The final space shuttle launch: An end to Nixon's big folly?

TIME's Jeffrey Kluger bids a not-so-fond farewell to Richard Nixon's half-baked plan for an expensive fleet of 'low-orbit space trucks'

The space shuttle Atlantis crew arrives at NASA Kennedy Space facility in preparation for Friday's final liftoff, and the (temporary) end to the 30-year shuttle program.
(Image credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett)

Add the space shuttle to the long list of things we can blame Richard Nixon for, says Jeffrey Kluger at TIME. In 1972, when America was basking in "the triumphant afterglow of the Apollo program," Nixon ignored the ambitious, Mars-by-1986 recommendations of his own space task force, scrapped the remaining planned moonshots, and saddled us instead with an uninspiring, expensive, disaster-prone, "reusable, low-orbit space truck." As we prepare to bid farewell to the creaky, "cursed vehicles" — Friday's launch of the Shuttle Atlantis will be the program's last — it's worth remembering that we could have done better. Here, an excerpt:

A reusable orbital vehicle, Nixon promised in his 1972 statement, "will revolutionize transportation into near space, by routinizing it... [The trip to and from space will be] safer and less demanding for the passengers, so that men and women with work to do in space can 'commute' aloft."

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