Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: Was the Space Shuttle a policy failure?

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

Was the Space Shuttle a successful program? In many ways, yes: it endured for 30 years, launched hundreds of astronauts into space, and built the International Space Station. But, according to the goals of lower costs, rapid reusability, and reliability NASA stated at its conception, the Space Shuttle program was a failure. In this new recurring feature on SPE, Jack and Casey read through a classic paper in space policy and discuss its arguments, its conclusions, and whether the paper stands up to this day. Read along with us and suggest future episodes in our Planetary Society online member community. Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/space-shuttle-policy-failureSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to the Space Policy Edition, another month, another episode. I am Casey Dreyer, the Chief of Space Policy here at the Planetary Society. And today I'm joined by my colleague, Jack Curley, who is, among other things, the head of our Washington operations and government relations here at the Planetary Society as well. Hey, Jack. Hey, Casey. How are you doing? Doing good. Enjoying myself and looking forward to a whole new year of space policy episodes coming up after this one. This is the last of 2024.

However, that does not matter because we have a slightly different take on the show today. Instead of having an external guest, we, Jack, you and I, are going to read, I'd say, I was going to say a famous paper of space policy. I don't know if space policy papers tend to be famous, but an infamous one. And it's going to be part of a series we do on the show for visiting or revisiting really influential and important pieces of space policy, academic analysis,

and journal writing, and articles and analysis. And this episode, we're going to be actually starting with a paper written by our board member, John Logsdon, who I think literally, would you say he literally founded the field of space history and policy? I would say that he wrote the book, but in fact, he probably wrote five. Yeah. We're going to be reading his paper called the Space Shuttle Program, A Policy Failure? Including in the title. Published in 1986.

And I think, you know, a really important and insightful piece of commentary on how the difference evolves between the intent behind a program and the reality behind a program. As epitomized by the space shuttle. And I think we'll revisit this question now 10 years after the space shuttle ended about whether it was a policy failure or not. So that paper, we will link to it in the show notes online. You can read it yourself. It's only, I think, 10 pages, Or you can read John's entire book on the space shuttle decision, which is the Nixon, his book on the Nixon space policy era, if you have a little bit more time. But before that, Jack, we have to pitch. This is a great time of year to become a member of the Planetary Society. Which you can do.

Which I hear by good authority. You can join at planetary.org slash join. All sorts of levels of membership starting at four bucks a month. And by being a member of the Planetary Society, obviously you're not just enabling this show to occur if you like space policy, you're enabling all the great work that Jack is doing on behalf of our members in Washington, D.C., all of our educational work, our outreach, our work to get kids involved in space, and of course, the amazing education, excitement, and community building that we do online at the Planetary Society. Jack, do you have any, you're a member, right? I am a member, card carrying. Both of us, card carrying members, anything you'd like to add about why folks should join

and become it truly is the one way the surefire way that you can have an impact on space exploration on space science and be part of this uh future we all see for humanity in space i'm sold that sounds great to me let's dollars a month four bucks a month that's it's actually quite reasonable these days uh so i hope you consider that if you if you like the show uh if you want to support the work we're doing or if you know someone who needs a good gift this year so they can become also like us a card carrying member of the planetary society that's at planetary.org slash join. All right.

Jack, let's talk about this paper. The Space Shuttle Program, a Policy Failure. Released as a peer-reviewed article in Science in 1986 in May, this is not long after the Challenger disaster. So a very fresh and moment of reconsideration of the space shuttle program in what would be a very early part of its history. It would continue the space shuttle program for another 25 years after this point. But Jack, how should we approach this? Maybe we can outline John's argument here about what does this mean to be a policy

failure? So what does it start with? What stands out to you? What arguments does John make here about the Space Shuttle program? I mean, I think the core argument that John's making in this article is that the Space Shuttle was designed almost by committee to meet all of these exceptional anticipated needs that maybe were not substantiated by other policy decisions or requests of the scientific community or the human spaceflight community. of in this at the crux of all these different uh interests and tried to answer a question that didn't quite exist at that point right right they were creating they were assembling a coalition of support by solving problems that didn't necessarily exist but seemed nice to have. So they said, oh, the space shuttle, here's what it's going to do for you. It's going to lower the cost of spaceflight. That was the big one.

It's going to address a bunch of national security needs for the Department of Defense and the Air Force. You could launch it very quickly into space if you need to. You can scramble or you can snag a malfunctioning satellite or an important national security asset fix it and launch it you know bring it back into space you can build a space station which is what nasa would kind of mention on the sly ultimately wanted to use it for but didn't uh lead with that we'll say yeah and i think john's point is that this i think he summarizes

it at the very end of the paper where he calls you know the fundamental problem came from the not just the the execution of the program but the decision itself the motivations itself which was that ultimately nasa made the case to the stakeholders, primarily in this case, the White House, and it's what's called the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, the budgeteers that approve expenditures by the federal government. NASA made the case to them. And then they kind of walked away from or they never really followed through at a high level. It was never a huge huge important priority for them. So they kind of, they won the argument, but then never really captured the attention going forward.

