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Related: About this forumWhy did Jimmy Carter save the space shuttle
There are a lot of backstories to the development of America's only spaceplane (to date); one of the most interesting is: Why did Jimmy Carter, who was no great fan of man in space save the space shuttle program? The excellent Ars Technica blog has an article on this: A Cold War mystery: Why did Jimmy Carter save the space shuttle?.
The article goes into the various funding problems faced by the space shuttle program by the late 70s, during the Carter administration; the upshot is that Carter finally supported the program.
In doing so, Jimmy Carter saved the space shuttle, Kraft believes. Without supplementals for fiscal year 1979 and 1980, the shuttle would never have flown, at least not as the iconic vehicle that would eventually fly 135 missions and 355 individual fliers into space. It took some flights as high as 400 miles above the planet before retiring five years ago this week. That was the first supplemental NASA had ever asked for, Kraft said. And we got that money from Jimmy Carter.
These few paragraphs vastly oversimplify the story; but, it does seem that without the need for the shuttle's use in verifying the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, it might very well have been canceled.
If Walter Mondale had won the presidency in 1984, the shuttle program would likely have been canceled after the Challenger disaster and NASA's budget gutted.
There's much more to the story, I recommend the article: http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/a-cold-war-mystery-why-did-jimmy-carter-save-the-space-shuttle/
Warpy
(111,339 posts)because the military depended upon all the infrastructure for many of its own programs.
However, Mondale would likely have canceled the shuttle. Maybe by now we'd have an improvement going up and returning, possibly building on U2 technology rather than requiring huge rocket boosters at low altitude. There were a lot of design problems with the old shuttle and it was in service for far too long with no real improvements simply because it worked most of the time.
What is in doubt is whether a lot of the pure research that has been so exciting lately would ever have been done without the shuttle. Hubble's eyesight problem would never have been corrected, for instance, and it would have been more difficult to get the ISS started.