How will history judge the shuttle? Max Faget, one of this century’s most renowned aerospace designers, offered an insider’s perspective: “When we first broke the speed of sound, we did this in a research airplane. After we flew that airplane a dozen times, we discarded it, put it into a museum, and then got to work on designing airplanes based on the knowledge we gained from it. The shuttle is the first one that…flew this tremendous Mach number range, but it also did the job of a launch vehicle and a spacecraft that could stay in orbit for days or weeks at a time. If it is a little bit wanting in some of its operational features, I think it’s excusable. Maybe the second and third generation shuttles could be really good, but I don’t know how you can make the third generation shuttle without have the first and second generation shuttle. We are still learning.”

For the people who pioneered American high-speed flight, then worked on Apollo and then turned to the space shuttle, that was the goal all along.

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Brian Welch, a writer and spokesman for the space agency since 1979, has worked at both the Langley Research Center and the Johnson Space Center. For further reading: Entering Space: An Astronaut’s Odyssey, by Joseph P. Allen; and Liftoff: The Story of America’s Adventure in Space, by Michael Collins.

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