Did he save it? And if so, why? An interesting bit of history of which I’d been unaware. Mondale wanted to kill it, and did manage to reduce the fleet size from seven to five (including Enterprise, which never flew). Which was economically stupid, because it saved very little money. If we’d had six vehicles, we’d have still had four after the losses of Challenger and Columbia (assuming that we hadn’t built Endeavour from spares after Challenger, and those two events would have occurred in that alternate universe). A four- or five-ship fleet would have made for a slightly different calculus after the loss of the latter, because part of the reason the program was ended was that three was too small a fleet to continue to operate for long.
5 thoughts on “Jimmy Carter And The Space Shuttle”
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Carter’s support for the shuttle was mentioned in Joseph Trento’s 1987 book Prescription For Disaster (which followed the space program through to the Challenger disaster), the bragging bit wasn’t mentioned, Robert Frosch recounted that Carters background in engineering showed through in his questions.
The reason my first vote for president was for Carter was because he was an engineer. That was a mistake.
“It’s obvious that the space shuttle is just a contrivance to keep NASA alive”
So a politician can write truth???
We didn’t need the shuttle to orbit spy satellites. It was needed to build ISS which we didn’t need to spend $150b on. Both the shuttle and ISS were contrivances. $150b is ten of SpaceX 30 years before SpaceX. Talk about opportunity cost!
Carter and Mondale… election nights in 1980 and 1984. Fond memories.
Reading all that plagued STS development by 1978-79, I was depressingly reminded of everything plaguing the current P.O.R. And the one before it.