And then all of these promises that NASA had made about the value of doing something like a space shuttle were left to be done with little oversight or attention and as soon as the program got into trouble it started becoming very difficult to to do all of these things that they claim they could do right and it did not solve that existential threat that apollo did right um as a as a point of geopolitical uh feat right as a geopolitical uh uh well apollo was an exogenous event right apollo was created by you know to address particularly at the at the core of it it's genesis an event that was an epical event that was happening outside of the us literally itself right in in the soviet union with the first human into space and this perceived loss. And then within the context of the cold war,

Apollo solved a clear problem. Whereas the shuttle to kind of put in your words here was, was creating a program to fit perceived problems or, or non-existent problems, and then trying to get it across the goal in that case and and it's interesting in a way john this paper is an argument for the original sin uh you know of that the space shuttle carried forth with it that was unable to shake that the motivate that the process that the that by the process of how a program was created is actually carried through

the program itself into the future for decades in this case and ultimately i mean arguably it was the core of some of the disasters that befell the program and you know so just to to jump out here a little bit so in addition to this complicated and belabored effort to sell the space shuttle to the White House and to various stakeholders within the government, the design of the space shuttle was constantly changing at this point. This is John writing in 1986 about events that happened in 1970, 71, and 72. And 72 is when Nixon approved formally the space shuttle development with the first flight, not then until 1981. And the design originally was for a fully reusable space plane. And rapidly reusable, right? These are all things that we're used to hearing now through what SpaceX is doing, but this is this first wild concept at the time.

But the design kept changing in this early period, not because of what, and this is, I think, the concept of, again, of this original political sin or policy sin that John's identifying, sin or policy sin that John's identifying, not because of the needs of the program itself, but because of the cost limits being imposed on it by, in a sense, an arbitrary cost limit by the Office of Management and Budget. And so, and then there's a couple, I mean, you can add, what else was driving shuttle design decisions at this point, according to this paper? What else was driving shuttle design decisions at this point, according to this paper? Well, I mean, I think what's really clear here, too, is the political implications. 1970, 1971, 1972, President Nixon is going into a reelection year.

There's a whole outlining in this paper of the political considerations of federal programs in policy making at the time in 1970 to 1972. And I think in there, it even says that NASA has such an outsized impact based on its proportion of the federal budget, its impact on the politics in the regions that they operate. And so there's the political considerations, there's the industry, you know, considerations as well at a time of trying to revitalize the aerospace industry, trying to revitalize the aerospace industry, late 1960s, sort of following on after Apollo had ended. And then there's the sort of the thing that's happening in the background with the military considerations, right? In that this is still the height of the Cold War. And one of the conclusions of the paper being that the thing that convinced Nixon wasn't the size of the payload bay or the capabilities of what things it could get into orbit. It was that this would put humans in space for longer, which is the ultimate goal of,

at that time, both of the major superpowers. And that this continues the US on that, following Apollo, following the victory of planting the flag on the moon, that the United States could continue to lead in manned space flight, crewed space flight. Well, but also, I think that the national security, not just that, so the symbolism aspect, but then this perceived national security value. Again, that was, I think, what drove the size of this shuttle payload bay, or the shape of the shuttle itself as this delta wing,

is that it had to have this high cross-sectional ability to rapidly take off, turn around, and come back. These considerations in this paper were presented as, oh, the DOD would say, oh, yeah, that sounds nice to have. Sure. You know, that sounds useful, but then never really seriously considered it or needed it beyond just a few people. So the design of the shuttle, in addition to the points that you raise as a political value, political tool for Nixon's reelection,, a means to continue human space flight in an affordable way was also being designed for this perception of national security without the full endorsement.

And again, I think that's where this idea of nice to have, but it's solving a problem that they don't really face. And the paper says here, the military was happy with what is the Titan three booster that it was using at the time. I believe the rocket that launched Voyagers and Viking was Viking, the Titan 4 booster. Titan 3, certainly for Voyagers.

And they didn't reach out to NASA needing a shuttle. NASA came to them saying, hey, would this be useful for you? But then NASA never reevaluated that commitment. But then ironically, at the very end, that was one of those deciding factors for Nixon is that these perceived national security benefits could also be a value to the United States. And so it's this interesting argument too, where this, such an epical decision for something that then ultimately ran, you know, the 10 years-ish development time plus 30 years, 40 years, basically, came down to convincing Nixon on this broad kind of hard to define quality of we need, we can't pull back from human spaceflight and this national security benefit that never fully appeared materialized in the long run. Yeah. Well, what I find really interesting, too, is at no point is Congress considered.

