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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There are many ties between NACA and the space shuttle. In the 1950s, for example, the work of the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD) of the old Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Va., was launching instrumented scale models on top of sounding rockets and telemetering data back to the ground. Although difficult and primitive by today's standards, the research was both viable and fundamental. It gave engineers valuable insights into the problems of high-speed flight, beyond Mach 2 or 3 and into the hypersonic regime.

The head of PARD was Robert Gilruth, who had been with NACA since the 1940s and was destined to direct Project Mercury. Gilruth was later the director of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston when the first serious feasibility studies for the shuttle were conducted. His deputy at PARD was a young man from Virginia Polytechnic Institute named Chris Kraft, who went on to become the first flight director in the first mission control center and who, as Gilruth's successor in Houston, helped bring the space shuttle into being. Another member of the PARD team was a brilliant engineer from deep in Louisiana by the name of Maxime Faget. He went on to supervise the designs that became Mercury capsules, Apollo command and service modules and space shuttles. In fact, many of the engineers in PARD joined the Space Task Group in 1959 to create Project Mercury, as did many others from the Langley laboratory.

The experience of these seasoned experts stretched far back into the corporate memory of NACA, for corporate memory was one of the many things in which the NACA excelled, and they left an indelible mark on the space program.

To understand why proponents were so optimistic about the space shuttle in the 1970s, one has to return to the heady days of Project Apollo. 'You could not have built the shuttle without the Apollo heritage,' Loftus said. 'You couldn't have done it with another team.' Pohl agreed. 'A lot of people who worked on the orbiter worked on the X-15,' he said. 'Then they worked on Apollo. So they had the knowledge of how to build airplanes, they had the knowledge of how to build rockets and the kinds of things that you had to be concerned about when operating in the space environment.'

The designers of the shuttle thought in terms of a rough-and-ready, rugged and robust wheel-drive kind of spacecraft, capable of bouncing around the back roads of space with a vast array of redundant systems, four deep in many cases, to provide defense in-depth against hardware problems and ground processing headaches.

That defense in-depth, known as quad redundancy, had an odd-sounding acronym (even for NASA) to express its method of operation: FO/FO/FS. It was pronounced 'Fo-Fo-Fis,' and that stood for 'Fail Operational/Fail Operational/Fail Safe.' Safe enough to get the crew home even if three levels of systems failed, and for anything short of that, you just kept on operating–and launching.

If the influences of the Apollo era were profoundly felt in the early years of the shuttle program, there is every reason to believe that the common experience many in NASA shared from the old NACA days was equally important. The young engineers who grew up around wind tunnels and flight lines in the 1940s and '50s, and who went on to become managers in the '60s, had a strong, almost overwhelming faith in the results of their research. Their minds were focused on building the shuttle, on making it work and finding the technical breakthroughs that would allow a 100-ton vehicle to drop out of space and land safely half a world away.

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