The Space Shuttle was a compromise between NASA's dreams and the Air Force's payloads
Engineers wanted a fully reusable spaceship: a winged orbiter riding a winged booster. What flew from 1981 to 2011 was only partly reusable, shaped by Air Force demands for a huge cargo bay and by budget limits. Over 135 missions it launched Hubble, helped build the space station, and lost two crews.
The idea of a winged rocket went back to the Silbervogel, a design sketched in late-1930s Germany by Eugen Sänger and Irene Bredt. In the 1950s and 1960s the US Air Force pursued a piloted spaceplane called Dyna-Soar, cancelled in 1963, while NASA and the Air Force flew wingless lifting bodies to learn how to glide down from high speed without power. In 1969 a panel under Vice President Spiro Agnew proposed a whole fleet of reusable craft; the shuttle was the only piece that got funded, and it officially kept the name Space Transportation System.
The design was a tug of war. Max Faget, who had helped shape the Mercury capsule, patented a straight-winged, two-stage craft that could be fully recovered. The Air Force insisted on delta wings that could survive reentry heating and swing far sideways, plus the power to lift 29,000 kilograms into orbit and a bay 18 metres long. In 1971 the partners settled on a delta-winged orbiter strapped to a throwaway fuel tank, and in 1972 President Nixon approved it. Two solid-fuel boosters would parachute into the sea for reuse.
Building it was hard. The RS-25 main engine, the first reusable engine that could be throttled, suffered cracked turbine blades and nozzle failures in testing. For heat protection NASA chose replaceable ceramic tiles so the frame could be light aluminium. When Columbia reached Florida in 1979, 6,000 of its 30,000 tiles were still missing, and many already fitted had to be redone, adding two years.
Enterprise, finished in 1976, only flew landing tests. Columbia, Challenger, Discovery and Atlantis went to orbit, with Endeavour added in 1991 after Challenger was lost in 1986. Columbia broke up in 2003; the two disasters killed 14 astronauts. After Atlantis landed for the last time on 21 July 2011, American crews rode Russian Soyuz capsules until Crew Dragon flew in May 2020.
Source: Space Shuttle
