees during the Apollo years that reusability was not
likely to reduce the cost of manned spaceflight.

I was a young, dirty-fingernail engineer working my a.s off on RSI problems
during the Phase A and B period (Jan 1969 thru Dec 1971).  Once we
understood things like the need to completely inspect the TPS (especially
the 7 miles of gap between the tiles) and to re-waterproof at least half of
the 20,000+ RSI tiles between each mission, it was clear that the "160-hour
turnaround" was typical PR hype and proposal crapola that was being used to
sell the shuttle to the Washington decision-makers who hold NASA's purse
strings. The guys and gals working on the orbiter, the SSME and  the SRM/SRB
came to the same realization regarding their own particular shuttle system.
When Nixon approved the shuttle development in January 1972, I don't think
anyone seriously believed that the shuttle operating cost could be as low as
$40M per flight. But not even the most severe shuttle critic way back then
would have believeds that it would turn out to be more than $500M per
flight.

Later
Ray Schmitt