BY
E RIC
G .
SW E D I N
3 N O . I 8 4 U H Q
I
A Failed Dream
V O L .
Utah’s Spaceport
255 In 1971, as the Apollo program was still putting astronauts on the moon, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) envisioned space travel and exploration in the future. Though many space enthusiasts hoped for a large space station or moon base, a reusable spacecraft called the space shuttle was projected as the next obvious step, because putting people and cargo into orbit with single-use booster rockets was very expensive. When budget cutters in the Nixon Administration cancelled the final three planned Apollo moon flights, NASA decided to build a winged booster vehicle and winged orbiter that could each be able to fly back to the ground for reuse, dramatically lowering launch costs. NASA wanted a “space truck” that could carry into orbit astronauts, satellites, sections of a space station, or sections of vehicles to be assembled in space in order to later take astronauts to Mars.1 NASA had regularly battled with the Air Force over space funding and programs, both in Congress and within the federal bureaucracy. For instance, the NASA space station Skylab eventually prevailed over the Air Force’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program. To build congressional support for the proposed space shuttle, NASA looked for allies and expanded the possible uses of the space shuttle by including Air Force requirements in the proposed system. 1 The term “space truck” was widely used as a description of the space shuttle, as evidenced by the name of a 1987–1997 exhibit on the space shuttle at the Smithsonian. See Smithsonian, “America’s Space Truck: The Space Shuttle,” accessed May 23, 2016, si.edu/Exhibitions/Details/America’s-Space-Truck-The-Space-Shuttle-3550.
