NASA Spaceflight by Roger D. Launius & Howard E. McCurdy

Author:Roger D. Launius & Howard E. McCurdy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Cultivating New Shuttle Users

The 1977 pricing policy and its successors were aimed primarily at convincing the manufacturers, owners, and operators of commercial communications satellites to launch their satellites aboard the space shuttle. However, NASA early on also recognized that if its promises with respect to the shuttle were to be made real, there was a need to attract new users to space activities and thus to create an increased demand for shuttle operations. As early as 1973, it created an STS (Space Transportation System, another name for the space shuttle ) New User Development Program. A basic assumption of that program was that “a passive user development strategy, which assumes new users of the STS will come to NASA , will not be successful” and that “an active user development approach to stimulate the interest” of new users was required. NASA in 1973–1974 sponsored four studies “to develop techniques and methodologies for identifying new uses and new users in the educational, industrial, and international sectors.”

Commenting on this effort, Aviation Week & Space Technology noted: NASA understands that a major problem in exploiting shuttle capabilities lies in a critical missing element—finding paying users for the system in sufficient numbers to use this new national resources economically … [B]ut there has been a notable lack of response from the non-aerospace industry, which could become the preponderant customer population of shuttle users.

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