by Michael Sanibel

Created on: June 27, 2008

The Space Shuttle and Space Station - two financial disasters that never should have happened.

I clearly remember October 5, 1957. In the wee hours of that morning, I saw the tiny Russian satellite Sputnik pass directly over my home town of Rochester, N.H. Or, I saw what I thought was the satellite at the time. On the fifty year anniversary of Sputnik's launch, I discovered that what I actually saw floating overhead was the second stage of the booster rocket, in a nearly identical orbit to the spacecraft. After all these years, this fact explains why I could see it with my naked eye in the dark of night. This historic event started a life-long fascination with space which greatly influenced my future in many ways.

One of my idols was our first astronaut in space, Alan Shepard, who was also from New Hampshire. I set out on a path to become an astronaut myself and entered the U. S. Air Force Academy as a freshman cadet only one month before the first moon landing. During my senior year I heard about the first plans for a reusable launch vehicle that could return to Earth after performing its space mission. I was also one of the original "Trekkies," never missing an episode of the television series that was responsible for the name of the first Space Shuttle Enterprise.

My eyesight kept me out of the astronaut program, but it didn't keep me out of the space program. As a young Air Force officer, I was assigned to the Space & Missile Systems Organization (SAMSO) in El Segundo, California. At the time, it was the buying agency for all military satellites. I was a project officer in the program office that was procuring the Fleet Satellite Communications System spacecraft for the U. S. Navy. It was the mid-seventies and the moon landings were now a part of history. We had developed an assortment of unmanned rockets used to launch satellites into various orbits. One of them, the Atlas-Centaur, was selected as the launch vehicle for the Fleet Satellites currently under development.

Before our first satellite was launched in February 1978, formal discussions had already begun regarding transitioning launches to the Space Transportation System (STS) following its deployment in the early eighties. The plan was for the unmanned rockets to be phased out over time as the Shuttle came on line to carry future spacecraft into orbit. For those spacecraft requiring a much higher orbit than the Shuttle occupied, a special interim upper stage booster was being developed to carry the

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