The bulk of the text is devoted to the space shuttle program, which began in the early s, well before the first shuttle flight in Tellingly, 5 of the book's 13 chapters are about the Challenger and Columbia accidents and their repercussions. The facts will be familiar to most observers of U. Thus the book is far more than a review of secondary sources; it is a primary contribution to the history of the space program.
I estimate that U. One central question that repeatedly came to mind as I read Duggins's history is "What purpose has the shuttle served? In the early years the shuttle was an unwelcome compromise, something that NASA settled for when its ambitious desire to build on the Apollo manned moon program with a mission to Mars was rejected in the political process. The shuttle was supposed to become a reliable and low-cost means of getting to space and delivering satellites for the military and private companies.
This goal was never met, however; the shuttle's eventual flight rate the number of flights per year approached only 5 percent of what was initially expected, and costs soared far above original projections.
Once the program was mature, the shuttle's existence became its own justification, and a space station was added to serve as its destination. Politics came into play as well. Duggins asserts that the Clinton Administration favored using the human spaceflight program as a means of conducting foreign policy, noting that critics called it "foreign aid with spacesuits.
The Challenger and Columbia accidents provided their own motivations for continuing the program—the rallying call "return to flight" became a mission unto itself. Duggins discusses the common institutional and cultural factors that were found to be behind both shuttle accidents and hints that NASA is still dealing with them.
He quotes the husband of one of the astronauts who perished on Columbia who happened to be a NASA flight surgeon himself :. The book also brings home the fact that the experience of being an astronaut is less than glamorous and can sometimes even be harrowing.
The considerable risks of spaceflight were reinforced in April by the uncontrolled reentry of a Soyuz capsule that was carrying an American, a Russian and a South Korean back to Earth from the International Space Station. The capsule's reentry problems and its hard landing some miles off target which the astronauts survived received little attention in the press and remain poorly understood.
Final Countdown is neither an academic history nor a political analysis; it draws on almost none of the scholarly literature on the U. Station was just beginning to live up to its promise for research, so it was the older shuttle system that went," Adler said.
According to Barry, the decision to end the space shuttle program was made easier in the geopolitical context of when the United States and Russia were "good allies" and the cost of using the Soyuz spacecraft was essentially negligible. It wasn't until several years later Russia complained that, in fact, they were getting an unfair deal because they were being forced into providing vehicles that they hadn't budgeted for," Barry said.
So now, it is important that the United States has an independent capability of being able to launch people to space. Demo-2 will be the first time that the Dragon spacecraft takes astronauts into space, and if the demonstration mission goes to plan, SpaceX is contracted to supply six more flights to the ISS. The return of launches to U.
Boeing is slightly behind SpaceX though, with the company hoping to conduct a manned test flight of the Starliner in Two of the shuttles had even experienced failure, however, the rate of failure was still equivalent to all other launch vehicles.
There is also a level of innate hazard when it comes to space travel; however, with every disappointment, there has been a considerable improvement in terms of reliability for subsequent flights. This was one of the factors that made people question the decision to end the project. The main concern was that the program was excessively costly. Apart from building another multi-reason crew vehicle MPCV that is intended to take teams outward into the solar system, the agency is also looking to solicit dispatch services from four commercially-designed shuttles which will be used to take space travellers to and from the International Space Station.
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