I’ve said for years (even before the first one blew up, I think) that the Shuttle is a dog. It’s the 1975 panel-sided Mercury station wagon of space. And that’s on a good day, when it doesn’t kill its crew. On Idle Words is an article which lays out the case in delicious detail that it’s time to stick a fork in it. (And in the ISS, too.)
The Apollo program showed how successful the agency could be when given a clear technical objective and the budget required to meet it. But the Shuttle program has shown the flip side of NASA, as rational goals detach from reality under constantly changing political and funding pressures. NASA has learned valuable bureaucratic lessons – it knows to spread its work over as many jurisdictions as possible, it has learned that chronic funding is always better than acute funding, however much money a one-time outlay might save in the long run, and it has demonstrated that ineffectual projects can be sustained indefinitely if cancelling them is sufficiently awkward. But these are lessons we have already learned for far less on the ground, with Amtrak, and building a more photogenic, spaceborne version of the Sunset Limited in orbit hardly seems like a space policy for the 21st century.
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