I agree that it would have been a gargantuan, billion dollar effort to rescue Columbia, with a high risk of failure.
But had they succeeded, or even had they not for that matter, the lessons learned would have been substantial. So I would propose that the effort would not have been money down the drain. It would have captured the public's imagination, escalated the space agency and its astronauts to a heroic status not seen since the 1960s, and taught the nation a valuable and graphic lesson on the costs of skimping on safety, in this case failing to have a backup rocket ready to take off, or an escape module built into the Shuttle, for example.
Had we kept the Saturn rockets alive, as an alternative heavy cargo and human transport system, with a launch-ready rocket on the pad while people were in orbit, then Lee Hutchinson's notion would not have been so far fetched at all.
But that would have cost tens of billions of dollars that the nation chose instead to invest into other projects--military buildups in the 1980s, wars of invasion in the 1990s and 2000s, and so forth. Only the most powerful of politicians could have persuaded the country to spend that kind of money as a contingency. It's just too tempting to redirect it into local (vote buying) projects.
But had they succeeded, or even had they not for that matter, the lessons learned would have been substantial. So I would propose that the effort would not have been money down the drain. It would have captured the public's imagination, escalated the space agency and its astronauts to a heroic status not seen since the 1960s, and taught the nation a valuable and graphic lesson on the costs of skimping on safety, in this case failing to have a backup rocket ready to take off, or an escape module built into the Shuttle, for example.
Had we kept the Saturn rockets alive, as an alternative heavy cargo and human transport system, with a launch-ready rocket on the pad while people were in orbit, then Lee Hutchinson's notion would not have been so far fetched at all.
But that would have cost tens of billions of dollars that the nation chose instead to invest into other projects--military buildups in the 1980s, wars of invasion in the 1990s and 2000s, and so forth. Only the most powerful of politicians could have persuaded the country to spend that kind of money as a contingency. It's just too tempting to redirect it into local (vote buying) projects.