Had we achieved the space shuttle’s goal of reducing costs and making access to space routine and affordable, we would be in a different place today, says Garver. “That’s not the most efficient way to have a space program,” said Garver. And congressional districts are driving how these programs are created, Garver notes. It has a lot of big infrastructure to fill and a lot of mouths to feed, she says. In the Obama administration, we set goals of lowering the cost of space transportation and investing in future sustainable technologies, says Garver.īut NASA grew up on Apollo and likes doing big things, says Garver. We wanted to show the world that they were choosing between democratic and socialist societies and that democracy was the way to advance science and technology, says Garver. With Apollo that purpose was so clear, she says.
These questions come up because since Apollo, we haven’t done a great job of articulating and leading to a why and a purpose for human spaceflight, says Garver. What about those who argue that robotic exploration, rather than human spaceflight, is the way to go? But “NASA’s initial estimated $6 billion development cost quadrupled and by the mid-1980s it was obvious to anyone paying attention that it was never going to deliver on its stated promise,” Garver writes in “Escaping Gravity.” That was the primary goal of the space shuttle program. During the post Apollo era, one of NASA’s stated goals was to develop an entirely new, lower cost and more routine way of accessing low-Earth orbit.
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