Henry Pohl was one of them, and he still marvels at how rocketry and aeronautics came together that day in the shuttle program. “Most people can’t appreciate that the shuttle, when it’s in orbit up there, is going eight times faster than a bullet when it leaves the muzzle of a .30-06,” said Pohl, who is director of engineering at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston. “It’s an airplane. But we launch it like a rocket. We kick it out of orbit half way around the world, dead stick, no engines. It flies like a rock, yet we set it down on the runway, and we do it time and time again.”

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There have been almost 50 flights to date, as a matter of fact, and the shuttle program will surpass that milestone later this year. Since 1981, the orbiters of NASA’s space shuttle fleet have carried more passengers, traveled almost as many miles and hauled more cargo than all previous U.S. manned spacecraft combined. It has now been 20 years since President Richard M. Nixon approved the development of this remarkable space plane, and in that time the orbiters have come to offer the most impressive form of conveyance humans have managed to achieve in more than 50 centuries of trying. Yet for all of that, the space shuttle has become one of the most hotly debated forms of transportation in history, the fulcrum upon which a perennial battle for the heart and soul of the space program has seesawed back and forth, year after year, for nearly two-thirds of the time that NASA has existed. Understanding why this is so takes a little perspective.

A space shuttle flight begins with sheer spectacle. At the moment of controlled detonation–also known as liftoff–a shuttle is both creating and harnessing 6.5 million pounds of thrust. Its three main engines alone, diminutive in comparison to the raw power of the twin solid-rocket boosters, are themselves generating the output equivalent of 23 Hoover Dams.

Leaving the launch pad, a space shuttle is all rocket, its wings of little practical consequence except as impediments to airflow patterns. Reaching 100 mph as it clears the tower, the shuttle is a study in thunderous vibration, and this only builds in intensity for the first two minutes until the solid boosters tail off and drop away with a pyrotechnic clatter. But what the experience lacks in subtlety during liftoff is more than counterbalanced by the effortless grace with which a space shuttle uses all that energy to navigate once it has reached the seas of low Earth orbit. Once there, the deep-throated rumbling and bucking of ascent gives way to the more placid environment of life in orbit, answerable only to the laws of orbital mechanics and the flight rules of mission control.

But if the shuttle is such a wondrous vehicle, “the world’s greatest, all-electric flying machine,” as four-time flier Robert Crippen put it, then why has it also inspired such descriptions as “untouchable folly,” “space lemon” and “flying brickyard”? Morton Dean, who has covered the space shuttle for two television networks, said the shuttle’s public relations problems go all the way back to what he calls original sin at the beginning of the program. There were too many fantastic promises made, he said, for it to be otherwise, from a launch a week to freight cargoes well below $1,000 per pound (the current rate is variously calculated between $5,000 and $6,000 per pound).

But during its first decade of operation it became painfully obvious that the shuttle–contending with the realities of launch scrubs, schedule slips, remanifested payloads, upset and very critical customers and, ultimately, the cauterizing spectacle of the Challenger explosion–was not going to meet its advance billing. “There was an aura of expectation,” said Joe Loftus, assistant director for plans at JSC, “and the failure to meet some of those expectations has totally obfuscated anybody’s actually looking at what’s been accomplished.”

The technical heritage of the space shuttle goes back at least to the 1950s, but one could argue that the space plane’s roots stretch all the way to the earliest days of flight. The agency that made the shuttle possible in the first place was not NASA but its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, commonly referred to as NACA. Created in 1915, the organization was charged to “supervise and direct the scientific study of the problems of flight, with a view to their practical solution.”

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