With the 135th and final mission of the Space Shuttle in July 2011, NASA brought to a close the storied thirty year career of this remarkable vehicle and concluded the Space Shuttle Program. Through this era of manned spaceflight, we saw the rise of the personal computer, the invention of the Internet, the creation of the Global Positioning System (GPS), and the worldwide proliferation of cellular telephone service, to name only some of the most familiar elements of the world today.
Even with these remarkable technological developments, the Space Shuttle routinely demonstrated its remarkable capabilities and stimulated our imagination about space exploration. However, the complexity of the system and the extraordinary cost of flying the reusable Shuttle led to controversy and sharp differences of opinion in the face of new priorities for NASA and missions beyond low earth orbit. As a result, NASA retired the Shuttle in 2011 not long after the 30th anniversary of the first flight in 1981. Yet even in retirement, the Space Shuttle remains one of the most positive and tangible symbols of American excellence worldwide, and it has become an important example of the technological capability of the United States, universally recognized as such by the American people and also by the larger international community.
In Space Shuttle Legacy: How We Did It and What We Learned (Launius, R., Krige, J. and Craig, J. editors, Space Shuttle Legacy-How We Did It and What We Learned, AIAA Library of Flight, 2013), a group of experts including historians, political scientists, public administrators, engineers, and scientists have combined to answer the question – what is the legacy of the Space Shuttle? They examine key aspects of the program, including its long history, its successes and failures, and what lessons it offers to those engaged in current or future spaceflight programs.
This book was planned at Georgia Tech along with the symposium, The Space Shuttle: An Engineering Milestone, held on the campus in June 2011 to commemorate the Space Shuttle Program and the many individuals who devoted themselves to its success. The book and the Symposium proceedings are intended to serve as a catalyst for additional study in the years to come.