Yeah, that's right. Outside of maybe some of that, the the the politics right of, well, we want to make sure there's jobs in districts. There's not a it is seriously the shuttle came down to the decision of Richard M. Nixon, right? It came down to him saying, yes, I want to do this and not even getting into the specifications, right? Um, of what the shuttle would look like, what it would be capable of, what the development time should be, what the cost cap is per year. Um, it really is just Nixon gave it the thumbs up.

And it was then off to NASA to try to answer for all of these promises that it had, all these promises, right? That it had made to the Department of Defense and to the Office of Management and Budget. Yeah, well, OMB as well. Yeah, that's a good point. And I think it really highlights maybe just a different era of American politics. I mean, because this is Richard Nixon, Republican president,

with an overwhelmingly, I think, Democratic House and Senate at this time. And generally more functional process-wise kind of a politics, less polarized time of American politics. I think epitomized by this idea, one of the highlights that you mentioned earlier in terms of jobs were in Southern California, then and now a major aerospace center, but of California being a swing state for the Republican president, which now is almost unimaginable in terms of the local politics there. And exactly. That's interesting, too. I never really thought about that. Congress just didn't seem super interested. And I wonder if that was this. Nixon, again, is portrayed in this as almost seeing the space shuttle as, again, feeding into the symbolism of human spaceflight. space shuttle as again feeding into this the symbolism of human space flight not only is it valuable for this external u.s projection of power but nixon saw astronauts as being the you know

your so-called right stuff about this ideal of american citizenry mixed with this technological futurist you know kind of look down the line. And they note here that the supersonic transport was this big concept that had been canceled by Congress early in the 1970s and was this kind of heartbreaking, could have been, project because it was too expensive. And this general attitude of retrenchment on technological development and the space shuttle is seen as the symbol pushing back against that. But again, and interesting though, that Congress does not really

seem all that interested beyond this. And I wonder if that's a reflection of that malaise that was developing at the pushing back of technological progress right from the general public. Well, we need to get this done now, because if we lose the momentum post Apollo, that we are not going to be able to maintain crude spaceflight. I mean, looking to the 60s and then the 1970s, an explosion in robotic space exploration. Obviously, we have the Apollo missions, but then Apollo-Soyuz in 1975, really high-profile events that have downstream implications, both when it comes to technology spinoffs and jobs in districts, but also in terms of shaping the view of the United States in space. the view of the United States in space. Right. Um, but then at the same time, right, this decision all came down to one person at the end of the day.

That's a classic space in the myth of presidential leadership. There's a whole book on this, this idea. It really carried through with, with John F. Kennedy, right? That space things. And I think I'd say maybe infected is too strong of a word, but has embedded itself in the psyche of space advocates for decades. That if only the president stood up and made this Kennedy-like commitment to some space effort, going back to the moon, going to Mars, you know, going to Titan, you name it, then we would see the results, the benefits of it. It almost then became the singular goals. We just need to convince that one person. But I think what John's paper is showing here is that you can win that argument with that one person, but you're still going to fail in your out in your goals because you haven't

gotten the full buy-in or, or at the end of the day, you're just, you're just not capable of addressing a true national need. And again, this idea that the end of the paper, that the shuttle for all the things that it has done well, and I think that's worth mentioning here is that this is a separation between the space shuttle as a amazing piece of engineering that did a lot of amazing things from the actual goals lined out at the beginning but that john says it even though they won the president's approval the program did not get a national commitment and i want to focus on that a little

bit because what does a national commitment means and there you go there's your lack of congress maybe playing into this willing to fund it but also national commitment you had people in nixon's own white house at the omb the office of management and budget they're the ones driving down the cost of the space shuttle they were skeptics the entire time saying you got to make this cheaper you got to make that as i should say you got to make the development cost cheaper and so as a consequence nasa started shifting and changing its all development from a fully reusable two-stage rocket to this strange assembly of usable reusable reusable with dispensable fuel tank and recoverable uh side boosters but the fundamental design being driven by this cost caps at this lower level of white house bureaucracy completely

independent of nixon and examples of jim fletcher the nasa administrator being turned away and not being allowed to talk to nixon and nixon not knowing what his own staff were doing, like this whole fundamental kind of comical veep-like breakdown of communication happening within the House itself, indicative of this lack of national commitment. And it's, so this idea then you can, and I think then we saw as a consequence, this idea that you win the president's support, you then get what you want. We saw this then continue to play out like this in the future. You got Reagan to call out a space station in the 1984 State of the Union. And then it's kind of the same story with the station after that.

