NASA's budget allocation 1980-1989, by category

In the first four years of the 1980s the area with the largest amount of investment was Spaceflight Research and Development, which received over 75 percent of the budget in each year. However, this changed in 1984 when the Spaceflight, Control and Data Communication department became the largest area of focus, receiving over 50 percent of all investment between 1984 and 1989.

Space Shuttle Program

The major focus of NASA in the 1980s was the Space Shuttle Program, which began in 1972, but launched for the first time in 1981. The primary goal of the program was to transport crew and cargo into space in re-useable aircraft, and it was heavily involved in the manufacturing of the International Space Station in the 1990s. Of the five space shuttles built, two shuttles were destroyed. The Challenger module exploded in 1986, and the Columbia disaster took place in 2003, resulting in the deaths of all seven astronauts in both cases.

Challenger Program

Space Shuttle Challenger was the second shuttle to be built as part of the program. On January 28, 1986 the shuttle was launched for its tenth mission, however a gas leak on one of the solid rocket boosters resulted in an explosion that killed all the crew and destroyed the shuttle, just 73 seconds after lift-off. The disaster resulted in NASA making many technical and safety adjustments to their module designs, as well as an increase in the number of missions into orbit, and over three billion dollars was added on to the 1987 budget. The three remaining orbiters used in the program were Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour, and after completing over 130 missions at a cost of almost 200 billion U.S dollars, all three were retired between February and July 2011.