In September 1969, several months after the Apollo 11 lunar landing, President Richard M. Nixon established the Space Task Force to chart NASA's path for the decades to come. This imaginative vision was shattered less than six months later when, on January 13, 1970, NASA Administrator Dr. Thomas Paine announced that, owing to funding cuts, only the reusable Space Shuttle could be afforded -- there would be no space station, no return to the Moon, and no missions to Mars. This is a story never before told about the missions and technologies that NASA had begun to plan but never fully realized. The book is a companion to the author's previous two works on the Space Shuttle. Whereas the first two books showed how the Space Shuttle flew in space and what the program accomplished, this book explains what more the Space Shuttle could have achieved and how the space transportation system could have further matured if circumstances had been otherwise. A final chapter also discusses how some of these plans might be resurrected in future programs.

Autorentext

Davide Sivolella is an aerospace engineer living and working in the UK with experience in the airline and aircraft manufacturing industries.. As a child, Davide developed a fascination with all kinds of flying machines, especially those that travel above the atmosphere. In fact, this passion for astronautics led him to pursue a bachelor's and master's degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the Polytechnic of Turin (Italy). Born in July 1981, just a few months after the Columbia's maiden flight, he developed a fondness for the Space Shuttle program. Eventually, this resulted in Springer-Praxis publishing in August 2013 his first book, To Orbit and Back Again: How the Space Shuttle Flew in Space. The book has been praised onnumerous outlets. A sequel entitled "The Space Shuttle Program: Technologies and Accomplishments" was released in 2017. This new book, "The Untold Stories of the Space Shuttle Program", complements its predecessors by showing what the Space Shuttle could have achieved and how the Space Transportation System could have been further matured.