Talk:Criticism of the Space Shuttle program/Quote farm

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James Van Allen, the father of nuclear physics in space and a longtime critic of the space shuttle program, described the program as "too expensive and dangerous". "It's a vastly difficult effort with almost no significant purpose," Van Allen told The Associated Press."

Louis Friedman, director of the space interest group known as The Planetary Society, said, "...the shuttle is enormously expensive. It's a risky vehicle. It's an old technology,"

"By any measure of 'safe,' this [program] is not safe... It remains dangerous. We have got to replace this vehicle as soon as possible." -- CAIB Chairman Harold Gehman

"The Shuttle is fundamentally flawed." --NASA Administrator Mike Griffin

The NASA Chief Administrator Michael Griffin has recently suggested the decision to develop the Space Shuttle and International Space Station was a mistake by saying, "It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path. We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can." [1] [2]

"The only thing we can get in return for the $25-30B now budgeted for Shuttle operations between now and 2010 is more heartache and more delays in the new space initiative. Every day that Shuttle cancellation is put off, another $15,000,000 is wasted and the return of humans to the moon is delayed by another day." "The only reason left to fly the Shuttle is to finish the International Space Station. But simple arithmetic tells you that it is not capable of doing this task." Jeffrey F. Bell, retired space scientist

"The shuttle is an unsafe, expensive way for humans to explore space just a few hundred miles above Earth. The problem with the shuttle isn't chunks of foam, it's the shuttle itself. NASA should mothball the program and put the nation's scientific and technological expertise to better use." LA Times Editorial, June 29, 2006 [3]

News release from The Planetary Science group, about the NASA 2007 budget: "The NASA (FY2007) Budget released today shortchanges space science in order to fund 17 projected space shuttle flights. Despite recent spectacular results from NASA's science programs, this budget puts the brakes on their growth within the agency. It seriously damages the hugely productive and successful robotic exploration of our solar system and beyond. "According to this budget, flight projects that were already underway, such as the Space Interferometry Mission, will be delayed. Others, such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder and a mission to Jupiter's moon Europa, will be deferred indefinitely. Furthermore, the new budget slashes funding for the fundamental space science that makes such missions possible and turns raw data into discoveries. "Using money intended for science programs to fund continued operation of the shuttle is a serious setback to the U.S. space program, NASA is essentially transferring funds from a popular and highly productive program into one scheduled for termination." The Planetary Society Board of Directors points out that the very first goal stated in the original Vision for Space Exploration announced by President Bush was to "implement a sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar system and beyond." [4]

Theodore Postol, professor of science, technology and national-security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "I think the science argument is very weak. The only argument that I would accept as science-based is the argument that you're learning about peoples' biological response to being in zero gravity," "You don't need a reusable vehicle to do those experiments. In fact the Russians have shown that you can do it very well without a reusable vehicle." [5]

More than 20 years after its first flight, the shuttle has essentially become a space truck that gets terrible gas mileage. It totes cargo at a cost of roughly $20,000 a pound. [6]

"Most of the really wrong design decisions in the Shuttle system - the side-mounted orbiter, solid rocket boosters, lack of air-breathing engines, no escape system, fragile heat protection - were the direct fallout of this design phase, when tight budgets and onerous Air Force requirements forced engineers to improvise solutions to problems that had as much to do with the mechanics of Congressional funding as the mechanics of flight. In a pattern that would recur repeatedly in the years to come, NASA managers decided that they were better off making spending cuts on initial design even if they resulted in much higher operating costs over the lifetime of the program." -- Maciej Ceglowski

Former astronaut Joe Allen, who also served as the agency's assistant administrator for legislative affairs in the late 1970s: "I've become exasperated, I am so proud of what NASA did in the halcyon days, and appalled at the cul-de-sacs it's gotten into. We have an extraordinarily expensive asset in space and an extraordinarily expensive transportation system to service it. That takes all the money. There is nothing left over for something new." [7]

Neal Lane, science adviser to former President Clinton and former director of the National Science Foundation: "Unless we can get a clear, stated mission, we should step back and not risk further lives, If we don't go somewhere, the current program is unsustainable." [8]

Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society: "As long as we are wed to the shuttle architecture, we can't go anywhere else," [9]

The shuttle does not work as first envisioned. It does not fly every other week, but five or six times a year. It hoists people and cargo into orbit not for $100 a pound, but for 200 times that. It relies not on a lean ground support crew, but a vast engineering bureaucracy with an annual budget in the billions. [10]