You had George H.W. Bush do a whole push around space exploration. Yeah, in 1989. And he gave a great speech about how great this is and the money did not show up george w bush did something similar in 2004 obama even kind of got nudged into doing something along those lines in 2009 after the end of constellation every time this happens you can get the president ultimately is just going to be distracted by all the immediate insane things you have to deal with as being president and nasa isn't a problem they want to ever have to solve nasa should be a nice a good thing that helps them look good but it takes this bigger solution so there seems to be this fundamental contradiction though then then to me at the end, or it's like, okay,

how do you get this national commitment? Well, you need to solve a lot of problems for a lot of people, but then by doing so you've compromised your vision and ability to deliver on that so much that you will never succeed in them at the end. And so is there this inherent contradiction? Can, absent some massive external shock, can a representative democracy create efficient engineering for major space projects? I don't know. Do we have good examples of that? I mean, it clearly shows that there needs to be a

maybe better management of those stakeholder groups, right? You, you, this paper clearly shows you can't go forward and expect a policy success despite the success, ultimate success of shuttle, right? Of individual shuttle missions that you can't go on without input from the public. Right. But then at the same time, you can't solely be based on, you can't be basing engineering decisions on rule by committee, right. By decisions that are made by people who are not experts in engineering. Ultimately, at the end of the day, the thing solving a political problem doesn't also solve an engineering one right yeah it almost creates them it creates them absolutely um and creates budgetary hurdles

later on right i mean this paper was written may 1986 or was published in may of 1986 at a time when the future of shuttle was uncertain. The future of, at the time, space station freedom was completely in limbo. And the future of human spaceflight was completely unclear. It was complete uncertainty. Not to mention, also happening at the same time similar track on the robotic space exploration something that we at the Planetary Society care a lot about um had also taken a nosedive and I mean since uh since 1980 there were two

since 1980 there were two planetary science missions that launched on shuttle but in the latter that was even after this paper was published those were both in 89 as magellan and what was the galileo galileo of course yeah yep and uh yeah they had the big fallow period 34 well and that was another uh item brought up in this paper was that the science community itself was very much against the shuttle i like to i don't know about you jack but i i feel like i like the first real introduction to a maybe a mature view of of space was when I first read about that people hated the space shuttle in the space community. I was, I was like this naive young,

young, I was like 28 or something at the time, but I was getting into this for the first time. And I read Bruce Murray's founder of the planetary society, Bruce Murray's book journey into space. And he just rips into the space shuttle as being expensive, slow, taking money away from science, backlogging all of launch, because we haven't really touched on it yet,

but space shuttle for a while was mandated as the single launch vehicle for the entire U.S. national security and and civilian space programs which it clearly had a hard time keeping up with that demand and so you had things like galileo wait years and you know and suffer serious consequences um as a result but reading that you know when i was a kid you know you're younger than me but i as a kid of the 80s i guess as a kid in the 90s you just you watch space shuttle launches. It's the space shuttle. That was just the thing.

Yeah. The Lego sets are on the space shuttle. Yeah. It's just what it was. And so I was like, Oh yeah, how cool is space shuttle? That's neat.

And to see that people really, I mean like Bruce Murray, and maybe it was actually, he had a white hot, passionate dislike for the program was seriously eye-opening for me and i think reading this history about how this was cobbled together and for what reasons and again you see the price that science did pay however then you get this whole flip side that i think is really interesting too this paper again written in 86 prior to the launch of the hubble space telescope

prior to the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble Space Telescope is launched by the shuttle designed to fit into that big old payload bay that NASA really did not need. That was the more expensive and as a consequence, all those design decisions. The Cadillac options. Yeah, that then had to trade off all these reusability and cost and benefits of operation for but then you get the hubble space telescope out of it and

anything smaller you just don't have as literally you just can't have as big of a primary mirror you don't get as you know much of a visibility you don't get as much of an access to the to the early cosmos from it this is where the story complicates for me where is a policy by whose policy do we say something is a failure and by and and who at the who when they were making the decisions were really establishing the goals at the end of the day so like we're I was thinking about this. NASA wanted to build a space station right after Apollo. They wanted to have a space shuttle to build a space station. They got the space shuttle, and then it took them another 30 years,

and they built a space station out of it, and now we have a space station. In that sense, if we didn't have a shuttle, I don't think we'd have a space station right now. So in some ways, in this really extreme long view, building the capability ultimately got you a lot of stuff. And how seriously do we take those arguments at the beginning that are made? And for what reasons? I think that's an open question to me from reading this paper.

Well, I think, too, and you touch on a thought that I've been having, is in the long view, maybe the answer to that question was the space shuttle a policy failure. The answer might be partly no, right? I think if you read this article, it reads as the answer is a resounding yes. It is an absolute policy failure based on the expectations set by NASA to OMB, to the Congress, to the Department of Defense, that this program does not pass muster. But yeah, looking at that long view, we have a station. We had shuttle until 2010. It was generally partially reusable. And maybe part of it runs into that problem of, of that. I think we run into a lot of times speaking as a space advocate, speaking with space advocates is, you know, I want I have a vision for my space program and I want it now.

