Space Junk | Snoopy | Coffee | Stamps | Ecology | Dummies | Tomato Seeds | Comet Wine | Vanguard | Edwards | Enterprise
Mercury | Gemini | Apollo | Moonwalking | Rocks | Craters | Salyut | Mir | Progress | Skylab | Shuttles | Energia | Buran
Choice morsels discovered and misplaced stories recalled about American and Russian space shuttles...
| Shuttle Maiden Flights | |
|---|---|
| Columbia | 1981 April 12 |
| Challenger | 1983 April 4 |
| Discovery | 1984 August 30 |
| Atlantis | 1985 October 3 |
| Endeavour | 1992 May 7 |
All U.S. space shuttle flights have been launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
U.S. shuttles have made numerous night launches. The earliest were Challenger in August 1983, Atlantis in November 1985, Discovery in November 1989 and Atlantis in February 1990.
Columbia in June 1982 was the first shuttle to carry a secret military payload. Discovery in January 1985 was the first completely secret military flight. Atlantis in November 1990 was the last completely secret military shuttle payload. [History of All Space Shuttle Flights by Year]
Shuttling through space...
Space shuttle astronauts have to keep track of 5,000 loose items such as photo equipment, supplies, food, tools, hygiene materials, payload parts and spares.
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The first planned spacewalk from a shuttle had to be cancelled in November 1982 when spacesuits malfunctioned.
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Ulf Merbold from West Germany was the first non-American to go to space in a U.S. craft.
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Sonny Carter lost his watch somewhere inside shuttle Discovery while orbiting in November 1989. Five months later, during Discovery's April 1990 trip to space, Loren Shriver found it.
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Shuttle Discovery carried 32 fertilized chicken eggs to orbit in 1989.
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Houston shared mission control with the West German Space Operations Center at Oberpfaffenhofen near Munich during the flight of Challenger in October and November 1985.
Landing the shuttle
The second space shuttle flight had to land early after only two days in space when a fuel cell failed in orbit.
The third shuttle flight was the only space shuttle to land in New Mexico. The orbiter Columbia landed at White Sands in March 1982.
In the early days, most space shuttles landed in California. The first seven to land at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, were Challenger in February 1984, Challenger October 1984, Discovery November 1984, Discovery January 1985, Discovery April 1985, Atlantis November 1990, and Discovery May 1991.
Weather and computer problems in January 1990 forced the crew of shuttle Columbia to extend their stay in orbit to 10 days 21 hours. That was half a day longer than any previous mission up to that time.
When shuttle Columbia flew in space for almost nine days in December 1990 it still was only the 15th longest U.S. space mission and the third longest shuttle flight. Longer shuttle flights had been made previously by Columbia -- 10 days in November 1983 and nearly 11 days in January 1990. Other longer flights were Gemini 7 in 1965, Apollo 7, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 from 1968 to 1972, all three Skylab missions in 1973-74, and the joint U.S.-USSR Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975.
Maytag repairmen in space
The Hubble Space Telescope, which turned out to have blurry vision after launch in 1990, was fitted with eye glasses when astronaut repairmen visited the satellite in a 1994 shuttle flight.
| The Challenger Seven January 28, 1986 | |
|---|---|
| Francis R. "Dick" Scobee | |
| Michael J. Smith | |
| Judith A. Resnik | |
| Ellison S. Onizuka | |
| Ronald E. McNair | |
| Gregory B. Jarvis | |
| Sharon Christa McAuliffe | |
Seven astronauts were aboard Challenger flight STS-51L, later renumbered STS-25, when it exploded during liftoff on January 28, 1986. Christa McAuliffe was a Concord, New Hampshire, high school social studies teacher. She and the other six were killed when a solid-fuel booster rocket leak led to a massive liquid-fuel tank explosion during lift off from a Cape Canaveral launch pad.
Millions of American students were watching television in classrooms as Challenger exploded. They had been planning to participate in lessons teacher Christa McAuliffe was to have taught by TV from orbit. Later, people around the world watched the accident replayed from NASA videotape as mission control reported at one minute thirteen seconds into liftoff from the pad, "Obviously a major malfunction. We have no downlink. The vehicle has exploded."
