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Days at Vandenberg

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With the success of the Space Shuttle system in the early 1980’s, NASA was confident that flights would become more frequent and versatile. As a solution to increasing the number of flights, a second launch site for the Space Shuttle was built. The location was Vandenburg AFB in sunny California.

Today, it is hard to imagine a Shuttle roaring off the Earth in any other place besides the hollowed ground of Kennedy Space Center, but Vandeberg was a seriously developed addition to the operation of America’s space program. From the inception of the Space Transportation System (STS—a fancy name for the entire Shuttle operation), it was envisioned that there would be several Space Shuttle launch sites. Eventually, by the early 1980’s NASA settled for two with one on each coast of the continental United States.

In hindsight, it is quite remarkable that with the ever-shrinking budget of NASA that Vandenburg was ever even considered as a feasible plan to launch Shuttle’s. With the current budget crisis within NASA a second launch site for the Shuttle is a frivolity, but in the mid-1980’s it was seen as crtitical.Unfortunatly, what it turned into was a liability.

Along with Unites States Air Force, NASA would have had many reasons for having the Shuttle launch site at Vandenberg. One big reason is that the USAF would have paid for the construction and use of at least two new Shuttles. This would have taken a small load off NASA’s budget and launch schedule also because now all Military branches would use Vandenberg instead of Florida. This meant that NASA could stop dedicating at least two flights a year to Military payloads and still, in a way, be paid for them. And finally after two decades of planning and failed projects such as the Manned Orbital Laboratory (MOL) it appeared that the USAF was going to get their manned spaceflight capability. In fact, some USAF astronauts had spent their entire careers preparing for such projects and never getting the chance to fly an actual spaceflight.

One would ask though, why would the USAF be so intent on putting billions of dollars into such a program? The answer, really, is simple: polar orbit. Because of the location of Vandenberg, and its latitude in the Western Hemisphere, a Shuttle could be launched and be over the Soviet Union in less than two minutes. At the time, and remember in the 1980’s the Cold War was at its zenith, this would mean that a satellite or even conceivably a nuclear weapon could be over the heads of people in Moscow in a few minutes. This was not possible from the location of Kennedy in Florida. Amazingly, and in typical Cold War fashion, the idea of launching Shuttles from Vandenberg is why the Soviets built their own short-lived version of the Space Shuttle. Called the Buran, or Snow Bear, it was intended to meet the capabilities of any manned ship launched from Vandenberg. But like Shuttle’s at Vandenberg, the entire Buran system was scrapped before it was ever given a chance to be useful (In a little side bar of history, Buran was launched once unmanned and by remote control in 1988. Cosmonauts, at the time, had argued that since the Americans tested their Shuttle in space manned, they should also, but the cosmonauts lost the argument).

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