Read Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) for Free Online Page B

only a dozen flying between the last moon landing in 1972 and the first shuttle flight in 1981. As a result, there was plenty of opportunity for astronauts to be involved in the development of the shuttle, and they participated more in the development of this vehicle than any before.
    Even so, there were some at NASA with the idea that the moon would be just the first step into the solar system, who were concerned about what the shuttle wouldn’t be able to do—go beyond Earth’s veritable backyard.
    In January 1973 astronaut T. K. Mattingly was assigned to be head of Astronaut Office support to the shuttle program. This was around the same time that the contracts were being awarded to the companies that would be responsible for making the shuttle’s various components. Mattingly, who had orbited the moon on Apollo 16 while Young was walking on it, recalls talking to Deke Slayton, the head of flight crew operations at NASA ’s Johnson Space Center ( JSC ) in Houston, Texas, about the assignment. “When I got back from Apollo 16 , Deke asked me, he said, ‘You know, there’s only one more flight, so if you really want to fly again anytime near-term, you might want to take the backup assignment on [ Apollo ] 17 ,’ he said. ‘Chances aren’t very good, but we do know that we replace people occasionally. So if you would like to have that chance, you can do it, or you could work on the shuttle program.’ Really, I hadn’t paid much attention to it,” Mattingly said of the shuttle program at that point.
I kind of knew the work was going on, but I didn’t know what it was, because my ambition had always been—I didn’t think I would go to [walk on] the moon, but I was really hoping that I’d get to be on the Mars mission, which I was sure was going to happen the following year. To a young kid, it just seemed obvious that the next step is you go to the moon, then you sharpen your tools and you go to Mars, and I thought, “Boy, that’s where I’d like to go.”
Even by then it was becoming obvious that that wasn’t really a likely proposition. I wasn’t enthused about the shuttle because I still thought going to Mars was the next step. I believe that we needed to build a space station first so we could have hardware, which would gather years of lifetime experience while we could get to it and fix it, and we could build the transportation system while we’re gaining the experience with a space station. All of that architecture was obviously politically driven, and they were having to fit into a tighter budget.There really was not a great swell of emotion or enthusiasm for things following Apollo in the political arena, nor in the public arena, for that matter. So I think they had to walk some very, very tight lines in order to keep the program going, and so they chose the Space Transportation [System] as the way to go.
    George Mueller, the head of manned spaceflight at NASA during the Apollo program and the man many recognize as the father of both the Skylab space station and the Space Shuttle program, said that, even with the development of the shuttle, human exploration of other worlds remained the ultimate goal. “It became clear that the cost of getting into orbit was the driver for all future programs. I began to think about, how do you get the cost down. In air travel, you can’t fly from here to London and then throw the plane away when you get to London. What we came up with was a completely reusable vehicle. We had every intention of going back to the moon. What we were doing was going into low Earth orbit and establishing a base there; it was a requirement for reaching our long-term goal.”
    Former Johnson Space Center director Chris Kraft recalled the approval of the shuttle as “a real come-down for NASA .”
We, the powers that be at NASA , had grand visions of going back to the moon, having bases on the moon, and on to Mars. They made very significant reports on what the future of NASA could