Why I hate the Space Shuttle

Just recently I found an old article [1] from 1992 written by Thomas O. Paine, the former administrator of NASA. In this article, which was mainly about the possible future of space travel, he mentioned, that in his opinion, "between 2000 and 2010 the ordinary Space Shuttle fleet will be grounded due to a tragic accident". This prophesy was hanging above NASA like Damocles' sword. And then it fell. Now according to the politicians and the space agencies plan the fleet will indeed by grounded, by 2010. The necessary changes in the American space politics were only possible due to the tragic loss of Columbia Space Shuttle. The new, now planned concept in my opinion the silent admission of the fact, that the strategy of the last 30 years of the human spaceflight was a fundamentally flawed one, and blocked the way of development on many fields. More seriously than one would imagine.

In 1972 the astronauts of Apollo 16 were just driving around on the Moon, when Richard Nixon ("big friend" of space) had given green light to the space shuttle plans. The new aim was to build a construction that could be launched as a rocket, but would land as an airplane, simply, cleanly, on its own to a runway, without having half the navy out on the seas looking for the capsules and vomiting astronauts. After the process the parts of the construction, like the fuselage could be reused again and again. This seemed like a cheap way to ship satellites between Florida and Low Earth Orbit (LEO). For this reason they dubbed it "Space Shuttle". The low cost will draw private firms like magnet, they will be queuing for miles with their telecommunication, remote sensing satellites to get on the bi-weekly launched Shuttles. So the space will be commercialized - so it was said.

References

1. To Settle the Red Planet: A Decade-by-Decade Look at Martian History, 1990-2090