Right. And it says, well, by the you know, I think the the original plan was by 1990, between 1980 and 1990, there was going to be 600 launches of space shuttle. And that just that never happened. We got over 130. just that never happened we got over 130 um 135 and by that by that metric right we it it was a failure but it also achieved these major milestones as well and so trying to have the answer be maybe it's kind of a failure kind of not a failure it got things. It did inspire you and inspired me seeing shuttle launches to become space advocates. So in a way, it did succeed in building a national program that promoted American values, that promoted American excellence in space. And it's notable that the Soviet Union, after the U.S. started investing in a space shuttle,

the Soviet Union also started investing in a space shuttle. The Buran. Never. It never flew. It flew once, just without people on it. It flew with automated. We'll be right back with the rest of our Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio after this short break.

Greetings, Bill Nye here. What a year it's been at the Planetary Society. From advocating for missions that matter, to funding new technology, to grants for planetary research and biology in space, to sharing the wonder of space exploration with the world. You made it all happen. Many of the great scientific missions we've dreamed of are happening, and it's thanks to your support. But we can't stop now, because tomorrow's discoveries must begin today. With your help, we can keep our work going strong into 2024

and continue to explore worlds, find life, and defend Earth. Plus, when you make a gift today, your gift will be matched up to $100,000 thanks to a special matching gift challenge from a generous Planetary Society member. Your year-end contribution, especially when doubled, will go far to help launch us into all the exciting opportunities tomorrow will bring. Visit planetary.org slash planetary fund. Thank you. So is it fair, and maybe, maybe we're giving a lot of generous interpretations because we like space, but because I mean, part of it is what you're saying is, sure, they, I mean, I was saying this to you.

Like, sure, they had their reasons at the beginning. And sure, they didn't pan out and probably weren't even realistic in the first place. But look at all this other cool stuff it did. It's like, well, sure. I mean, yeah, that's great. I'm glad it did a lot of cool stuff. But why not say the cool stuff at the beginning? And, you know, why make all these other promises?

And that's where I think it's almost like the people you have to convince, and this is what's so strange in a way about government programs, like once they start rolling, particularly big ones like Shuttle, is that it became clear pretty early on that the Shuttle was not going to fly 50 times a year. I mean, we're talking way before the Shut launch right they ran into all this like we're talking mid-1972 they were thinking it was like this isn't going to happen this is not going to be the cost effect like it was all those things that you know all those challenges that ultimately faced started

to become clear pretty early on but they didn't stop it and all the kind of these non-tangibles about human access to space maybe national security stuff something something and the variety of opportunities that it provided in terms of big telescopes or space stations ultimately carried it through. So it was never really held to these standards during development. Right. Right. And so that's where it becomes, but then is that, is that a healthy way to run a multi-billion dollar programs? I don't know. Well, it's cause it's because it's it's the the group of people you have to convince aren't the ones you have to who have to deal with it and i

think that's the other point this paper makes is that the people who made this decision knew this is going to be won't be operational until the 1980s and you would just you're making these broad commitments so how can you have a national commitment even? How do you have that as an expectation if you're talking 10, 20, 30 years down the line? That seems like a really high bar to cross at the same time. Well, I mean, you're talking about multiple presidential administrations, entire arrangements of Congress later. Making that same national commitment is very hard, right? We don't live in a system that handles long-term planning very well. And we've seen that since the beginning of the space program. And I think back to your earlier point, a lot of space advocates might

default to saying, well, we just need a Kennedy moment, right? We just need that, the, the, the, the Rice University speech for Mars exploration or for, you know, the return to the moon. And that's just not how that can happen. It's not even really how it happened. Yeah. Right. It wasn't because Kennedy was not president for much longer after that. And it became, you know, the whole, I mean, we can delve into the history of Apollo too, right? Of how do major space programs like this, space systems, right? It's not just one mission. This is, was supposed to be between 130 and 600 missions. Um, how do you get to that point where you're also solving problems, right? That are legitimate problems. I'll call them legitimate problems posed by the

scientific community or proposed by the national security community or proposed by the human spaceflight community, the exploration community, whichever community you're trying to represent. And something I've been thinking about? What was NASA's job in 1971? Was NASA's job to solve problems to, to take input from the outside and solve problems? Or was it their job to sell the president on a new vision for human space flight? And it clearly was the latter, at least the, what they perceived their job being was the latter because there was nothing pushing them in another direction. Well, cause they were created to solve a problem that they then solved.

