Where to Launch and Land the Space Shuttle? (1971-1972)
The Space Shuttle Launch and Recovery Site Review Board got its start on 26 April 1971. Its mission: to determine if replacing Kennedy Space Center and the U.S. Air Force Shuttle launch site planned for Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, with a new single-site launch and landing facility would save money. The Board had its work cut out for it, for politicians and businessmen proposed some 150 possible sites in 40 U.S. states.
A 1971 Plan for an Evolutionary Interim Space Station Program
In April 1971, the NASA Headquarters Office of Advanced Research and Technology (OART) completed a blueprint for NASA’s next decade. Had the OART plan become more widely known, it would surely have generated controversy, for it proposed to end U.S. lunar exploration with Apollo 15 so that the giant Saturn V rockets earmarked for Apollo missions 16, 17, 18, and 19 could instead launch a series of increasingly sophisticated Space Stations.
The Last Days of the Nuclear Shuttle (1971)
In July 1969, as Apollo 11 brought the Apollo Program to its culmination, Lockheed Missile and Space, McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Company (MDAC), and North American Rockwell (NAR) began the Nuclear Flight Systems Definition (NFSD) study on contract to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The NFSD study occurred against a backdrop of great change in the U.S. civilian space program, and its evolution through three very different phases reflected this.
The Last Manned Mars Plan (1971)
As early as 1961, some within NASA proposed that a Mars expedition be made the space agency’s next goal after Apollo. NASA Administrator James Webb was loath to promote such a goal until after Apollo had achieved its politically motivated purpose of placing a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. In […]
Apollo-Soyuz Shuttle Manipulator Demo (1971-1972)
In 1971, NASA was looking for cheap missions it could perform with its surplus inventory of Apollo spacecraft. Mercury capsule co-designer Caldwell Johnson proposed that an Apollo spacecraft - perhaps the one scheduled to dock with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in 1975 - be used to test a Shuttle robot arm. Space historian David S. F. Portree recounts this Space Shuttle development might-have-been.