National Security Requirements Drive Shuttle Design

Abstract

When NASA in its September 30, 1970, budget proposal to the Office of Management and Budget OMB) characterized the space shuttle as “cost- effective,” it was responding to pressure from the budget office to demonstrate that the combination of the costs of developing and operating the reusable shuttle would, over the period of shuttle use, produce a cost savings over the use of existing or new expendable launch vehicles to launch the same missions. This requirement was unprecedented; in the 12 years since NASA had begun operations, it had never been required to show that one of its programs could be justified in economic terms. The NASA leadership, once it had decided to defer the space station and to justify the shuttle as a generalpurpose launch system, concluded that it had no alternative but to accede to the cost-effectiveness requirement. NASA quickly recognized that meeting this requirement would require the shuttle being used to launch essentially all U.S. payloads. In particular, military and intelligence satellites launched by the national security community comprised almost half of the U.S. demand for space launches, and there was no way that the shuttle could be cost effective unless that community abandoned its own launch vehicles and committed to use the shuttle once its feasibility had been demonstrated.