Why did nasa cancel space program

With next week's historic SpaceX launch, this era of reliance may be coming to an end. But why did NASA retire the space shuttle even though the space agency had no alternative launch vehicle? In February, , the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it reentered the atmosphere, killing all seven crew members on board, the second fatal shuttle accident after the catastrophic launch failure of Challenger in Following the Columbia disaster, shuttle flights were suspended for more than two years.

And in , President George Bush revealed his administration's Vision for Space Exploration, announcing that the program would be terminated after the end of the construction of the International Space Station. The Columbia accident finally wiped away the facade that the shuttle program was ever going to be what it was originally cracked up to be when President Nixon approved it in And most of the reasons for that were because of compromises made back in the s when the shuttle was being designed due to cutbacks in the budget.

The commissions offered two alternatives. The second was Flexible Path, which would have sent American astronauts to every destination besides the moon—the asteroids, the moons of Mars, and so on.

Both options would lead to the holy grail of space exploration enthusiasts, a mission to Mars. For the Obama administration, which was not shy about spending money in areas that it cared about, this price tag was too dear to bear. The results of these private deliberations were rolled out in the budget request that was released in February Project Constellation would be canceled , root and branch.

Instead, NASA would conduct studies of heavy-lift rockets, deep-space propulsion, and other technologies that it was said, in the fullness of time, would make exploring space cheaper and easier. Congress, which had not been consulted, reacted with bipartisan fury. The Obama administration made two critical errors. It had not consulted with Congress or anyone else when it developed its plans to kill Constellation.

The White House also blatantly pulled a bureaucratic dodge that was apparent even to a first-term member of the House from the sticks. To kill a popular program, one studies it to death. Nowhere in the Obama plan was there a commitment to send astronauts anywhere.

Clearly, the White House had no intention of doing space exploration. Budget cuts forced the agency to rethink the feasibility of its exploration plans. In , the flights planned for Apollo 15, 19 and 20 were cancelled, and the remaining missions were renumbered.

Some of the astronauts who spent years training for Apollo were reassigned to these programs while others retired without ever making it to space. The Apollo 17 crew would be the last humans to land on the Moon. Skip to main content. NASA had grand plans for the Moon during the Apollo program, but those dreams were cut short a few years after the first landing.