If only we had built the Space Shuttle.

The history of America's manned spaceflight efforts, since the first landing on the moon 35 years ago, fills me with regret. So much could have been; so few hopes have been realized.

What have we accomplished? Six successful exploratory missions to the moon's surface. Then, what seemed like a further blossoming: the Apollo Applications Program space station, basically a drained Saturn V third stage with makeshift living quarters inside. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, a first experiment in US-Soviet manned spaceflight cooperation.

And then the pride of American engineering: the 1975 "Moonbase Alpha." [1] It was an impressive name for what was in essence three modified Apollo Lunar Modules in Mare Humorum, augmented in 1977 by an inflatable shelter, and then by a glorified burrow for solar-flare times dug with space-age versions of the humble Army entrenching tool. Alpha was manned sporadically into the 1980s, continuously from 1982-86 by a two-man crew, occupied more with maintenance and TV appearances than with science. But at least the US could claim that, in President Ronald Reagan's famous phrase, it "held the high ground."

The tragic pad explosion of Apollo XXV in February 1986, which killed its Alpha-bound crew and destroyed Pad 39A at Merritt Island, changed all that.

It became clear that the aging Saturn/Apollo launch and processing infrastructure required to keep Moonbase Alpha going, frequently criticized as an expensive political white elephant, had become dilapidated and its management hierarchy often complacent to the point of jeopardizing safety. Fingers were pointed; heads rolled; NASA went through three directors in the space of a year. The Apollo XXIV/Alpha crew had to go home without a relief crew, and leave the moonbase in mothballs for the foreseeable future. And while all this was happening, the Chernobyl disaster and the coming of glasnost and Gorbachev made clear that the Space Race with the Soviets was no longer a major concern. Saturn IB launches to low Earth orbit resumed in 1988, but the will to risk anything as elaborate and high-visibility as another Moon landing had gone.

What was left? Theatrics in low Earth orbit, often in the name of high-minded principles of international cooperation. The linkup of the AAP Skylab B module with the Russian Mir in 1992 created the world's first international space station[2], albeit one seemingly in constant danger of falling apart-- and when Skylab/Mir in turn lost an American/Russian/Kazakh crew to a Soyuz collision and fire in 1995, ultimately to be scuttled with their bodies in the Pacific Ocean, it was curtains for manned spaceflight of any sort until the Chinese Shenzhou flights of 2002-03. Today, at a time when other concerns dominate the public consciousness, there are no funded plans whatsoever for US manned space travel.

It could have been different.

Few people today realize the scope of the manned spaceflight programs proposed as follow-ons to Apollo during the Nixon administration. There were gigantic, massive space stations planned; nuclear rockets; flights to Mars.

And serving as the vital ground-to-orbit link for them all, a reusable spacecraft called the Space Shuttle, a sort of spaceplane that would take off like a rocket and land on a runway like an airplane. Most of the circa-1969 plan was probably fiscally impossible, and during the Nixon years it was all cancelled.

Except for the Shuttle. The program was modified a bit to bring down the budget and satisfy mysterious Department of Defense payload demands, but it survived in essence for a few more years. Some early engineering on the project actually got under way in the mid-1970s; Rockwell International built most of the airframe of a test article known as Challenger. But the success of Moonbase Alpha meant that it would likely consume most of the funding for American manned spaceflight for the foreseeable future; Rockwell vastly exceeded the inadequate amount allocated to it for engineering, and in early 1977, in the same executive order authorizing the Moonbase Alpha flare burrow, President Jimmy Carter had the Shuttle program cancelled.

It was the loss of an amazing opportunity. The rockets we've used throughout the history of spaceflight are throwaways; Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke have compared the use of the Saturn to sailing the Queen Elizabeth II across the Atlantic Ocean once and then sinking it at the far end. Not so the Shuttle. Most of the system's components were designed to be reusable, and this would have resulted in tremendous savings of money. A NASA panel at the time estimated that a fleet of four operational Shuttles could actually pay for itself in satellite launch revenue over its lifetime.

The Shuttle was the basis for a program, not of expensive, one-off moon-shot stunts, but of sustainable space operations. With spaceflight rendered cheap and easy, a more ambitious program could ultimately go ahead: more elaborate space stations, larger moonbases, a permanent infrastructure for the human expansion into space.

Successors to the Shuttle would carry tourists into space, and perhaps build O'Neill colonies at L4 and L5, and massive solar power stations in orbit to solve America's energy problems. It's possible that the terrorist attacks on Los Angeles and the US Capitol in 2001 could have been avoided had we reduced our dependence on foreign oil by means of solar power satellites.

Today Moonbase Alpha sits empty in the dusty plain of Mare Humorum, surrounded only by footprints and scientific equipment, abandoned-- perhaps forever, but for a long time at the very least. I often think of what could have been, if we had built the Space Shuttle. You could be living in orbit. I could be writing this from a city on the Moon-- maybe from a permanent base on Mars. As we ponder what to do about America's moribund space program, perhaps we should pause to consider what might have been.

Notes

[1] Officially it was the Apollo Applications Lunar Research Station, or Liberty Base in some documents; astronauts making long-distance contact with radio hams via the OSCAR IX satellite gave it the call-sign of Alpha in honor of a now-forgotten TV series.

[2] Memorably denounced on air by Prof. Bernard Quatermass of the British Rocket Group.