But, this goal seems to be critical to DOD support. It might be easy to underestimate the national security implications of the Space Shuttle decision and the desire of some in the DOD to gain a military astronaut foothold that facilitated it. Most of those missions were for the purpose of deploying reconnaissance satellites but what else might have been accomplished on them is unknown in the non-classified world. In return, military astronauts would fly on classified missions in LEO. In essence, NASA embraced a military mission for the Space Shuttle program as a means of building a coalition in support of an approval that might not have been approved otherwise.
Without those design modifications to support the military space program, the DOD would have probably withheld monetary and political support from the project. Moreover, the payload bay of the Space Shuttle, so often viewed as excessive for most mission requirements, needed its 15 (4.6 meters) x 60 (18.3 meters) feet dimensions to satisfy DOD and intelligence community planners that it would accommodate national security payloads. This would enable great flexibility in deploying those space assets into orbit, while masking their trajectories from the Soviet Union. That military mission, as it came to coalesce around the new Space Shuttle in the 1970s, took as its raison d’être the deployment of reconnaissance and other national security payloads into low-Earth orbit (LEO).Īs such, the DOD and the intelligence community insisted that the shuttle’s orbiter be designed so that it had a cross-range maneuvering capability to meet requirements for lift-off and landing at the same location after only one orbit. Although NASA wanted the shuttle for its purposes, the Department of Defense (DOD) agreed to support the shuttle because of its perceived use as a means for military operations in space.
The launch of the Space Shuttle “Columbia” on April 12, 1981.ĭuring the 1970s, the Space Shuttle became the “sine qua non” of NASA, intended as it was to make spaceflight routine, safe, and relatively inexpensive.
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