Criticism of the Space Shuttle program
[7] NASA's promotion of and reliance on the Shuttle slowed domestic commercial expendable launch vehicle (ELV) programs until after the 1986 Challenger disaster.
[10] It would afford the opportunity to conduct science experiments on board the shuttle to be used to study the effects of space flight on humans, animals and plants.
Some reasons for the higher-than-expected operational costs were: For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.Some researchers have criticized a pervasive shift in NASA culture away from safety in order to ensure that launches took place in a timely fashion, sometimes called "go fever".
According to sociologist Diane Vaughan, the aggressive launch schedules arose in the Reagan years as an attempt to rehabilitate America's post-Vietnam War prestige.
After landing, the orbiter would be checked out and start being mated to the External Tank and Solid Rocket Boosters, and be ready for launch in as little as two weeks.
In practice, before the loss of Challenger, about half of the turnaround time after a mission was unplanned tests and modifications based on unexpected events that occurred during flight.
[5] Some shuttle features initially presented as important to Space Station support have proved superfluous: While the technical details of the Challenger and Columbia accidents are different, the organizational problems show similarities.
Morton-Thiokol designed and manufactured the SRBs, and during a pre-launch conference call with NASA, Roger Boisjoly, the Thiokol engineer most experienced with the O-rings, pleaded with management repeatedly to cancel or reschedule the launch.
He raised concerns that the unusually low temperatures would stiffen the O-rings, preventing a complete seal during flexing of the rocket motor segments, which was exactly what happened on the fatal flight.
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board called this tendency the "normalization of deviance" – a gradual acceptance of events outside the design tolerances of the craft simply because they had not been catastrophic to date.
The problem on Columbia was that the damage was sustained from a foam strike to the reinforced carbon-carbon leading edge panel of the wing, not the heat tiles.
The first Shuttle mission, STS-1, had a protruding gap filler that diverted hot gas into the right wheel well on re-entry, resulting in a buckling of the right main landing gear door.
[32] Charles Bolden was amazed to learn after the loss of Columbia that the "impenetrable" leading wing edges of the vehicle he flew for 14 years were less than an inch thick.
To justify its very large fixed operational program cost, NASA initially forced all domestic, internal, and Department of Defense payloads to the shuttle.
[citation needed] When that proved impossible (after the Challenger disaster), NASA used the International Space Station (ISS) as a justification for the shuttle.
This necessitated that they not burn up upon atmospheric reentry, which in turn made mounting them on the orbiter itself (the one part of the Shuttle system where reuse was paramount) a seemingly logical decision.
The committee pointed out, "that it was, for example, inappropriate in the case of Challenger to risk the lives of seven astronauts and nearly one-fourth of NASA's launch assets to place in orbit a communications satellite.