And then they're like, okay, now what we've landed on. And then it's not fair to, to hold them to, you know, it's of course that, okay,

we have this giant system and bureaucracy now. Bureaucracies are really good at sustaining themselves. And it's not necessarily a pejorative description of a bureaucracy. It's just of all the people in it, they're self-interested in continuing their roles and existence and capabilities. And it is an interesting question about what was NASA's job. and that's kind of what i was thinking about again reading this paper in terms of whose policies failed because nasa again the through line through this and you mentioned this post apollo era that this original pitch to the nixon white house through uh was it spiro agnew who was the vice president on the space

council was this massive Apollo like expenditure, continued Apollo like expenditure to do a space shuttle station, lunar base and Mars by 1986 or something. This wild, insane, totally awesome, you know, I guess now fictionalized and, uh, for all mankind, uh, TV show, but this idea that they would keep this up and running and, uh, John's whole book on Nixon era and the Nixon space doctrine that basically defines modern space flight is that no NASA, you're not special. You no longer get special consideration. Your job is to continue to exist among this milieu of other government agencies fighting for your share of the pie.

this milieu of other government agencies fighting for your share of the pie. And in that sense, it's their responsibility to make the arguments they can within the bounds of decency, you know, and not outright lies. But I mean, just how do we pitch ourselves as being relevant? And there was, I think, a crisis of identity at NASA after Apollo about what do we do? And, you know, I think there was a, for a while, they were like, does NASA solve, like, the energy crisis that was happening? Does NASA solve, you know, we have all these smart people and other things, like, do they solve whatever crisis

that's befalling the world at the time? But at the end of the day, it's probably fair to let them say, okay, we can try to create something that is broadly useful in order to secure funding for this bigger thing that we hold that we think is valuable. That doesn't have the same. This is the classic I get. Every discussion of mine always now digs down to the foundation of real real and acceptable reasons for space flight right and like at the end of the day the real reason for the shuttle was to continue this you know human presence in space and great national symbolism and so forth and but they had to find all these

so-called acceptable reasons of cost savings and national security utility and so forth and so on that then they could never execute on so that i i tend to give nasa a break at the same time i acknowledge i'm a very sympathetic person to to this outcome and the question is what what would the alternative be what would have because i do think it's important to emphasize here in this paper that whatever promises NASA made, they did with this idea that they then would have presidential support to commit to this big ambitious project of a reusable shuttle. And what happened was after making these promises, after getting the buy-in, they just get chipped away at by the Office of Management and Budget saying, you have to go below this total cost. You must not spend more than this. For no reason beyond that was what was convenient for the administration. This is what we're allotting you. Yeah. It's like, you get this much and you can do it cheaper.

How? Well, it's your job to figure that out. I know you can do it cheaper. It's like, okay, then you make all these sacrifices, among which is, ironically, increasing the total cost of the lifetime of the mission because the operational costs tend to be super, super high instead of spending the money early on. Howard McCurdy dives into this in a later paper on a similar topic that I found really interesting. But this trade-off between not wanting to give the resources to do it right and then being upset that it didn't happen right isn't really then nasa's fault like where does you know that you you look for in a sense how do

you endure in a system that is designed to be somewhat maddening like this as you said like not great at making these long-term commitments in the first place and And when NASA itself is facing, when NASA itself is facing an existential crisis, right? Of why are we here to solve the crises, other crises, a crisis about crises. Um, part of it is, well, we have NASA today, right? Do we have NASA today as 0.48% of the federal budget? Is that a high watermark compared to the direction it could have gone post Apollo without convincing President Nixon that they needed to move forward with shuttle. If without shuttle, was there a path forward for NASA to maintain its brand, its direction? And I think it's independence, too.

Could we have seen a I love alternate histories. Could we have seen a, I love alternate histories, could we have seen a situation where NASA then falls into or gets separated out into, well, the national security components or get absorbed into Department of Defense and the national prestige components get lumped in with Department of State and then scientific components gets put into NSF or some new agency. And then you have a disparate space program that's split between five agencies and you have no central authority. And maybe it's governed by a space council. Maybe that's an alternative at the time. But looking post Apollo, it was, well, they needed to not just prove what they should be doing next, but prove their existence as a national good. Taking the Nixon doctrine to its fullest extent, it's not just the congressional justification for keeping the budget the same as the previous fiscal year, but it's keeping the agency in and of itself.

Is it worth, especially in those formative years of NASA, is it worth keeping it as an agency? And I think, I mean, as a space advocate, I'm a little biased. I think the answer is yes. I think having a centralized space agency like NASA is a positive thing. But at the time, 1972, 1971, 1972, 1971. OMB clearly was not a fan of the immense expenditures that had preceded it, that had preceded in the preceding decade for Apollo. And I think that opposition to a concerted national effort, um, could, could have ended NASA as we think about it today and could have changed the course of us presence in space. If Richard Nixon didn't think it was a positive thing to continue to have humans. Yeah. I mean, how much is, I mean, that's the interesting question, right? What do you lose by not having humans in space? And on some level, very little, in a practical sense. You learn less about what it's like to have humans in space.

