Why The Space Shuttle Only Launched Three Deep Space Missions

The Space Shuttle was "America's Ride To Space" for 3 decades, it launched over 100 times, and yet over that long career it only launched 3 interplanetary missions - Magellan, Galileo and Ulysses. And all of those were launched in 2 years, after that everything the Shuttle carried remained in Earth orbit.
Multiple factors came together to limit this:
- The Shuttle was late and expensive
- The Reagan administration cancelled most interplanetary missions
- Challenger's destruction changed NASA's policy requiring all launches on shuttle.

Magellan

Galileo

Ulysses

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[SRFriso]

Yeah, even though it was expensive, inefficient, and dangerous, it's very hard to deny that the Space Shuttle was just cool. Coming in for a controlled landing like a plane rather than dangling from a few pieces of cloth, it's very easy to see how people would consider going back to Crew Dragon and Starliner is a regression.

[garyhill]

Thank you for putting this video together. I worked as a spacecraft system engineer/manager at JPL from 1979 to 1981. During this period none of the spacecraft I worked on ever flew, including the NASA Solar Polar spacecraft. Each was delayed - delayed - and ultimately canceled. I wish people could see the Shuttle through our eyes as the space science eating monster that it was.

[mattcolver]

I worked on PAM-S. 
Since it was a one time mission we kept the cost of construction down by using some fixtures to assemble it made of plywood. NASA kind of scoffed at this method, but we were able to hold tolerances better than required and save money at the same time.

[paulcarpenter]

We older space nerds remember the 20 year period after the Viking/Voyager missions being a LEAN time for unmanned missions. It's tragic Carl Sagan passed right before seeing the resumption of ambitious missions.

[RS-lsmm]

The main spacecraft for Magellan was mostly spare parts but the radar was all new. I designed part of it.

[ebikeengineer]

I've got to say you get some good info. I worked on the I&T team for Mars Observer, one of our guys formerly worked on Magellan and he told us about 'raiding' a museum to borrow components for testing. I never thought I'd see that story in a historical documentary.

[frozenthirdyear]

The Shuttle was a pretty cool launch vehicle, but the main reason it's my favorite real-world spacecraft is because of its aesthetic design and its sheer cultural legacy. It's always the first thing that comes to mind when I think of a fictional spacecraft being described as a space plane.
Also, adorably stumpy nose. 10/10, would boop snoot.

[patrickcoin]

The reason the US launched so few interplanetary missions in the 1980's was that cost overruns on the space shuttle ate the NASA budget during the period when money was needed for development, basically the 1970's. I heard Bruce Murray explain this at a talk he gave in Pasadena circa 1979-80. All sorts of great things had been planned, but the shuttle ate their budgets, and then proved unreliable as well.

[anthonystownsend]

My uncle got me a large framed photo of Columbia for Christmas when I was 3 or 4, so 1989 or 1990, sitting on pad 39-A at night time with all the spot lights on. It was on my bedroom wall until I left home then when I had my own family and home, I placed in my garage workshop. Unfortunately we had a fire last year and I lost it but it was my favourite thing to look at everyday.

[rcketplumber]

A friend of mine calibrated the UV spectrometer for Galileo. It was cool to see Jupiter in the sky and think, "Whoa, Wayne's hardware is Out... There!"

[paulhaynes]

As someone else in the comments already said, the Shuttle, like Concorde, looked the part - looked like the future, like what science fiction had promised us. And yet both turned out to be too expensive and technological dead-ends. And we're back to old-fashioned rockets, capsules that land in the sea, and subsonic aircraft. As someone who grew up with the space race and the moon landing, who watched 2001 A Space Odyssey in rapture, and whose dad worked on Concorde, I'm still struggling to understand this. I know the nuts and bolts of the answers, but I still look at the Shuttle and Concorde and think how right they looked, how beautiful. How could that be so wrong??

[lukevaxhacker]

I worked on a simulation and training team who trained operators for the IUS 1988-1992 who worked at Onizuka AFB. STS-34 with Galileo launched specifically on the morning of October 18, 1989. At 5:04 PM Pacific TIme the day before, the Loma Prieta earthquake hit. The base suffered some damage, but was sufficiently operational that they could support the mission. The sim team is on to observe operations and I showed up for work along with coworkers and the team.

[devikwolf]

It's commonly said that the ISS couldn't have been built without the space shuttle... but that's also because of how many ISS components were specifically designed with the expectation of being delivered on the Shuttle. Wouldn't it have been equally possible to construct ISS using a method similar to how MIR was constructed, with multiple unmanned launches meeting up with the station and then being docked remotely? More difficult, more dangerous, and more expensive, but still perfectly possible. If the US hadn't built the shuttle as an integrated cargo and crew vehicle, ISS would have taken a vastly different form.

[thanksfernuthin]

So cool. All of the obstacles, set backs, accidents led to advanced capabilities. The Galileo antenna led to much more data being sent from space craft when their antennas DID work properly.

[bilthon]

Wait, so this means that if it wasn't for the Challenger disaster we'd probably had Galileo orbiting Jupiter already by the time Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit it?

[Shloz]

One note, regarding the issue of Halley's comet that you bring up in your opening: If I recall correctly, NASA built a probe to send in 1986 to Halley's comet, but it was on board Challenger when it was lost - which then meant that there was no more time (nor any shuttle launches, and probably no budget) to prepare another attempt.

[paulbrooks]

If there’s one thing that space travel, exploration, and engineering should teach us, is that we are amazingly capable when we work together. We can do great things when we cooperate.

[jdsahr]

Thanks for talking about Magellan. I used Magellan as a detailed example of an SAR for my radar class. It turns out that basically the Magellan radar had to be exactly the radar that they built -- there wasn't much wiggle room for transmitter frequency and operating mode.

It was remarkably successful, and very clever, for such a relatively low-cost mission.

Also, there were *three* radio experiments onboard: The mapping SAR, radio altimeter, and a (receive only) radiometer.

[YueYukii]

i never ever realised shuttle was used for these missions. Its freaking cool im still learning new bits of stuff about this awesome spacecraft.

[michaelphillips]

And I am proud to say that I was the Shuttle Payload integration engineer who worked all these missions.