NASA is sixty years old this year – but its annual budget depends on what it can deliver within each four-year cycle of American politics. Even if a President expects two terms in office, any NASA project that takes longer than eight years to get results will either heap glory on his or her political opponent or face cancellation. Kennedy’s commitment to send astronauts to the Moon took seven years to achieve, even with funding at eight times what they are today. The Space Shuttle, also known as the ‘Space Transportation System’ was in planning when the first manned Apollo missions flew in 19, but by the early 1970s, public support for expensive projects was fading, and the Shuttle faced cancellation. To save the project, NASA redesigned the reusable orbiter to be able to fly both civilian and Air Force missions.

The result was that the Shuttle was hugely complicated, cumbersome, and expensive. When the first missions began in 1981, the year Ronald Reagan entered office, the launch schedule was much slower than planned: the promised weekly flights became an average of just four missions per year.īut today’s standards, that seems like a decent turnaround. NASA’s Shuttle required the precise coordination of advanced sub-systems built by different contractors.

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