According to the New York Times it looks like NASA is finally coming to its senses, and will be going back to the tried and tested "expendable launch vehicles" (aka rockets) of yesteryear.

On the whole, I'm as much a fan of the Space Shuttle as any other technology geek, but I do not think the shuttle will be seen as anything but a frivolous bureaucratic boondoggle in the objective gaze of history, and rather be seen as advancing the US space program, more accurately did much damage to it.

It's particularly interesting to read what the naysayers had to say back in 1980 about the Shuttle program, and how hauntingly correct they were. As in this April Washington Monthly article entitled (somewhat sadly, considering his recent passing) "Beam Me Out Of This Death Trap, Scotty". If you've got the time, it's a fascinating article to read. In case you were hoping I would provide a synopsis, read on.

The first point of the article is that the original justification for the shuttle was cost savings, which turned out to be a myth. (Remind anyone of WMDs?) Anyhow, here's a funny excerpt, implicating what I presume to now be Wolfram Research in the boondoggle:

Back in 1972, when shuttle designs were still on the table, a consulting company called Mathematica did some cost-benefit studies for the project. Mathematica estimated that, under certain conditions, an individual shuttle flight would have a direct cost (fuel, command salaries, sweeping the pad) of $22.4 million. In 1975, NASA froze that number. It started selling contracts for shuttle launches at $22.4 million per, for the first three years of flight--a guaranteed price with no escalator for inflation.

Yet the calculations were made under the assumption of each vehicle would make 50 flights a year, with a 10 year lifespan for the shuttle vehicles. While the shuttles' lifespans exceeded expectations (Columbia was lost in 2003, twentysome years after its maiden voyage) there have been barely over a hundred launches of all five orbiters! In other words, rather than costing 3 times less, it cost closer to orders of magnitude more! As the article fails to predict "pessimistically" enough...

...suppose the shuttles fly only the pessimistic 200 flights. The investment cost leaps to $65 million per flight. Suddenly the total cost of a shuttle flight becomes $105 million--almost twice the cost of three of those wasteful Delta rockets.

Furthermore, Mathematica apparently argued that the cost savings the shuttle would offer is the ability to repair broken satellites or return them to earth. While there were several Hubble repair missions, most satellites were launched into orbits the shuttle couldn't reach, and even if it could, most satellites (particularly of the communications variety) aren't generally worth salvaging.

And if it weren't enough that the shuttle program failed in its primary mission to provide an economy "shuttle" to space, it also fell short of its ability to deliver on its promised 65K lbs. of payload due to design compensations, such as insulating the solid rocket booster to prevent ice from forming and demolishing the orbiter upon liftoff....

The entire vehicle, loaded, weighs 4.5 million pounds. Say you add one percent (for insulation). Doesn't sound like much. One percent comes to 45,000 pounds. That's almost all of the payload.

Even at the time they recognized that getting a 65K payload for (what turned out to be) $1B per flight wasn't as cost effective as the 29K payloads the Titan rockets could do for $50M, without losing over a dozen astronauts and civilians in the process. Sadly, they also predicted the issues with the tiles on the Columbia:

Some suspect the tile mounting is the least of Columbia's difficulties. "I don't think anybody appreciates the depths of the problems," Kapryan says. The tiles are the most important system NASA has ever designed as "safe life." That means there is no back-up for them. If they fail, the shuttle burns on reentry. If enough fall off, the shuttle may become unstable during landing, and thus un-pilotable. The worry runs deep enough that NASA investigated installing a crane assembly in Columbia so the crew could inspect and repair damaged tiles in space. (Verdict: Can't be done. You can hardly do it on the ground.)

(emphasis mine) Hopefully the astronauts can successfully complete the repairs to Discovery before it lands, as I sincerely hope we've come a long way since 1980 when this article was written. If not, all this talk about spacewalks to repair tiles was just grand spectacle to make us feel more comfortable of throwing the astronauts into a highly risky situation!

Still, that's not to say the entire shuttle program should or needs to be cancelled. Robert Zubrin, of the Mars Society, posits that exploration of Mars is the next most logical yet ambitious step in the exploration of space that humanity should undertake. As a reserved critic of the shuttle program, Zubrin's Mars Society posits that the Columbia disaster could result in the cancellation of the shuttle program, but that NASA is taking action:

NASA has [started] the Orbital Space Plane (OSP) program, which will move the human taxi-to-orbit function from the Shuttle to a small capsule or mini-orbiter that can be launched on top of an Atlas or Delta. This however poses the decisive question of what happens to the Shuttle physical, technical, and human infrastructure... Such a Shuttle-derived Saturn-V class booster would provide NASA with the primary tool it needs to launch human missions of exploration throughout the inner solar system.

So, use the shuttle launch facilities, technology, expertise, contractors, and knowledge to launch classic rockets into space, and phase out the remaining orbiters of the shuttle fleet, which is what the NYT article seems to suggest is what will happen. For those who are curious about the current status of the fleet, in order of their creation:

• Enterprise (nee Constitution were it not for the Star Trek geeks) Used for testing gliding and landing operations after taking off of a 747 in the 1970s, this now sits in the Smithsonian Institution. Never performed a vertical liftoff or went into orbit.
• Columbia Maiden flight, 4/12/1981; Destroyed upon re-entry on 2/1/2003. Originally commissioned on 7/26/1972 as the first orbiter.
• Challenger Maiden flight, 4/4/1983; Destroyed upon liftoff on 1/28/1986. Originally commissioned on 7/26/1972 as a test vehicle (like Enterprise) and served as such until 1/1/1979 when it began conversion into the second orbiter.
• Discovery Maiden flight, 8/30/1984; Currently in space. Originally commissioned on 1/29/1979 as the third orbiter.
• Atlantis Maiden flight, 10/3/1985; In operation. Originally commissioned on 1/29/1979 as the fourth orbiter.
• Endeavor Maiden flight, 5/7/1992; In operation. Originally commissioned on 7/31/1987 to replace Challenger.

Keep your fingers crossed for the Discovery crew.