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The Space Shuttle program occupied over 654 facilities, used over 1.2 million line items of equipment, and employed over 5,000 people. The total value of equipment was over $12 billion. Shuttle-related facilities represented over a quarter of NASA's inventory.
During that time period the fleet logged 1,322 days, 19 hours, 21 minutes and 23 seconds of flight time. [2] The longest orbital flight of the Shuttle was STS-80 at 17 days 15 hours, while the shortest flight was STS-51-L at one minute 13 seconds when the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart during launch.
The final shuttle mission was completed with the landing of Atlantis on July 21, 2011, closing the 30-year Space Shuttle program. The Shuttle was presented to the public in 1972 as a "space truck" which would, among other things, be used to build a United States space station in low Earth orbit in the early 1990s and then be replaced by a new ...
The shuttle was moved directly into an Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF), where post-flight de-servicing and pre-flight processing took place simultaneously. After only 26 days in the OPF, a record fast processing in the history of the Space Shuttle program, the shuttle was rolled to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) on November 7, 1985. [2]
The Space Shuttle is a retired, partially reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated from 1981 to 2011 by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Space Shuttle program.
Events taking place on this day were interviews for both the International Space Station (ISS) and Shuttle crews. Mission Specialist Mike Fossum received a call from Texas Governor Rick Perry , who like Fossum, is a graduate of the Texas A&M University .
The shuttle program was marked by triumphs and failures, including the 2003 Columbia disaster. The tragedies left a lasting mark on the perception of risks in space.
It was an aluminum structure resembling two wheels with a 6 m (20 ft) long central axle, ballasted with lead to give it a total mass of 3,855 kg (8,499 lb), which could be lifted by the "Canadarm" Remote Manipulator System – the Shuttle's "robot arm" – and moved around to help astronauts gain experience in using the system. It was stored in ...