With Apollo winding down and public enthusiasm fading, Richard Nixon approved NASA's proposal for a reusable Space Shuttle on January 5, 1972, aiming to lower the cost of reaching orbit. The program, first flown in 1981, ultimately launched 135 missions, built the International Space Station, and suffered two fatal disasters before retiring in 2011.
By the winter of 1971, NASA was a victim of its own success. Apollo had put men on the Moon, but Congress and the White House were already cutting its budget, and the agency needed a new program to keep its workforce and its purpose. Its answer was a winged, reusable vehicle that could fly to orbit and land like an airplane, cutting the cost of spaceflight by never throwing away the hardware. In early January 1972, NASA Administrator James Fletcher and his deputy, George Low, met Richard Nixon at the Western White House in San Clemente, California, where the president approved the project. In his public statement, Nixon said the shuttle would help turn the space frontier of the 1970s into familiar territory, easily accessible for human endeavor, in the 1980s and 1990s.
The design that emerged was a compromise shaped by money and by the military. The Office of Management and Budget capped development at roughly $5.5 billion, which ruled out NASA's preferred fully reusable, two-stage craft. Engineers instead paired an orbiter with a disposable external fuel tank and two recoverable solid-rocket boosters. The Air Force, whose support NASA needed politically, insisted on a cargo bay 60 feet long and 15 feet wide, large enough for its reconnaissance satellites, and on wings that could maneuver hundreds of miles sideways during reentry. Those requirements fixed the orbiter's size and its distinctive delta wing.
Columbia first flew on April 12, 1981, with John Young and Robert Crippen aboard. Over the next 30 years the fleet deployed the Hubble Space Telescope, carried the components that built the International Space Station, and flew 135 missions in all. It never came close to the routine, inexpensive operations NASA had promised. Planners had once projected dozens of flights a year; the busiest year, 1985, saw nine. The losses of Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 killed 14 astronauts. Atlantis landed for the final time in July 2011, ending the program that Nixon's decision had set in motion.