"The Shuttle was the result of NASA's desire to continue as a separate entity." "While the DOD and HUD are critical components of government, the same is not the case with NASA and space exploration. It is a luxury that can be expended when economic pressures require it." "The agency has lived on public relations, and that Congress has enjoyed this glitter as well." --Les Aspin, a Democratic Congressman from Wisconsin "The Space Shuttle: Who Needs It?" The Washington Monthly. September 1972, pp. 18-22. [11] He is skeptical of the necessity of the Shuttle and chalks its support up not to legitimate requirements but to NASA "puffery."

Mr. Robert F. Thompson, shuttle program manager from 1970 to 1981, in CAIB testimony: "Operating costs. (Laughter) I had a better answer for development costs.

"At the time we were selling the program at the start of Phase B, the people in Washington, Charlie Donlan, some of them got a company called Mathematica to come in and do an analysis of operating costs. Mathematica sat down and attempted to do some work on operating costs, and they discovered something. They discovered the more you flew, the cheaper it got per flight. (Laughter) Fabulous.

"So they added as many flights as they could. They got up to 40 to 50 flights a year. Hell, anyone reasonably knew you weren't going to fly 50 times a year. The most capability we ever put in the program is when we built the facilities for the tank at Michoud, we left growth capability to where you could get up to 24 flights a year by producing tanks, if you really wanted to get that high. We never thought you'd ever get above 10 or 12 flights a year. So when you want to say could you fly it for X million dollars, some of the charts of the document I sent you last night look ridiculous in today's world. Go back 30 years to purchasing power of the '71 dollar and those costs per flight were not the cost of ownership, they were only the costs between vehicle design that were critical to the design, because that's what we were trying to make a decision on. If they didn't matter -- you have to have a control center over here whether you've got a two-stage fully-reusable vehicle or a stage-and-a-half vehicle. So we didn't try to throw the cost of ownership into that. It would have made it look much bigger. So that's where those very low cost-per-flight numbers came from. They were never real." [12]

"NASA received about 110% of the total money it estimated would be necessary for development of the shuttle at the program's outset." "A close examination of the historical record allows for no conclusion other than that claims of a weak commitment to the (shuttle) program are completely unfounded. Responsibility for this false view becoming part of conventional wisdom must be shared by NASA, which unjustified the program, and then claimed the program was underfunded." "The problem of poor performance in the civil space program is more a matter of inefficiency in use of the resources being provided than a lack of resources required." --Roger A. Pielke, Center for Public Policy Research, University of Colorado "A reappraisal of the Space Shuttle Program" [13]

NASA initially touted the shuttle as a reusable launch vehicle that would provide a cheap way to place satellites into orbit. The proposed and actual numbers have proved quite different. "The [original] numbers that NASA gave to the White House were that shuttle would cost about $5.5 million per launch and the launch rate would be anywhere between 50 and 60 launches a year," said John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. Shuttles have instead averaged about five launches a year, and NASA was way off on the cost. "Most people use a figure like $400 [million] or $500 million [per launch]," Logsdon said. "Anyway you look at it, it's a lot of money." After Columbia became the first shuttle in space in 1981, shuttle crews became, in effect, human couriers to do deliveries that unmanned rockets could do at the same or lower cost, and without human risks. [14]

"Is the shuttle well-suited for manned space flight and is it technically well-suited for science exploration? It seems to me, it's not technically suited for either," the physics professor said. Expendable launch vehicles with simple return capsules would be safer and cheaper to fly in the long run, Postol suggests. "We're spending a lot of money to return 150,000 pounds of shuttle home and make it safe for another human sojourn into space," "On re-entry, a vehicle should simply bring the crew back. It shouldn't be an enormous plane-like vehicle with all these tiles." Postol argues against sending humans into space at all, saying we should be leaving the inhospitable void to unmanned craft. "I could do an enormous amount of science with robotics. That is much safer and doesn't risk lives." --Theodore Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [15]

"The international space station, like the shuttle, is an instrument in search of a purpose." "[We] are doing a variety of piddley experiments with little larger application to anything." --Wesley Ward, chief space geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. [16]

