Space shuttle design study maps path to breakthrough inventions

by Clarence Oxford
Los Angeles CA (SPX) Dec 05, 2025

Researchers examining NASA's space shuttle development argue that the agency's design approach offers a template for creating breakthrough products that combine many interdependent features, from launch systems to smartphones and pharmaceuticals. They focus on how NASA generated internal knowledge for the shuttle program between 1969 and 1971, when engineers had to balance performance, cost, and reusability without an existing design blueprint.

Management professor Francisco Polidoro Jr. of Texas McCombs compares the space shuttle to the original iPhone, noting that both depend on tightly linked features whose performance affects one another, such as payload capacity, weight, and structural or systems integration. He emphasizes that organizations facing such complexity cannot test every possible feature combination and instead must rely on a selective search process to explore designs.

Polidoro and co-authors Raja Roy, Minyoung Kim, and Curba Morris Lampert built a detailed timeline of shuttle design iterations by reviewing about 7,000 pages of archival material, including internal NASA memoranda, technical reports, published and unpublished accounts, and oral histories from engineers and historians. From this record they reconstructed how specific engineering decisions evolved over successive concepts in the early shuttle program.

The study highlights NASA's recognition that the high costs of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions stemmed from nonreusable hardware, prompting a shift toward partially reusable systems. Early shuttle design goals included the ability to carry payloads of 50,000 pounds, employ solid-propellant boosters that could be jettisoned and recovered, and use an external tank containing liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen that would be discarded after launch.

According to the authors, engineers advanced shuttle design through two recurring knowledge-building modes they term oscillation and accumulation. In the oscillation mode, teams concentrated on a single performance objective and then intentionally stepped back to investigate alternative approaches before returning to the original target with additional insights, while in the accumulation mode they progressively met more performance goals as lessons from prior iterations carried forward.

The paper argues that the interaction of oscillation and accumulation, rather than either process alone, enabled key shuttle breakthroughs. One example is the decision to move from efficient liquid hydrogen-liquid oxygen propulsion to a temporary reliance on kerosene in some designs, which allowed engineers to test other features such as solid rocket motors and reusable boosters and then later reintegrate the more advanced cryogenic propellants.

Polidoro notes that stepping back from a promising solution can create room to extend technical understanding, even when engineers are attached to a successful design. "With breakthrough inventions, the number of combinations of possible features quickly explodes, and you just can't test all of them," he says. "It has to be a much more selective search process."

He also points out that "Stepping back and letting go, temporarily, of solutions that are superior creates a space for you to keep on accumulating knowledge," adding that this requires humility from technologists who may be invested in their earlier achievements. In later discussion he concludes that "A temporary retreat can become the foundation for the next leap forward."

The study observes that today's space sector, with many private actors such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, presents coordination challenges for this kind of intertwined search process compared with NASA's more centralized shuttle environment. Polidoro recommends that firms define design and prototyping tasks around clusters of highly interdependent features so that oscillation and accumulation can proceed effectively within and across teams.

Beyond aerospace, the authors argue that the same logic applies to other complex technologies such as new drugs, where a compound that precisely targets a disease pathway might be set aside because of toxicity issues and later revisited after new safety knowledge emerges. In these cases, the temporary retreat from a promising option can still generate insights that support future advances when the compound or design is reintroduced.

Research Report:Creating a breakthrough invention: NASA's internal knowledge generation for the Space Shuttle