Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space Transportation System, The First 100 Missions Book

Wow! This book was a required text for a graduate-level space class I took a few years ago. The steep price (for a student, of course!) almost had me skip the purchase - I am glad that I didn't. Mr. Jenkins book on the history of the Space Transportation System, colloquially known as the Space Shuttle reaches both forward and backwards into the history behind the idea.

The origins the idea stretch back before World War II with Dr. Eugen Sänger's "antipodal orbital bomber"; after the Moon race in the 1960s, President Nixon's Space Task Group needed a project to distinguish itself from Kennedy's call for the Apollo program, and to help the burgeoning national security space program within the Department of Defense and the National Reconnaissance Office. By supporting the space shuttle as a means to boost reconnaissance satellites (e.g. the KH-9 Hexagon), the program had viability within the "black" (covert/spy) and "white" (commericial/civil) space programs.

Sadly, the Shuttle's actual use as a "one-stop" lift capability never reached its planned peak. Twenty-five mission in, the destruction of Challenger grounded those lofty goals. The second launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base was mothballed, a replacement was built from spare parts, and national security payloads were off-loaded to expendable launch vehicles such as the Titan IV. The shuttle then became a taxi to space - MIR missions, construction of the ISS and scientific payloads became its raison d'être.

Jenkins' book covers all of this and more. If you needed one book to categorize, classify and cover the shuttle program - this is it. The only drawback I can state is the limit to the "first 100 missions." Once Mr. Jenkins takes data from the final 35 missions, his book will truly be the only Shuttle book to own.