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Sunlight reflects through the window looking over Space Shuttle Columbia's payload bay, STS-1

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Space Shuttle Columbia landing at Edwards Air Force Base after its first flight, completing the STS-1 mission. April 14, 1981.

Yesterday, April 12, was the 40th anniversary of STS-1, the first flight of the Space Shuttle!

We were so used to the shuttle program that we lost track of how significant it was; never before or since have we had reusable spacecrafts. SpaceX doesn’t really count because they’re largely experimental rather than practical, and they explode more often than they succeed.

The shuttle required a new external tank for every launch (the big orange thing, which wasn’t a rocket at all but a big fuel tank), but that’s nothing compared to the old space flight system. For the Apollo program, they had to build a new Saturn V for every singe launch, and nothing, not a single bolt, could be salvaged. The shuttle was so much cheaper by comparison, and had Bush and Obama kept funding the Orion program and allowed NASA to keep innovating, we might have been able to bring the cost down even further to make space flight economically comparable to the airline industry.

The space shuttle cost tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram to get into space. SpaceX claims to have brought this down to mere thousands, though their goal isn’t actually to go to space but to provide suborbital cargo deliveries for the US military anywhere in the planet within 90 minutes; Musk’s space flight obsession is incidental, it’s a cover story, not the primary goal. If we had continued publicly funding the innovative process instead of contracting it out to private companies for profit, we probably could have taken the price down to hundreds of dollars per kilogram. That’s still tens of thousands of dollars per person, but that’s much more feasible; people would take on that debt if it meant they could go to space. That’s about the same cost as a wedding.

I can buy a plane ticket right now from Orlando to San Diego for about one dollar a kilogram (less than that it I book way in advance). Can you imagine a world where you could go to space for hundreds of dollars? Dozens of dollars? A couple bucks?