"But with the race to the Moon won, Nasa returned to the White House with a plan to build a space station and a reusable shuttle to service it. After almost two years of deliberation, the answer came back. “The decision was to build the Space Shuttle,” says Barry. “President Nixon realised that they really needed not to kill the space industry and the least expensive option was to build the Space Shuttle.” There was an obvious flaw in this plan: there was little point in having the shuttle without a space station. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, saw an opportunity. “They had a very energetic programme to beat the Americans to the Moon,” says Barry. “They didn’t want to admit that in public so their answer was, ‘We were planning to build a space station all along’.”"