Roger D. Launius of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., will visit campus to discuss the case of the space shuttle.

This presentation reviews the history and legacy of the Space Shuttle program after thirty years. It suggests that while the shuttle was not an unadulterated success on balance it served a venerable role in spaceflight and deserves an overall positive assessment in history. We find that while the Space Shuttle has a reputation as a mistake it was generally successful. Additionally, the Space Shuttle provided three decades of significant human spaceflight capability and stretched the nature of what could be accomplished in Earth orbit much beyond anything envisioned previously. Most significantly since the American human spaceflight program has always been focused in national prestige, the Space Shuttle served well as a symbol of American technological verisimilitude. Finally, this presentation discusses the retirement of the Space Shuttle and possibilities for the future of human spaceflight.

Launius is senior curator in the Division of Space History at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., where he was division chair 2003-2007. Between 1990 and 2002 he served as chief historian of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. A graduate of Graceland College in Lamoni, Iowa, he received his Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, in 1982. He has written or edited more than twenty books on aerospace history, most recently the Smithsonian Atlas of Space Exploration (HarperCollins, 2009); Robots in Space: Technology, Evolution, and Interplanetary Travel (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Societal Impact of Spaceflight (NASA SP-2007-4801, 2007); Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight (NASA SP-2006-4702, 2006); Space Stations: Base Camps to the Stars (Smithsonian Books, 2003; 2nd edition, Konecky & Konecky, 2009), which received the AIAA’s history manuscript prize; Reconsidering a Century of Flight (University of North Carolina Press, 2003); To Reach the High Frontier: A History of U.S. Launch Vehicles (University Press of Kentucky, 2002); Imagining Space: Achievements, Possibilities, Projections, 1950-2050 (Chronicle Books, 2001), and NASA: A History of the U.S. Civil Space Program (Krieger Publishing CO., 1994). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the International Academy of Astronautics, and the American Astronautical Society, and associate fellow of the AIAA. He also served as a consultant to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board in 2003 and presented the prestigious Harmon Memorial Lecture on the history of national security space policy at the United States Air Force Academy in 2006. He is frequently consulted by the electronic and print media for his views on space issues, and has been a guest commentator on National Public Radio and all the major television network news programs.