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The Space Shuttle Columbia was lost as it returned from a two-week mission when previously detected damage to the shuttle's thermal protection system (TPS) resulted in the spacecraft breaking apart during reentry at an altitude of just under 65 km and a speed of about Mach 19. Investigation revealed that a piece of foam insulation had fallen ...
Many other planned missions were canceled due to the late development of the shuttle, and the Challenger and Columbia disasters. Four missions were cut short by a day or more while in orbit: STS-2 (equipment failure), [ 22 ] STS-35 (weather), [ 102 ] STS-44 (equipment failure), [ 193 ] and STS-83 (equipment failure, relaunched as STS-94 ).
It discusses the history of the Space Shuttle program, and documents the post-disaster recovery and investigation efforts. [90] Michael Leinbach, a retired Launch Director at KSC who was working on the day of the disaster, released Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew in 2018. It documents his personal ...
After the Challenger and Columbia disasters in 1986 and 2003 immediately, if temporarily, grounded the shuttles, the U.S. had no way to get crews to space. When the shuttles were retired, NASA was ...
The positioning had to be precise. The shuttle's nose was raised 200 feet into the night sky so that the rudder could clear 80 feet of space. Endeavour was then turned 17 degrees clockwise to ...
A Kounotori departing Tanegashima Space Center bound for the International Space Station. Located in Japan on an island 115 kilometres (71 mi) south of Kyūshū, the Tanegashima Space Center (TCS) is the launch site for H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV), called Kounotori ( こうのとり , Oriental stork or white stork ) , used to resupply the Kibō ...
A new record for the number of people in space at the same time, though not necessarily all in orbit, was reached on 25 May 2023. 20 people were in space simultaneously, with eleven people aboard the ISS, three on Tiangong, and six on VSS Unity. [10]
The original intention was to compensate for this lower payload by lowering the per-launch costs and a high launch frequency. However, the actual costs of a Space Shuttle launch were higher than initially predicted, and the Space Shuttle did not fly the intended 24 missions per year as initially predicted by NASA. [66] [28]: III–489–490