NASA's TDRS-B communications satellite also was lost in the Challenger explosion January 28, 1986.
| Challenger's Nine Distinguished Flights | |
|---|---|
| First American women in space | Sally Ride |
| First black man in space | Guion S. Bluford Jr. |
| First shuttle spacewalk | Donald Peterson Story Musgrave |
| First American female spacewalk | Kathryn Sullivan |
| First untethered spacewalk | Robert Stewart Bruce McCandless |
| First satellite repair in orbit | Pinky Nelson Ox Van Hoften |
| First Coke and Pepsi in orbit | 1985 |
| Challenger's Tragic Tenth Flight | |
| First persons to die enroute to space | |
| First Americans to die during a spaceflight | |
After the Challenger disaster, NASA's three remaining shuttles -- Atlantis, Discovery and Columbia -- were rebuilt extensively, each with more than 250 modifications improving safety and performance. Columbia was cannibalized for spare parts to get Discovery and Atlantis to space in 1988. Then Columbia was refurbished and launched in 1989.
The Russian space station Mir was launched in 1986, just 23 days after the fatal explosion of U.S. shuttle Challenger.
After the Challenger disaster in 1986, an outpouring of national emotion supported the allocation of federal funds to build a replacement orbiter. Even then, some scientists and politicians continued to argue against manned spaceflights, forcing NASA to choose between shuttles and space stations vs. unmanned interplanetary probes and orbiting astronomy observatories. However, work was started immediately on a replacement orbiter.
NASA needed a name for the new shuttle after the name Challenger was retired in honor of the dead astronauts. The agency wanted to continue the tradition of naming orbiters for the ships of famous explorers. Directed by Congress to do so, NASA let American students choose the name. Elementary and secondary students in public and private schools in the United States and territories, Department of Defense overseas dependents schools and Bureau of Indian Affairs schools entered the competition. More than 6,100 teams, including 71,650 students, researched name choices. Each state, territory and agency announced a winner. Sailing ships of Capt. James Cook, the 18th-century British explorer, turned out to be most popular among American children. Thirty-one of 111 state winners wanted the new shuttle to be named Endeavour, although some used the American spelling Endeavor. NASA decided the final winner and announced the name in 1989 -- Endeavour. The new Endeavour flew in 1992.
Seven asteroids in Outer Space were named for the Challenger astronauts who were lost in a 1986 launch.
| The Columbia Seven February 1, 2003 | |
|---|---|
| Rick D. Husband | |
| William C. McCool | |
| Michael P. Anderson | |
| David M. Brown | |
| Kalpana Chawla | |
| Laurel Clark | |
| Ilan Ramon | |
Seven astronauts were aboard Columbia flight STS-107 when it broke up 200,000 feet over Texas about 9 a.m. EST on Feb. 1, 2003, as it descended from orbit toward a landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The astronauts were lost in the disaster. Columbia, the oldest shuttle in the fleet of four, was to have landed at 9:16 a.m. EST at Kennedy Space Center.
Video of the shuttle over Dallas showed multiple vapor trails as the spacecraft broke apart. Debris was strewn across a wide area from southeastern Texas into Louisiana. Nacogdoches, Texas, police found pieces of debris inside the city limits and in the surrounding county.
Aboard the shuttle were commander Rick D. Husband, 45; pilot William C. McCool, 40; payload commander Michael P. Anderson, 42; mission specialists David M. Brown, 46; Kalpana Chawla 41; and Laurel Clark, 41; and Israel's first astronaut, payload specialist Ilan Ramon, 47. Ramon had been a national hero in Israel for taking part in the 1981 bombing of a nuclear reactor in Iraq.
