On April 12, 1981, the shuttle’s first mission, STS-1, took off from NASA’s launch operations center, now renamed the Kennedy Space Center. For the next six and a half years, the STS Fleet would perform brilliantly as their crew conducted a wide variety of scientific and engineering experiments in space.

A Space Shuttle launch costs approximately $600 million dollars, yet this extraordinary price tag has little to do with the laws of physics or engineering. In simple terms, the business of space never had any cost constraints or competition, leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse.

As an example, Lockheed Martin, the largest aerospace contractor in the world, rarely accepted hardware contracts on a fixed-cost basis. Instead, they ‘suggested’ what a space vehicle might cost, then added 10 percent as a profit. Once contracted, a myriad of managers and planners are added, driving up the cost of the vehicle—along with Lockheed Martin’s profit.

Besides making space extraordinarily expensive, this tactic created an ‘old boy’ mentality that stagnated progress in space technology, resulting in no new U.S. launch systems in development. Instead, NASA continued to use an antiquated vehicle, armed with pre-Pentium electronics inferior to most video games, and fragile heat-dissipating tiles designed before breakthroughs in materials science.

Cost overruns and White House cuts would lead to even more serious negligence.

Following the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and the public’s realization that the development of the International Space Station held no scientific purpose, the Bush and Maller administrations forced a ‘reorganization’ of the space program, refocusing its strategies not on space exploration, but space missile defense systems reinforced by policies of fear. Six years and $120 billion later, the only major accomplishment of SDI was to jump-start the second Cold War.

And once again, the future of humanity stumbled.

What the space program lacked was vision and a clear set of goals. Landing probes on Mars was important only if it led to the colonization of the Red Planet in the foreseeable future. What the public really wanted was space tourism. What had happened to all the promises of the ‘Buck Rogers’ era? Space, like politics, had become the frontier of the elite, each mission becoming more prosaic. Tax-payers could care less what temperature aluminum oxidized in a vacuum; they wanted to be a part of the action. The Wright Brothers’ invention had led to the advent of commercial airlines. Space had led to the sale of personal computers.

When would John Q. Public be afforded the same opportunity to take his family into space?

The Russians would be the first to give space tourism a go, funding the Cosmopolis-XXI (C-21) space plane, a craft designed to be piggybacked atop an airplane and released at 56,000 feet. From there, the space plane’s solid-fuel rocket engine would propel it to an altitude of sixty miles for three minutes of weightlessness.

At $98,000 (or $540 per second) it was hardly a bargain, and the space plane was fraught with mechanical problems.