Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle by Matthew H. Hersch (review)

Reviewed by:

• Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle by Matthew H. Hersch
• Michael J. Neufeld (bio)

Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle
By Matthew H. Hersch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. Pp. 315.

Dark Star (a title taken from an obscure science fiction movie) is not a comprehensive technical history of NASA’s space shuttle program, nor does it contain much new information. (For that, see the work of Dennis Jenkins.) Rather, it is a scathing critique of what Hersch sees as a project doomed from the start by space agency leaders’ fixation on a winged, reusable rocket plane as the means to drastically reduce the cost of space launch. Conceived as part of the infrastructure of an ambitious post-Apollo space program, it became instead NASA’s last chance to sustain human spaceflight as its budget began falling even before the first lunar landings. In order to save the shuttle, the agency made major design concessions to secure Air Force participation and to reduce peak expenditures in the lean 1970s. The result was a “bad design” (p. 160) that NASA accepted on the [End Page 1066] assumption that the shuttle would soon be redesigned or replaced—it never was. As a result, “the shuttle failed because it was designed to fail” (p. 12; italics in the original).

Hersch is critical of the most important scholarly work on the topic, Diane Vaughn’s The Challenger Launch Decision (1996). That book is a sociological analysis of the first shuttle accident in 1986, and Vaughn asserts that the disaster’s root cause was poor management, leading to the “normalization of deviance” and the refusal to recognize that a catastrophic failure of one of the solid-rocket boosters (SRBs) was imminent. Hersch argues instead that NASA managers succumbed to “fatalism” (p. 160) because they knew that the shuttle’s design was flawed. Mounting the orbiter on the side of a huge external tank that shed insulating foam, often striking the orbiter’s fragile reentry protection system, and next to segmented SRBs that could burn through or explode, doomed the system to an accident. Making matters worse, the design constraints made it impossible to install an escape system for the full crew.

I am in fundamental agreement with Hersch’s critique of the shuttle, which I have long considered the United States’ worst space policy decision. (Full disclosure: I am mentioned in passing in the acknowledgments and my work is cited and quoted.) But he often pushes the argument too far. In his analysis of the Challenger accident, he makes his disagreement with Vaughn into a binary choice: either it was a short-term management failure, or it was a long-term result of a bad design (pp. 149–56). Yet in his epilogue, he concedes that it could be both (p. 217). He condemns the segmented SRB (in which the solid propellant was stacked in four segments with joints between them) as inherently dangerous, yet after that accident, NASA made 110 more shuttle launches with a redesigned SRB joint that worked every time. (The 2003 Columbia accident was caused by the other launch vulnerability: foam strikes on the reentry protection system.)

Dark Star is very readable and is suitable not only for scholars but also for general readers and classroom use. But it is often written in a breezy way, prone to exaggeration and factual errors. Just to pick a few examples from my own work, Hersch exaggerates the impact of the V-2 on the German potato supply (p. 28), he gets the origins of Wernher von Braun’s participation in the Collier’s space series wrong (p. 35), and he is in error about how German Gen. Walter Dornberger came to the United States and where he retired (pp. 37, 61). In addition, he errs in identifying the Bell X-1 rocket plane’s engine (p. 39) and the cancellation date of the X-20 DynaSoar (p. 51). He even makes a few small factual mistakes about the shuttle’s history. None of these errors are critical to the argument, but they do show a certain carelessness during the preparation of the book. [End Page...