THE END

Into the sunset. The final launch of the space shuttle brings to an end the dreams of the Apollo era

Jun 30th 2011, from the print edition

If the weather holds and there are no unforeseen complications, then early in the morning on July 8th a woman and three men will ascend the launch tower at Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre, strap themselves into Atlantis, the last operational space shuttle, and, as the engines ignite, wait for the countdown to reach zero. Burning thousands of litres of rocket fuel every second and blasting superheated gas into the water-filled trench beneath the pad, the engines will kick up the vast gouts of steam and smoke that characterise a rocket launch.

Atlantis will rise on a pillar of fire, slowly at first but then faster and faster. As it heads east across the Atlantic, its flight will flatten from vertical to almost horizontal. Around two minutes after launch, the boosters on either side of the shuttle will fall away, followed shortly afterwards by the giant external fuel tank strapped to the spaceship. Eight-and-a-half minutes into the flight and the craft, now travelling at about 27,000kph (17,000mph), will reach orbit and the four astronauts will enjoy the rare privilege of seeing their home planet from space.

They will also fly into the history books. Their mission, to resupply the International Space Station (ISS), will be the shuttle’s last. After 30 years, 135 launches and two disasters, the shuttle programme is being scrapped. Atlantis, alongside its sister ships Endeavour, Discovery and the prototype Enterprise (named, following a campaign by fans, after the galaxy-trotting counterpart from “Star Trek”), will disperse to museums.

Billions of dollars will be saved, thousands of workers along Florida’s “Space Coast” (and thousands more farther afield) will lose their jobs, the ISS will rely on Russian, European and Japanese rockets for its supplies and the nation that won the space race by putting Neil Armstrong’s footprint on the moon with Apollo 11, will be without the ability to send astronauts into space. Any that do go will rent seats on the Russian rockets.

In one way, it is surprising that the shuttle lasted as long as it did, for the programme never really satisfied anyone. Authorised by Richard Nixon in 1969, the shuttle was a flying compromise. It fell between the desires of the “space cadets” who, fired by the success of the Apollo project, wanted to press on into the solar system, building a lunar base or perhaps sending men to Mars, and those who thought that the billions of dollars spent on the moon missions might be better used back on Earth.

The original plan called for building a shuttle fleet and an orbiting space station at the same time. But Nixon was unwilling to pay for both, so postponed the station (a cousin of which exists today, thanks in no small part to the Russians, in the form of the ISS). And although NASA, America’s space agency, is a civilian outfit, the American air force took a keen interest in the shuttle. Its cargo bay was designed to hold spy satellites, although the American military maintains its own space operation (see article).

The shuttle was to be a multipurpose ship that would carry all of America’s government and commercial cargoes into space. Its biggest selling-point was its reusability, unlike other rockets which are discarded after one firing. Not having to build a fresh rocket for every mission ought to have brought down the cost of reaching orbit. But a fully reusable spacecraft proved too hard to build, which is why the shuttles carry a huge external fuel tank that is ditched into the ocean after each flight. The shuttle’s engines and the tiles that protect it from the heat of re-entry proved expensive to maintain, and divvying up work among different contractors added to the costs.

Engineers told Congress that shuttle missions might fly up to once a week, allowing NASA to amortise its development costs over lots of launches; in the event there have been only a handful each year. Estimates for the cost of a shuttle launch vary, but NASA claims about $450m a shot. Some independent observers reckon it is nearer $1.5 billion. The market for launching satellites is murky, but by comparison Russia’s expendable Proton rockets (which are almost unchanged since the 1960s and which have a similar cargo capacity to the shuttle) are thought to cost around a quarter of NASA’s figure for the shuttle.

Then there was safety. In 1986, after the failure of a gasket in one of its booster rockets, the shuttle Challenger disintegrated in mid-air shortly after lift-off, killing its crew of seven. In 2003, as it was re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, Columbia broke apart over Texas. It later emerged that the spacecraft’s heat shield had been damaged on launch, letting superheated air inside and tearing it apart. For an experimental spaceplane, two disasters in 135 missions is not a terrible record (the Apollo project was far more dangerous: of the 16 manned missions to use Apollo hardware, one suffered a fatal accident on the ground during tests and one was almost lost in space). But the shuttle was not sold to the public as an experimental craft. Worse, the reports into the two accidents slated NASA’s management style and internal culture, accusing the agency of complacency and recklessness. Both disasters, the reports concluded, had been accidents waiting to happen.

There were successes, too. One was the 1993 in-orbit repair of the Hubble Space Telescope; without astronauts to fit new lenses, the enormously expensive satellite would have been a flop. Disasters apart, the shuttle generally succeeded in at least one aspect of its mission: its regular launches (not to mention stunts such as flying a 77-year-old astronaut, and assorted senators and congressmen) made space travel seem routine, almost mundane—which helped to dampen public interest...