Bizarre reason NASA had to use eBay to keep important shuttles running
eBay isn't just for grabbing secondhand clothes
For an organization as advanced as NASA, you'd expect that its shuttles are made from some pretty sophisticated kit. With congress awarding NASA a jaw-dropping $24.88 billion in its 2024 budget, there should be plenty of money in the bank for manufacturing, alongside testing, and R&D.
Parts obviously don't come cheap, and while we don't imagine you'll be able to snap up a Russian shuttle and retrofit it as your own on eBay, the auction site is apparently a lifeline for NASA and space exploration.
A trick of the NASA trade from back in the day was to turn to eBay for a little helping hand when it came to acquiring parts that simply don't exist anymore. It all feels very Doc Brown in Back to the Future, but the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is known for trawling the internet in search of spare parts for its missions to the stars.
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In particular, NASA is remembered for purchasing bulk lots of medical equipment to scavenge Intel 8086 chips. These chips are cousins to the ones used in IMB Corp.'s first personal computer from 1981, which helped power the STS-1 Space Shuttle when it launched that same year.
As late as 2002, NASA was still leaning on eBay to acquire 8086 chips and was hoarding them as they became increasingly rare. Amidst fears that the aging fleet of shuttles was going to be grounded, the chips became invaluable as NASA tried to perfect its own $20 million automated checking system without the need for these technological relics.
Back in 2002, Jeff Carr, a spokesman for the United Space Alliance, told The New York Times: "It's like a scavenger hunt. It takes some degree of heroics.''
NASA used to trawl through catalogues and phone suppliers once upon a time, but as the internet took off, eBay and other corners of the internet became an unexpected honey pot of parts needed. According to Mike Renfroe, Director of Shuttle Logistics Planning for the United Space Alliance at the Kennedy Space Center, "One missing piece of hardware can ruin our day."
Unfortunately, if you plan on flogging that old PC in your basement or eight-inch floppy-disk drive, NASA probably isn't interested. As well as the agency reiterating it was only interested in bulk buys to keep inventories stocked, the Space Station program was eventually closed down in 2011.
NASA hasn't given up on boldly taking us where no one has gone before, and as well as the construction of the Orion spacecrafts, there's the Space Launch System (SLS), and Artemis program. So many years on from the Space Shuttle's original launch, we'd like to think that NASA is no longer raiding the depths of eBay for obsolete parts from medical equipment. Still, at least we can't knock NASA for being thrifty.