Additional serious criticism of the space program comes from those who believe the new exploration architecture should make more room for private enterprise and competition. Those in this camp were hoping the space agency would reinvent itself radically, questioning its basic assumptions and rebuilding itself from the ground up. They want massive layoffs, commercial bidding, and several major technical changes to the exploration architecture. [17]

Through the 1990s and into the new century, America’s manned spaceflight program would remain consigned to low earth orbit, flying up and down in the space shuttle, building a space station that never fulfilled its promise. [18]

"After writing the (1985) piece for Discover, I concluded that the shuttle program was unsustainable--that is, it was based on an economic model that simply could not work. I said we shouldn't send people into space unless we have something that's worth the cost and the risk of putting them there. So I got labeled as being opposed to manned space flight, and that isn't quite my argument. My argument with NASA has always been: The shuttle was a good idea that just didn't work. What you really need to do if you want to open up space for human exploitation, whether you're sending people or machines, is to have a better launch vehicle. Then, all kinds of things will be possible in space that are impractical now. ... So it's been the same program ever since the late 1960s. They started to build the shuttle and they made some rather optimistic projections. They said it was going to reduce launch costs by 95 percent. One of their own engineers told them that was impossible, because half of launch cost is not in the vehicle itself, it's the overhead, it's maintaining the Kennedy Space Center and all the other infrastructure. So, even if you reduced the cost of the shuttle to zero, you could only bring the total costs down by 50 percent. Nonetheless, that was the promise that they made to Congress. ... Then they started flying it and, as it turns out, it's more expensive to send a pound into space on the space shuttle than it was on the old rockets. And that was my argument to NASA: The shuttle wasn't an unreasonable program. It probably could have reduced launch costs, but when you find out that isn't true, then you've got to stop and face reality. They didn't. ... NASA faces serious budget problems, consistently, ever since the shuttle started flying, because it is so much more expensive to fly than they had predicted. To compound the problem, they decided to bowl ahead with what I call "summit shuttle," the space station. If you did a realistic economic model, Congress would never buy it. So they promised them this bargain-basement thing, and, of course, it's late and over-cost and under-specification. They just kept hoping that things would get better. Instead, it's not one but two albatrosses surrounding them, and it's strangling the program. NASA's got a satellite that's essentially taking a picture of the whole universe. It's measured the whole universe to the very end. It's an enormous scientific achievement, and, to boot, you can go to a website now and see a picture of the whole universe. It's just staggering. All NASA has to do is advertise that stuff, but they have consistently downplayed their space science and built all of their public relations around the astronauts. They think that the astronaut sells, so that's what they market. In fact, the astronauts, what they're doing, what NASA's doing, is pretty dull stuff. For twenty years we send people up, and they fly around in orbit, and they do these silly experiments. They're not pioneering. They're not doing new scientific research. They're not expanding the bounds of exploration or anything. But NASA's perception is that people really like to see people in space. And my argument with them is, if you really want people in space, then build a launch vehicle that makes it practical for them to get there. ... the astronauts in the Columbia died for nothing; they were not doing anything worth the cost and the risk. The Israeli astronaut, Colonel Ilan Ramon, was up there to push a button on a camera, to take pictures of the desert. We have satellites that do that all the time and do it much better than he could. That was just make-work. To the extent that people want to pay just for the romance of having people in space, sure, that's worth something. I just don't think it's worth the enormous cost that we are investing." --NASA historian Alex Roland[19]

"President Bush's 2006 budget recommends $16.5 billion in budget authority for the nation's space program and roughly half of that will be devoted directly and indirectly to manned space activities. Most of the remainder will go toward supporting the NASA scientific program, which chiefly carried out with unmanned space vehicles. NASA's unmanned space probes and satellites have helped create a 'golden age of astronomy' and given humankind a vastly improved understanding of the universe and their place in it. The scientific community widely views the manned space flight program as a large waste of resources." --Charles L. Schultze, Senior Fellow, Economic Studies [20]

The scientific projects that are suitable for and carried out in the space shuttle are widely considered by scientists as low priority. "Any specific mission you can identify to do in space, you can design and build an unmanned space craft to do it more effectively, more economically, and more safely." Historian Alex Roland [21]

