The Space Shuttle has had a history of triumph and tragedy. From launching the Hubble Space Telescope to two tragic spacecraft disasters, it’s been a long road to the next few launches, which mark the rapidly approaching end of the winged spaceplane. After the current STS-127 mission, with Endeavour due to lift off shortly, we are nearing the final STS-133 mission, currently slated for May 31, 2010. After that, NASA astronauts will once again be fare-paying passengers aboard Russian spacecraft. Whether the follow-on Aries rockets will fly in their presently planned form is anyone’s guess until the system review is published after the summer.
Conceived as an Earth-orbit space-truck, the Space Shuttle followed on from the triumphs of Apollo. Whatever happened, its missions were unlikely to match those spectaculars and, let’s face it, orbital missions are not exactly planet-conquering right stuff. Still, disasters excepted, the Shuttle has basically done the jobs intended for it, though as a far more expensive and labour-intensive launch system than planned - but of course that’s hardly surprising, as politics and budget cuts played as big a part in its design as the technical aspects.
Perhaps the most significant thing about post-Shuttle crewed spacecraft is that all designs - US, Russian, Chinese, European - have gone back to basics and ended up with Apollo-style capsules. Winged spacecraft have the look of science fiction (which makes them intrinsically more wowser to look at!), but for much of a mission, those wings are largely deadweight to be expensively hauled into orbit. Whether we’ll ever see a lookalike ‘son of Shuttle’ is a moot point. At best guess, such a spacecraft will require a quantum leap in materials and propulsion technology to make it possible - so don’t lay any bets for such a machine this side of 2050.
Visit NASA Space Shuttle Mission Control here.
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