Strategy Requires Focus: Why the Space Shuttle Spent So Much but Made Little Progress

The previous post discussed how clear and explicit US strategy was in World War II. This post, by contrast, concerns US space missions spending money but making little progress because they tried to accommodate too many mutually contradictory strategic goals at once. Remember: there are not 100 things to do. There is only one thing that matters most. --- The United States originally set out to build the space shuttle because NASA asked Congress for a shuttle that could bring the cost of placing each pound of payload in orbit below $100. NASA ultimately built five space shuttles. Two were lost in crashes, and 14 astronauts died. Over the entire operating period, the average transportation cost was $28,000 per pound. NASA’s shuttle program was bound to fail. Too many people were putting their own demands into the plan. Congress wanted to reduce the cost of placing satellites in orbit and therefore required “low-cost” solid-fuel rockets. But those rockets were highly unreliable, and their actual costs were high too. The public focused on crewed spaceflight—without realizing that the vast majority of space missions do not need a crew at all. Carrying people requires systems to support them, greatly increasing the difficulty. The Air Force wanted the shuttle shaped like an airplane, with wings, so that it could carry out missions both in space and in the atmosphere. Members of Congress also wanted their own states to get a share of the project through contracts with local contractors… Trying to satisfy everyone’s wishes produced this incoherent hybrid. In the end, the US space program spent heavily without achieving particularly good results. ----