| Some Notable Columbia Space Flights | |
|---|---|
| First-ever shuttle spaceflight | John Young Robert Crippen |
| First spaceplane to land on a runway | John Young Robert Crippen |
| First flight of Spacelab | 1981-82 |
| First extended-duration shuttle flight | 1992 |
| Ferried Chandra X-Ray Observatory to orbit | 1999 |
| Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission | 2002 |
| First female shuttle commander | Eileen Collins |
| First time a dozen were in orbit at the same time | 12 astronauts and cosmonauts |
| First non-American to fly in a U.S. craft | Ulf Merbold Germany |
| First dress shirt and tie in space | Jeffrey Hoffman |
| First ham radio chat from space | Owen Garriott |
| First all-ham shuttle crew | Kenneth Cameron Jay Apt Linda Godwin Steven Nagel Jerry Ross |
| First Americans to die enroute home from space |
Rick D. Husband William C. McCool Michael P. Anderson David M. Brown Kalpana Chawla Laurel Clark Ilan Ramon |
Shuttle Discovery commander Frederick D. Gregory suffered a foot infection in orbit in November 1989.
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The Atlantis flight in February 1990 was the second American spaceflight health delay after Apollo 9 which was delayed four days in 1968 when the crew came down with a respiratory illness.
Edwards Air Force base, the second-largest Air Force base in the continental U.S. encompassing 300,000 acres of the Mojave Desert, is home to the famed Flight Test Center whose pilots were glorified in Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff. Space shuttles have landed there.
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Should a U.S. space shuttle need to land at night in California, the concrete runway at Edwards Air Force Base is illuminated by six 800-million-candlepower searchlights.
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Brakes overheated but no landing problems turned up in January 1990 at Edwards Air Force Base, California, despite the heavy cargo of the rescued 11-ton LDEF satellite which pushed shuttle Columbia landing weight to 228,400 pounds, 8,000 pounds heavier than any previous.
Building a better coffee pot
Astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz applied American ingenuity to space shuttle coffee, inventing a pot which brews a cup of java in 45 seconds, uses fewer beans and creates less mess in a weightless galley.
Junkyard wing
A brand-new piece of shuttle Discovery's wing worth $304,000 was shipped to a Kennedy Space Center junkyard in 1992. NASA worker Brooks Humphrys, who helped operate the landfills that dot the space center, was searching the junkyard for recyclable materials when he uncovered the 18-in. 60-lb. wing part. The piece was supposed to be one of 22 on the orbiter wing leading edge. They keep the spaceship from burning up during reentry by withstanding temperatures of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
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The wing piece was sealed in a wooden crate that was discarded during a clean-up for an annual open house. Workers had placed the crate outside Discovery's hangar with empty crates. Other workers picked up the crates and took them to a landfill on the east end of Schwartz Road at Kennedy Space Center.
The Enterprise
The Smithsonian Institution annex to the popular National Air and Space Museum at Virginia's Dulles International Airport houses big aviation artifacts such as the prototype space shuttle Enterprise and a supersonic Concorde donated by France. Shuttle Enterprise was a test craft that never flew in space.
The single snowstorm
The USSR space shuttle Buran flew unmanned on its maiden voyage November 15, 1988. The new Energia rocket ferried the new shuttle successfully to two orbits and a picture-perfect automated landing. Buran means snowstorm in Russian. It only flew once and then it was unmanned. The combo rocket-shuttle project, known as the Energia-Buran Reusable Space System (MKS), was developed to compete with the U.S. space shuttle system.
Energia
The USSR's then-new super rocket Energia may have been the world's most powerful space launcher. Weighing 4.4 million lbs., it developed 6.6 million lbs. of thrust and could carry 220,000 lbs. to orbit. That was said to have been 10 tons more than the U.S. Saturn 5 which had sent men to the Moon in 1969-72 and had lofted the American space station Skylab in 1973. Saturn had lifted some 270,000 pounds when it launched Skylab into low earth orbit (LEO). The U.S. abandoned Saturn 5 in 1973. Carrying 110 tons to orbit, Energia tripled the lifting ability of the U.S. space shuttle. Energia could lift payloads five times heavier than payloads carried by Proton, the Soviet Union's second most powerful rocket. There were reports that the Energia rocket weighed more than planned by its designers, which would have decreased its payload capacity. At any rate, the Soviet Union disintegrated and the Energia rocket never flew again after the one Buran shuttle flight.
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