Remembering the Space Shuttle
[4] 7 February 1984 [8] 30 november 2008 [9] 13 May 1992
Exactly a decade ago, NASA’s reusable low-Earth orbital spacecraft’s time came to an end. All About Space relives the best moments
At the dawn of the Space Age, when mobile phones, laptop computers and the internet were still the stuff of science fiction, astronauts flew into space crammed inside cramped metal capsules that flew only once, launched on top of rockets that also flew only once. Today astronauts are flying into space inside capsules again, although the reusable Dragon and Orion spacecraft are a lot more sophisticated and a lot less cramped than those that flew during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions.
But for three memorable decades between
1981 and 2011, astronauts travelled into space and worked and lived in orbit inside spacecraft that could be used again and again. These sleek, white spacecraft flew up into orbit like rockets, but landed back on Earth at the end of their mission like a plane, rolling gracefully to a halt on a runway instead of splashing down in the ocean. These were the Space Shuttles.
Designed to be flown dozens of times every year, making access to space reliable and cheap, the shuttles ultimately proved too expensive and sadly too dangerous to keep flying, and NASA returned to using capsules. But for the astronauts who flew them, and the space enthusiasts who whooped and cheered as they leapt off the launchpad and thundered into space, they were and will always be the most beautiful spacecraft ever built.
Enterprise takes flight
1 Before Columbia became the first Space Shuttle to thunder into space in April 1981, another orbiter was used to practise landings. During a series of Approach and Landing Tests, the orbiter was carried into the sky on top of a specially modified jumbo jet. It was then set free, flown and landed on a desert runway by a pair of astronauts. The orbiter was named Enterprise after a fierce campaign by fans of the popular science-fiction series Star Trek, but ironically Enterprise never got to fly into space.
First Flight
2 On 12 April 1981, 20 years after Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight, the Space Shuttle Columbia thundered into the blue Florida sky for the first time. Carrying just two crew on board – veteran astronaut John Young, who had walked on the Moon in 1972 during the Apollo 16 mission, and rookie astronaut Robert Crippen – Columbia spent just two days in space on a test flight to check out all its systems. Despite some concerns when onboard cameras showed some of its thermal tiles had come off during launch, Columbia returned safely to Earth, gliding down elegantly to a perfect landing.
“the shuttles ultimately proved too expensive and sadly too dangerous to keep flying”
Challenger From above
3 Although today’s crewed Orion and Dragon space capsules are packed with state-of-the-art flight systems, electronics and technology that make them much more advanced than the Space Shuttle in many ways – and safer too – many people think that they are ugly compared to the orbiters.
When you see an image like this, showing Space Shuttle Challenger high above Earth, it’s not hard to see why. Seen here on the seventh Space Shuttle mission with its payload bay doors open wide and its sweptback wings and tall tail fin gleaming white in the sunlight, Challenger was a spectacular sight. This was taken by a small, free-flying satellite deployed by the Space Shuttle.
Bruce McCandless spacewalking without a tether
4 Before the Space Shuttle era, every spacewalking astronaut had been connected to their spacecraft by a tether, preventing them from floating off into space. On Space Shuttle mission STS-41-B in 1984, that changed when astronaut Bruce McCandless strapped on a revolutionary kind of ‘rocket backpack’ called a Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), floating up out of Challenger’s payload bay without any physical connection to the orbiter at all. As he flew almost 100 metres (328 feet) away from Challenger, propelled by gas jets in the MMU, McCandless was in effect an independent spacecraft. However, the MMU was only used a few more times before being retired, and now astronauts who go out on spacewalks to repair or service the International Space Station (ISS) use tethers.
Space Shuttle Atlantis docked to the MIR space station
5 One of the major benefits of the Space Shuttle system was the ability of the orbiter to rendezvous and dock with other spacecraft in orbit, and during the Space Shuttle program the orbiter Atlantis paid several very welcome visits to the Russian space station, Mir.
These visits weren’t just political gestures like the ApolloSoyuz Test Project docking of the mid-1970s; they gave ground crews, astronauts and engineers from the two countries opportunities to work together and learn how to collaborate in space in advance of the construction and operation of the ISS, which was built after Mir completed its time in space. Shuttle docked to ISS
6 Once Mir was retired – by crashing into the ocean in a flurry of blazing fireballs – the ISS began to take shape, and the Space Shuttle became a cross between a cargo ship and a delivery truck, taking various components of the orbital platform into space for the astronauts aboard the space station to fit together, increasing its size and capabilities over time. The shuttle also took astronauts up to the space station and returned them home again. This image shows Space Shuttle Endeavour docked with the ISS. Note how much bigger the ISS is than its predecessor, Mir, and also how much larger it is than the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, which are also docked to the space station. In fact, the shuttle’s payload bay could have held a Soyuz with room to spare.
“The Space Shuttle became a cross between a cargo ship and a delivery truck, taking various components of the orbital platform into space”