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The Space Shuttle costs about $1.5 billion per launch,
compared to the NASA estimate each launch could be done for $10.4 million.
So the launches cost about 140 times what NASA estimated they would cost.
Did investment in the shuttle program pay off? By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY After 133 missions, 14 astronauts lost in two tragic accidents and almost four decades of work, NASA's space shuttles will head to museums once this year's final two missions are done. So what did we get for the $113.7 billion that NASA says was spent on the shuttle? A century-long dream, the reusable, winged space plane was sold by the space agency as the logical successor to the Apollo missions of the moon-race era in the early 1970s. Budget cuts and compromises such as enlarging the shuttle payload to hold military satellites limited the promise of making space travel cheap, frequent and easy, says historian Roger Launius of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington. "The history of the space shuttle is one of biting off more than we can chew," says policy analyst Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado. In a recent Nature journal estimate, Pielke put the true cost of the program at $192 billion from 1971 to 2010 (more than the space agency estimate partly because of adjustments for inflation), or about $1.5 billion per launch. In 1972, NASA estimated each launch could be done for $10.4 million. Says Pielke: "However you add it up, it was an enormously expensive undertaking." "Economically, you can't make an argument for it," says economist Henry Hertzfeld of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. Originally, the program was supposed to make dozens of launches a year, lowering the costs per launch. Its busiest year, 1985, with nine launches, contributed to the loss of the Challenger shuttle with seven astronauts the next year, according to the subsequent investigation. From 1981 to today, the space shuttle carried about 2,300 experiments into space, NASA spokeswoman Stephanie Schierholz says. The most widely cited one, says David Pendlebury of Thomson Reuters' science information service, is a 1996 study of "anti-shock" shorts used to measure astronaut fitness. Overall, the shuttle's science achievements rank 10th on the Science News tally, which ties scientific discoveries since 1973 to individual space agency programs. First on that list with more than six times as many discoveries is the Hubble Space Telescope. Technologically, the shuttle pioneered many advances, says physicist Luke Sollitt of The Citadel in Charleston, S.C. NASA is keeping the space shuttles' reusable liquid-rocket engines for future missions, for example. And it allowed for the construction of the International Space Station. |