NASA proposed a two staged space shuttle, consisting of a launcher and an orbiter, both winged, rocket powered, and reusable. The vehicle would launch vertically, like a rocket, then after separating from the orbital stage, the launcher stage would land horizontally, like an airplane. The orbiter, upon completing its mission in space, would reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and also land horizontally. The shuttle would take upwards to sixty five thousand pounds to low Earth orbit. The cost for developing this system would be 12.8 billion dollars. NASA presented this proposal to the Nixon White House, buttressed by a study from the firm Mathematica Inc. that suggested that the fully reusable, two staged shuttle system would pay for itself at thirty nine flights per year between 1978 and 1990. NASA suggested that the shuttle would fly in excess of fifty times a year, which would lower the cost per flight even more.

The White House Office of Management and Budget was, to say the least, skeptical of the claim. The OMB doubted that, considering tighter budgets likely in the future and the changing design of satellites that would allow fewer of them to be launched, that the number of flights suggested in the Mathematica study was a realistic number. Also, the projected annual budget for NASA would not support a 12.8 billion dollar project, even if the almost inevitable cost overruns failed to materialize.

NASA and her contractor partners went back to the drawing board. They created a new proposal for a more modest shuttle system. The basic orbiter was retained, but instead of a launcher stage, two strap on rocket boosters and a large, external fuel tank were added. The cost of this system was projected to be 5.5 billion dollars.

This proposal was more acceptable to the Nixon Administration, which approved it and requested funding from the Congress. After a heated political battle, funding for the space shuttle program was approved in 1972. Rockwell International got the contract to build the orbiter. Morton Thiokol got the strap on rocket contract. Martin Marietta was charged with building the external fuel tank.

Thus NASA was charged with building a fleet of space vehicles that would launch every payload the United States needed launching, NASA, military, and commercial. It would do so at a greatly reduced cost and with greater safety and reliability. The fleet would comprise the national space line of the United States.

As it turned out, not even the agency that took men to the Moon and back in eight years could do all of those things successfully.