The US government now plans to retire the space shuttle fleet in a couple of years, deciding that they are no longer safe enough, so it seems like a good time to have a quick look back over its history to see whether it has been a success.

The roots of the space shuttle that NASA are continuing to fly to the International Space Station were fixed more than 40 years, when the American government were putting together a space program that would allow them to deliver a nuclear weapon to any point on the surface of the earth with a moment’s notice. The idea of a reusable space plane was the perfect way to launch a bomb to any point on the globe.

Thankfully it quickly became clear to the accountants within the government that it would be cheaper to kill hundreds of thousands of people using an intercontinental ballistic missile, and the idea of a space bomber was dropped. Of course those same accountants quickly saw that the enormous capital waste of using a disposable launch platform like Apollo was too much of an expense, and consequently it was decided that by using a space shuttle, it would be possible to launch payloads such as satellites into space much more cheaply.

Of course, it soon became clear that it would not be as cheap as originally decided to launch the shuttle, and that certain parts of it, such as the external fuel tank would still be disposed of after each flight and the platform was not flexible or robust enough to be launched on a bi weekly basis as originally planned.

The US government had planned for a much larger fleet of shuttles, which would have been capable of a massive construction plan in space that would have seen a gigantic permanently manned space station, and a vast network of satellites that would have established many modern innovations such as GPS a lot earlier.

In terms of its economics, the Space Shuttle program has been a failure. Too expensive to work as planned, and too complex to be launched as regularly as was originally envisaged, the shuttle could have become a white elephant if it hadn’t been such a remarkable achievement.

The government found a use for it in opening up the low levels of space to man, and it has been responsible for launching hundreds of people into space. The failure rate may have been too high – two failures were two too many! – But the successes far outweigh them.

The shuttle should have been the first stage in man’s conquest of space, but it has not been. A costly freight lifter limited to low earth orbit, it may be the most powerful machine ever created, but it was not powerful enough, and when it is retired, the USA will have no access to Space for around 5 years, and probably even longer than that if the proposed CEV takes as long to get off the ground as the shuttle did.