It was more costly, more dangerous and less reliable than NASA dreamed,
but over 30 years the space shuttle program had its proud moments
It is hard to remember now, three decades on, how thrilling it was to see for the first time a spacecraft landing not with a splash, but swooping from the sky, the shuttle Columbia a brilliant white against the blue, gliding onto the Mojave Desert, parachute billowing behind.
But it wasn't so. Costs soared. Two of the five shuttle spacecraft blew up in catastrophic accidents. Fourteen astronauts, including a schoolteacher, lost their lives. NASA wound up making less than half the shuttle flights it promised.
And now it's all about to end. If stormy weather doesn't scrub Friday's scheduled launch, Atlantis will lift off for the 135th, and last, flight of the shuttle program. When Atlantis comes home from its 12-day mission, it will be wheels down for the shuttle era.
Space shuttles flew more than 500 million miles, but never got where Americans dreamed of going. The shuttle program was, in the words of former astronaut Duane Carey, who flew in 2002, a "magnificent failure."
The magnificence was in the innovation, the discoveries and the international cooperation fostered by the shuttle and the space station it served. The shuttle carried into space representatives of 16 other countries; in space travel, the United States and its former Cold War nemesis Russia have come closer, and shared more, than in any other sphere of life.
Speaking of magnificence, shuttle astronauts hauled up the Hubble Space Telescope and, more spectacularly, five times captured and repaired the device that has delivered incredibly beautiful and invaluable photographs of the cosmos. For decades, the shuttle served as a Defense Department workhorse, carrying aloft dozens of spy, weather and communications satellites, as well as smaller spacecraft sent on to explore the solar system.
And yet, measured against its promises, the shuttle was a failure. NASA predicted the program would cost $90 billion; the actual cost turned out to be $196 billion. As The Associated Press calculated, adjusting for inflation, the nation spent more on the shuttle than the combined costs of going to the moon, creating the atom bomb and digging the Panama Canal.
All that money, and the prospect of safe, affordable space travel is still a distant dream, one that NASA is leaving to wealthy space geeks and private entrepreneurs tinkering with their own spacecraft. In fact, the saddest and most disappointing thing about the end of the shuttle is that NASA has nothing else to bring to the launch pad anytime soon.
Yes, there's vague talk of a Mars mission and a return to the moon, but for years to come U.S. astronauts will have to hop a ride with the Russians even to visit the International Space Station. You wonder how long American kids will have to wait until they watch another space launch, and feel what we all felt that remarkable day 30 years ago when Columbia glided home from space, when we all gathered around televisions, when the space shuttle still looked like a swan.