"The problem from the start has been the Shuttle. Mankind's greatest scientific instrument was built under a NASA decree that anything that goes into space must go there by way of the shuttle. That meant Hubble had to be put in low-Earth orbit, which is far from ideal for observations. Moreover, Hubble was designed for routine shuttle maintenance visits. NASA said shuttle launches would be weekly, but five or six times a year was the best they could do. After Columbia, O'Keefe decided it's too dangerous for astronauts to service Hubble, we'll have to use robots. But if astronauts can't go to Hubble, how they gonna go to Mars? This week, the National Research Council said it's not likely that NASA could complete development of a robotic mission before Hubble breaks down, and called for a mission of the rebuilt shuttle to repair Hubble. Could we be seeing the influence of the astronaut lobby? Like who needs astronauts if a robot can fix Hubble?" Robert L. Park is a professor of physics and former chair of the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland [22]

Comments from Legendary Aerospace designer Burt Rutan: NASA's space shuttle is complex and generically dangerous. Still, not flying the shuttle to the Hubble Space Telescope is symbolic of a larger issue. "The budget forecast [for NASA] is to go out and spend hundreds of billions of dollar to go to Mars and yet you don't have the courage to go back to the Hubble … it looks like you got the wrong guys doing it," [23] Now we're flying the space shuttle, in my opinion the most expensive and dangerous system ever developed. "NASA abandoned affordability in favor of the shuttle, and now it's spending hundreds of millions to study frog legs. I want to fly in space, and I'm tired of waiting for NASA. [24] Space entrepreneur Burt Rutan, whose company Scaled Composites sent the first private astronauts into space last year, opened the International Space Development Conference with a blistering critique of NASA. He said the agency is wasting taxpayers' money on a deeply flawed space shuttle and paper spaceships that never get beyond the planning stage. According to Rutan, NASA should get out of the human spaceflight business and leave the flying to the emerging commercial spaceflight industry. At stake is whether ordinary citizens will have a role to play on the high frontier. [25] "NASA basically failed with the space shuttle program in the late 1970s before the first launch because it couldn't deliver on the low-cost-to-orbit promise, and it can't deliver on the safety," [26] "Look at the progress in 25 years of trying to replace the mistake of the shuttle. It's more expensive…not less…a horrible mistake," Rutan said. "They knew it right away. And they've spent billions…arguably nearly $100 billion over all these years trying to sort out how to correct that mistake…trying to solve the problem of access to space. The problem is…it’s the government trying to do it." [27]

Scott Hubbard, a former member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) and past director of NASA's Ames Research Center: "I think the concern by many members of the CAIB, myself included, is that there are other failure mechanisms … other types of aging going on that may appear at any time," "You have this uneasy feeling of what else might show up in such an incredibly complex vehicle … any vehicle that is that complex has failure modes that are difficult to predict or anticipate." Every shuttle launch "is a holding of the breath". [28]

Joseph Pelton, a research professor with the Institute for Applied Space Research at George Washington University: "In truth, the problems that NASA continues to experience with its shuttle and the International Space Station program—really the only reason the shuttle is still flying—goes back at least to the Challenger disaster in 1986," ... "Two major national space commissions back then—one looking into the Challenger accident, the other delving into the future of the American space program—noted that the shuttle was indeed becoming "obsolescent" and that it had to be replaced by another vehicle within at least 15 years, or 2001" "Instead of developing alternative plans for the launch of International Space Station components in smaller and more modular parts at that time, NASA pushed ahead without developing a new vehicle, nor developing a back-up plan." "Now, not only is NASA's credibility and space funding at risk, Pelton continued, but also at risk are the agency's international partners that are engaged in the $100 billion station program. "The now 'tar baby-like tandem' of the ISS and the space shuttle has done great harm to space programs around the world." "NASA has over-invested in both the shuttle and station initiatives taking away money from programs that truly matter to the United States and indeed the world." "The truth of the matter is that the shuttle program—an experimental program when designed in the 1970s—should have been grounded years ago. It should be replaced by better, safer, and more cost efficient programs. The development of private space vehicles that are human-rated, something that NASA is currently actively supporting, is clearly the right step forward," [29]

Roger Launius, Chair, Division of Space History at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.: "A sustained and underlying depression seems present among those working in the program, some of them for their entire careers," Launius explained. "There is a sense of ending—as well as an ever-present perception of loss and failure—present among many members of the space shuttle team." "As the space shuttle enters its home stretch, it should be remembered with both praises for its many accomplishments and criticisms for its shortcomings," Launius suggested. "I am in favor of giving the shuttle an honorable retirement and to give a full measure of respect and thanks to those charged with its operations over the years for their efforts."