That's essentially it. But it does carry, you know, I do feel, and I think it would be an interesting argument to make in detail at some point, that it is your loss leader into all this other space activities that you then have to find these backfilled justifications of scientific, you know, exploration and other aspects of it that make it see, you know, again, the so-called acceptable reasons that help keep it this high profile politically interesting you know it supported activity and yeah like losing that i think it definitely would have fit into that 70s era malaise attitude right of retrenchment regression particularly in technology and symbolic that you know we would just stop doing that or maybe do it so infrequently. We just keep making, I don't know, Saturn 1B boosters or something like that. And maybe the Russian space program is kind of an interesting core.

Maybe that's what it would have looked like, where it was kind of the shell of its former glory, obsessed with its past, minimally active for kind of what its core things that it does but not an innovator and basically only descends humans into space every now and then you know there's the whole then you have this whole military i said this was separate kind of military component which is much more active the less well i will also say the military component is huge in convincing Nixon. And even the laundry list of capabilities that shuttle would have to promote, I guess, military capabilities for shuttle. One of them is capture, containment, and disarmament of unfriendly spacecraft.

We live in a world today where even anti-satellite testing is generally frowned upon. In 1972, it was reasonable to think, well, maybe if the cold war went hot, it's going to include combat in space. And that was a reasonable expectation because it was so completely wide open what that future, uh, future state might look like. Have you ever seen the Russian movie? Salyut seven about the, uh, uh, it's kind of their equivalent of apollo 13 movie it's like an adventure movie to save that space station and i think it's in the mid early 80s um there's a subplot that is entirely

made up i'll just emphasize entirely made up this one of the tensions in the movie is that if the russians don't save the space station salute 7 that the u.s is going to launch a shuttle and steal it and like pluck it so that's like the tension of the movies like we got to do this now or else the u.s is going to steal this uh with their space shuttle to your exactly and i think they pulled that plot point entirely out of this omb probably yeah that is no no yeah who doesn't love reading these OMB reports about this? Um, any other aspects of this paper that really stood out to you, uh, in terms of, I mean, at the end of the day, maybe we should say, do you, do you buy the argument that John is making here?

I buy the argument. I mean, one, John's a very persuasive writer, right? And I think well-sourced, well-researched. And I buy that in 1986, in May of 1986, you could have deemed the shuttle a policy failure. However, to an earlier point, I think the fact that we still have a space agency and the shuttle lasted as long as it did is a policy success. Because I think you can discount the arguments that NASA had to make to OMB in order to prove its own existence and the continued use of outer space and continued uh advancement of capabilities in outer space yeah at the cost of i think as we discussed there being a dearth of of uh planetary science space space science missions in the 1980s as a result of shuttle being the sole platform launch vehicle for NASA, which coincidentally wouldn't have created, if we didn't have the shuttle and we stuck with the Titan 3, potentially we would have had more planetary science missions and we wouldn't

have had the Planetary Society, right? In this alternate history. But would we also still have NASA? So I think in that long view, I mean, I think we still have a space program and the shuttle continued to run for almost three decades or little over two decades after this paper was published. I think that is a success. And regardless of what points or arguments that NASA had to make in 1971 and early 1972 to convince Richard Nixon that we should move forward with the shuttle, that we should move forward with the shuttle. I think ultimately the shuttle helped prove the existence, helped be it's sort of a case study in why we need a space program,

to remain competitive, to be innovative, to be pushing the boundaries of what humanity is capable of. And we would not have the world that we have today if it weren't for shuttle, despite these early policy failings. An interesting take. I like that. My feel, if I had to summarize this, I think I'll emphasize John is a great and clear writer. And it is a pleasure to read papers like this versus the really, really dry ones, which can't exist. I think, again, it just kind of comes down to whose policies

apply here and i think we'll take at face value that nasa was not doing this maliciously is like was not misrepresenting it's had all the best intentions to say it could be a cost-effective single launch vehicle for the whole U.S. needs and it was going to be this transformative thing. I think that was the intent. NASA also had the policy goal of building a space station and doing all this other stuff in space. And in that sense, I think it yeah, we'll give this, it was 1986 so that hadn't happened yet. And it kind of depends what policies you're applying here and which ones have value or which ones are the most important to you.

