And interesting end-of-Shuttle post from Karl Schroeder (at Charles Stross’s blog):

A couple of years ago I sat down to lunch with a prominent astronaut, a Shuttle commander and space station veteran. We talked about space development and alternative paths to what NASA has actually done since 1970. I told him that what I’d been waiting for ever since Skylab was a variable-gravity research station, because it hadn’t taken us long to accumulate lots of evidence that lack of gravity is bad for the human body, and because lower gravity was the only physiological variable for the Moon, Mars and other possible destinations that we couldn’t currently test for. It’s also one of the most important; a variable-gravity station could tell us whether unaltered humans could live long-term on Mars, for instance. The astronaut asked me how I would be build this station, and I said, “Rotate two booster modules, one habitable, linked by tethers.” Much like Skylab, and very simple to construct.

He shook his head. “Tethers in space,” he said, “break.”

I blinked at him. “Well, if they break, you build ’em stronger, make ’em out of something else, or you use a number of them.” I didn’t quite say, “This isn’t rocket science,” but really, it’s basic engineering.

He shook his head even more vehemently. “Tethers in space,” he snapped past gritted teeth, “break.”

I had no reply. I had been watching him; he became visibly tense every time the conversation moved away from strict NASA doctrine.

If accurate, it does sound like a strange exchange. It’s like saying “rocket engines blow up” in response to a proposal to launch a rocket. Clearly, tethers have broken in space, but it’s a bizarre logic to thereby infer that all tethers in space will break. If you put in the proper structural safety factor (and aren’t heating it up by running a current through it electrodynamically), of course there is no reason that a tether need break. Being an astronaut is no guarantee of being a good engineer (or even necessarily logical). And many of them, of course, don’t have an engineering background.

[Via Chris Gerrib]

There’s a pretty good article on the history and the future over at Wired. This isn’t right, though:

It took the crash of Challenger in 1986, after which all surviving space shuttles were grounded for three years, to convince the military that it could not rely on the huge, complex craft for all its orbital missions. That was the beginning of the end of the Pentagon’s love affair with the shuttle, and in its autumn years, it did very little military work that we know of.

The Pentagon never had a love affair with the Shuttle to end — it always felt like it had been forced to use it, and (fortunately) fought to keep Titan, Delta and Atlas alive, despite the national policy that all was going to be launched on the Shuttle. This paid off after Challenger (though the other vehicles had failures as well — 1986 was probably the worst year for the space program since the early days).