The 30-year-long saga of a truly extraordinary space transportation system, which people around the world know as the space shuttle, has come to an end. True, the shuttle did not make access to space more like air travel, as the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) once promised. Yet it was a marvel of aerospace engineering, the world's first reusable spacecraft that went up like a rocket and was able to glide back to earth, ready to go again. The five space shuttles built have carried 355 people from 16 nations, men as well as women. Seven of every ten of the world's spacefarers travelled on the shuttle. It launched many satellites, including India's U.S.-built Insat-1B communications satellite, and three of NASA's great space observatories. The Hubble space telescope, which was launched by Discovery in 1990, would not today be taking those breath-taking images of the cosmos without the shuttle's unique capabilities. During five later shuttle missions, the last in 2009, astronauts made demanding spacewalks to fix corrective lenses on the Hubble, carry out maintenance tasks, and fix new instruments. Without this space-going truck, the giant International Space Station, which weighs close to 400 tonnes on completion, could not have been assembled piece by piece.
On conventional rockets, known as ‘expendable launch vehicles,' the actual payload, such as a satellite, that goes into orbit constitutes only a small percentage of their weight at launch. The rest of the rocket, much of it propellants, is consumed and jettisoned during the flight. Imagine where air travel would be if a new aircraft was needed for each journey. The space shuttle was intended to change this state of affairs. But being reusable did not translate into lower cost. Indeed, at an estimated $1.5 billion per launch, the shuttles were staggeringly more expensive than expendable launchers. One reason was that, unlike aircraft, each shuttle needed months of careful refurbishment before it could fly again. The care that went into preparing the shuttles for flight had to be greater because there were humans aboard. The death of 14 astronauts when Challenger and Columbia were lost showed all too clearly that manned spaceflight was still a dangerous endeavour, no matter how routine it might appear. But with the end of the shuttle programme, the world, including the U.S., will now rely solely on expendable rockets. That is unquestionably a step backwards. Hopefully, the dreams of a reusable craft that goes beyond the capabilities of the space shuttle and makes access to space both routine and cheap will be pursued again some day.