In the end of the day, it was not a cost-effective machine to operate, but it kind of didn't matter because we ran it for 30 years. It didn't stop it from happening, right? It's expensive. Was there an opportunity cost? Probably, but as you know and we've talked about before, sometimes that money, if it doesn't go to that one program,

it just doesn't come to NASA at all. It doesn't by definition take money from some other NASA project. Hard to say. That's a really hard one to say exactly where that money would have gone somewhere else, but it's not a guarantee. And we've seen that with other projects.

But the paper does make an interesting pivot in the middle. And I think that's what to me is like the point that I dwell on a bit is that I buy, and I think John makes a great argument that these policy goals that he selects, it did not fulfill and ended up never fulfilling, particularly the really ill-advised idea to make it the single launch vehicle of the entire nation. It's a military and civilian needs. But pivoting to this idea of national commitment,

I think is less, is harder to defend. I think it isn't as well defended in the scope of this paper. This idea that you need to have this national commitment to make it a policy success. And that's why it did not happen. And I think national commitments are really, I mean, I think you've heard us discussing this. They're somewhat ill-defined. They're hard to endure by definition, by just the design of our system. And it's not even clear exactly what they mean.

I think you can see it with Apollo. It had this national, I think, and the base maybe just comes out at the end of the day, it's you can see it with apollo it had this national i think and the base maybe just comes out at the end of the day it's just money and it's it's the difference between rhetoric and dollars because rhetoric is free and dollars you only get to spend once and but at the same time you can't just summon a national commitment national commitments and and this would be an interesting historian can email me and yell at me if this is completely wrong or jack you have a degree in political science you can yell me this wrong but national commitments to me occur because of external events and and

not internal ones necessarily some something has to happen that then and the national commitments in response to it's hard to just create a national commitment. And absent, in a sense, some massive thing that is kind of unpredictable, NASA couldn't just summon one of those to create the space shuttle. And so I think it's a standard. I mean, I get it. It's certainly nice to have a national commitment, but I think maybe you're lucky to get one of those a century, which seems to be what our running pace is at the moment with Apollo.

So that would be the area. Despite multiple events. Yeah, right. To create one, right? Not just in space, but I mean, you have the Cancer moonshot. Yeah. Right? Right.

It's this national commitment that has its funding, but it's not this Apollo. I mean, it's called the Cancer Moonshot after Apollo, but not the same level of commitment. You want to see a national commitment, look at the early days of COVID and see how quickly the U.S. spent $2 trillion when it wanted to. That's a national commitment. Forever, whatever people's politics on COVID ended up being at the beginning they couldn't pass that fast enough everyone got a thousand bucks or whatever right and they just suddenly spent trillions of dollars and that's what i mean that you can't just the same arguments for why we should support you know investments in vaccines for massive diseases were the same before and after COVID existed.

But only after it came, could that kind of money be spent and that national commitment exist. And so that's where I wonder you really, it's a high standard to hold to something and learning. And then the sausage being made in a democratic system becomes less. Yeah. I'm more sympathetic to that than not having that follow through exist. Well, I mean, even the, I think a national commitment also is supposed to, I guess, in

its vague definition is something that one person or one group of people decides is the national commitment. And there is a sustained, unfettered access to funding to meet that commitment. Yeah. As with COVID, spare no expense, right? With Apollo, whatever it costs, it's going to cost, but we're going to get this done. And you see that, that even with Nixon announcing that this is a national commitment on January the 5th, 1972, not three months later, OMB is already telling NASA how little of the next federal budget they're going to get. Clearly not a national commitment if you can't spare no yeah right that's i think john has a great line in this paper unrealistic expectations obviously lead to later policy failure i think that that's an important part of this too that is circled and underlined in my copy of this so jack i think uh the question of this space shuttle program,

a policy failure, kind of? Is that kind of a word? Kind of, question mark, as in the title. Emoticon, shruggy emoticon, yes. In some ways, yes, and in some ways, no, which I guess is the most satisfying answer for a policy discussion about as concrete as one gets. Jack, anything else you want to add about this paper that we read today?

No, I think this was a fantastic exercise. I think getting an opportunity to read, I think, a famous space policy article is a fair assessment for something that John wrote. This has been a great exercise, and the lessons learned in this will help inform what we're working on today and the next decade and the next national commitment that we have. From the space. God help us when that when that happens jack thanks for being here jack curly is our director of government relations in washington dc if you the listener have an idea for a paper that you want us to talk about or are particularly excited about please shoot either jack or i an email or drop us a note in the Planetary Society's online community.

We have that if you're a member, remember, at community.planetary.org. Until then, our next episode will be the first Friday of January 2024. You can subscribe to this podcast on all major podcast networks. If you like the show, please give us a review, a positive one, only I request, if you have positive things to say, or you can sign up to our free monthly newsletter on space policy and politics, The Space Advocate at planetary.org slash spaceadvocate.

So Jack, until next time, until next paper, Ad Astra. Till next time, Ad Astra. Until next time, Ad Astra.