It never got any easier after that. A slowdown hit the aerospace industry in the early 1970s, thousands of engineers lost their jobs, reductions in force (known as RIFs) swept NASA, and the agency lost almost a third of its employees, down from 33,000 during the peak Apollo years to around 24,000, the number NASA still employs today. The civil service complement at the space center in Houston was reduced from 4,800 to 3,200 employees. All this occurred while trying to bring a revolutionary space vehicle on line.

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For the person running the orbiter project at the time, the budget situation was ‘very severe and very hard.’ But Aaron Cohen, who today runs JSC, is just as quick to point out that when the budget ax had to fall, it generally fell on the schedule, not quality and not on safety. ‘I don’t think we made any shortcuts in that sense,’ he recalls, ‘but when I had a problem, I couldn’t solve it as rapidly because I couldn’t go with parallel approaches. I had to pick an approach and then hope it was right, rather than go down two or three paths at the same time, as we did in the Apollo program.’

In the end, neither the engineers nor the technical managers nor the people who ran things in Washington could make the shuttle all things to all people and somehow also manage to achieve every one of the enormous promises that were made. As late as 1979, NASA Administor Robert Frosch was still talking in public about the shuttle making regular Monday morning runs into space.

But although this sounds like fantasy today, it is illuminating to consider just some of the elements that were a part of the list of things on which NASA planned to enable 60 shuttle flights to be made a year. That list included a baseline of seven orbiters, three launch pads, two orbiter-processing facilities, adequate spare parts, regular Florida landings and a large percentage of highly standardized, commercial satellite deployment missions. It also included a space station and a fleet of space tugs to ply satellites back and forth from geosynchronous Earth orbit. In one way or another, for one reason or another, not one of those fundamental assumptions was ever met; yet the expectations placed on the shuttle scarcely lessened.

Despite all the impediments, work on the shuttle program continued, and now the fleet is flying. Was it a good choice for the nation to make? Was it a good thing? History will need a long time to work out those questions. But there are some observations that can be made based on the statistics and the performance of the system.

Notwithstanding its bad press, the shuttle has become one of the most reliable launch vehicles in history, with a success-to-failure ration of .978-to-1, with 1 being perfect. Over the course of the program, the fleet has logged more than 100 million miles, more than equivalent to an astronomical unit (AU)–the distance to the sun–with one accident. That figure is made more impressive by the fact that launch vehicles usually experience a higher rate of failure in the early years of operation, before hitting a stride of design maturity after 100 or more flights. But the shuttle has a higher reliability rating than any other U.S. launch vehicle, and most other types of launch vehicles that have been in operation for more than 30 years. Europe’s Ariane booster, the only other vehicle designed in the 1970s and operated in the ’80s, had five failures in its first 40 flights.

In its first decade of operation, the shuttle did not fly to orbit every week, but it did launch almost half of all the mass the United States has ever deployed to space. ‘For all intents and purposes,’ Loftus said, ‘we’ve launched 1,200 tons of payload every decade. It took us 215 launches in the 1960s, 152 launches in the ’70s and 102 launches in the ’80s. The shuttle, with 4 percent of all U.S. launches, has carried 41 percent of all the mass. Not including the orbiter.’

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