By the end of the program, it cost roughly $766 million per flight when accounting for overhead costs. Between 19, NASA spent approximately $10.6 billion to develop the space shuttle and its related facilities. The shuttle’s legacy is complex: It never lived up to its promise of enabling fast, affordable space travel. Shuttle-derived technology-particularly, the shuttle’s main engines-is now used for NASA’s Space Launch System, the cornerstone vehicle of the agency’s Artemis program. without a crewed launch vehicle for 9 years until SpaceX’s Crew Dragon carried two astronauts to the ISS in 2020.

The last shuttle mission flew in 2011, leaving the U.S. The gut-wrenching destruction of a second Space Shuttle, Columbia, in 2003 set in motion a plan to complete the ISS, retire the shuttles, and redirect NASA’s human spaceflight program back to the Moon. The shuttle also launched the majority of International Space Station (ISS) modules and was used for station assembly and repair missions. It deployed the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990 and carried astronauts to it five more times for repairs and upgrades. The Space Shuttle’s scientific achievements include launching NASA’s Galileo mission to Jupiter and the Magellan mission to Venus. turned back to expendable rockets for launches that didn’t require a crew, and the shuttle soon stopped carrying commercial and military payloads. The Vandenberg launch site was scrapped, the U.S. It was almost ready for operations when the tragic loss of Space Shuttle Challenger and its 7 crewmembers in 1986 prompted officials to scale back the program. (To learn how this decision jeopardized NASA’s planetary science program, we recommend Planetary Society co-founder Bruce Murray’s 1981 book Journey Into Space.)Ī second shuttle launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California would have enabled polar-orbiting missions. adhered to a shuttle-only launch policy for all space missions. Policymakers were so confident of the vehicle’s capabilities that for a time, the U.S. The Space Shuttle operated as a multipurpose space truck that could launch civilian, military, and commercial payloads to space. It first flew inġ981 following a development cost of almost $47 billion. Reusability and high flight rate would reduce the cost of spaceflight,Ĭemented its place as the future of human spaceflight. But those dreams did not mesh with the NixonĪdministration’s post-Apollo, pragmatic approach to spaceflight, which saw the agency as just another government program competing for resources.īudget constraints, along with a promise that the shuttle’s NASA originally envisioned the shuttle as just one piece ofĪ grand plan to expand humanity’s presence into the solar system,

Only the shuttle’s orange-brown external fuel tank couldn’t be The world’s first reusable spacecraft: the orbiter, its 3 main engines,Īnd twin solid rocket boosters could be refurbished and flown again. Gumdrop-shaped capsules that preceded it, the shuttle carried its crewīack to Earth upright and landed gently on a runway like a plane. The shuttle program was wildly ambitious, beginning a mere a decade years after the first person flew into space. Inspiring new generations to pursue space science-related careers. Rode in the iconic orbiters, diversifying NASA’s astronaut corps and NASA's five Space Shuttles are arguably the world’s most

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