Space Shuttle: Developing an Icon 1972-2013

by Dennis R. Jenkins

Due to this collection's heavy weight (18 lbs) non-standard shipping costs apply. See shopping cart for details. During 30 years and 135 missions, the U.S. space shuttle carried more crewmembers to orbit than all other launch systems, from all other countries combined, and carried more than 4.5 million pounds of payload to orbit. It was a staggering record of success. Unfortunately, it was accompanied by a tragic record of failure, with two accidents claiming the lives of 14 astronauts as well as other incidents claiming several ground personnel. But, as Richard Truly, an astronaut and NASA administrator, once said, "Flying in space is a bold business. We cannot print enough money to make it totally risk-free." This assertion was not meant as an excuse, simply a statement of fact regarding the physics of space travel and the dangers of chemical rockets. Because it flew for 30 years, most people alive today do not remember a time when the space shuttle was not in the news. The public was enthralled, the politicians somewhat less, and the armchair critics even less so. The space shuttle was meant as a stepping-stone to broader exploration. But the funding and political will never materialized, leaving the vehicle with little meaningful work for most of its flight campaign. Nevertheless, the space shuttle launched a variety of commercial and military satellites, planetary probes to Venus and Jupiter, and three of the four NASA Great Observatories, including the pièce de résistance, the Hubble Space Telescope. Only near the end was it able to demonstrate its intended purpose, building a space station. Even that, when finished, was only a shell of what had been envisioned when the space shuttle was approved. Unfortunately, having found its stride as the primary support vehicle for the International Space Station, the White House canceled the program, leaving the United States without the ability to launch people to orbit. All of this has left an uncertain legacy for one of the most visible engineering achievements of the 20th Century. This book is not meant to establish that legacy, but to thoroughly document the development, technology, and, to a lesser extent, the flight campaign. We will leave it to future historians to determine the ultimate worthiness of the program. What we can say for certain, though, is that it was one hell of a ride.

Genres: Space

1584 pages, Hardcover

Published February 27, 2017

Reviews

[Brahm · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this mammoth 3-volume, 1,500-page, 18-pound, million-word history of the space shuttle program would take me months to finish, but I couldn't put it down (at the expense of my wrists and neck) and got through it in just over 3 weeks.

This is a deeply technical and detail-oriented history of the space shuttle program, focused on technology and development, contractor scope, testing, schedule, cost, and risk mitigation. It is a big departure from page-turner astronaut biographies and more accessible space histories that I've read. Dennis Jenkins is a career engineer & project manager and that comes through in the text. While I absolutely loved the level of detail the book went into, that level of detail is probably not for all audiences.

The volumes are broken up as follows.

Volume 1: Setting the Stage. A history of space planes, rocket development, an immense amount of detail on blunt flying shapes and lifting bodies, and a history of the development and testing path by NASA and contractors as they arrived at the final structural and material design of the space shuttle and all subsystems. As an example, there was a ton of detail about material testing for the Thermal Protection System (TPS - all those tiles). The history has almost no mention of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, which I think is a good thing. Jenkins avoided scope creep and focused on his baby, the shuttle.

Volume 2: Technical Description. Here Jenkins treats us to 500 pages of detail on the shuttles, as they were built and delivered. He describes the orbiters, main engines, external tank, solid rocket boosters, supporting equipment, and some of the failed or deleted features that never came to me. There is also a chapter on the SLC-6 launch complex at Vandenberg, CA where an immense amount of money was spent to equip it to launch space shuttles, but no shuttle ever ended up being launched there. If I'm being honest, I did a fair bit of skimming in Volume 2; the combined 150 pages on the engines, external tank & solid boosters were just not as interesting to me as the design of the vehicle itself.

Volume 3: The Flight Campaign. This volume summarized the 135 flights of the space shuttle. What surprised me (in retrospect, given the first two volumes, this should not have surprised me) is the flight campaign focuses just as much on the shuttle vehicles themselves as the mission objectives. Any cute astronaut hijinks on orbit at clipped to a sentence at best, and the focus is the mission objectives and the state of the shuttle vehicles. For example, flipping to a random mission STS-55, the second paragraph reads:

The launch attempt on 22 March was proceeding smoothly until it was aborted at T-3 seconds by the onboard GPCs when SSME-3 failed to ignite completely. The oxidizer preburner purge pressure exceeded the maximum allowable due to a leak in one of the five purge system check valves, which in turn precluded full engine ignition. This was the first on-pad main engine abort since the return-to-flight and only the third of the flight campaign (STS-26/51F and STS-16/41D werethe others). The valve leak was later traced to contamination during manufacturing and NASA decided to replace all three main engines as a precaution.

Volume 3 also has chapters dedicated to the Challenger accident (1986) and Columbia accident (2003), diving deep into what happened, why it happened, the investigations and engineering reviews, and what changed as a result.

The books are physically beautiful, excellently bound with gold-embossed covers and spines, glossy paper, and endless colour photos. They arrive in their own box to keep the volumes together. My single minor criticism is that there are a surprising number of typos and formatting errors: spelling mistakes, at least one misnumbered mission (STS-83 is listed as OV-102's 2nd mission, it should be the 22nd [page III-224]), a couple paragraphs that just end without finishing the sentence (eg, page III-192), and at least one set of mis-labeled pictures where the image cannot possibly match the caption. But I attribute this to this work being a labour of love by Jenkins, it would be impossible to edit a work this enormous to perfection.

I learned sooo much reading this, it was a blast for me and probably the most in-depth work I've attempted to read on any subject. Worth it! One of the most interesting facts to me is about the shuttle down-mass capability; the ability to return mass from orbit. Nothing in production today comes close to the capability of the space shuttle; it returned roughly 250,000 lbs of material from orbit during its 135 flights, "marking essentially all of the down mass returned" (my emphasis). Neat.

This review is too brief to give Jenkins full credit for this monumental history, but I highly recommended this work for space geeks who love to get deep, deep, deep into the details.