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The Space Shuttle external tank (ET) carried the propellant for the Space Shuttle Main Engines, and connected the orbiter vehicle with the solid rocket boosters. The ET was 47 m (153.8 ft) tall and 8.4 m (27.6 ft) in diameter, and contained separate tanks for liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.
The Space Shuttle was a partially reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated by NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration). Its official program name was Space Transportation System (STS), taken from a 1969 plan for a system of reusable spacecraft of which it was the only item funded for development. [ 1 ]
The Space Shuttle program was the fourth human spaceflight program carried out by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which accomplished routine transportation for Earth-to-orbit crew and cargo from 1981 to 2011.
The retirement of NASA's Space Shuttle fleet took place from March to July 2011. Discovery was the first of the three active Space Shuttles to be retired, completing its final mission on March 9, 2011; Endeavour did so on June 1. The final shuttle mission was completed with the landing of Atlantis on July 21, 2011, closing the 30-year Space ...
Columbia (STS-3) landing on Northrop Strip at White Sands Space Harbor, 30 March 1982, flanked by two T-38 chase planes. White Sands Space Harbor at White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico was an emergency landing site for the Space Shuttle and was used as a backup when the runways at Edwards Air Force Base and the Kennedy Space Center were ...
The Space Shuttle program, however, faced criticism that it failed to reduce the cost of access to space and had safety concerns following the Challenger and Columbia disasters. [ 7 ] [ 8 ] The SpaceX Dragon 1 first flew in 2010, and became the first commercially built and operated spacecraft to be recovered from orbit.
STS-60 was the first mission of the U.S./Russian Shuttle-Mir Program, and the 18th flight of Discovery, in which Sergei K. Krikalev became the first Russian cosmonaut to fly aboard a Space Shuttle. The mission used NASA Space Shuttle Discovery , which lifted off from Launch Pad 39A on February 3, 1994, from Kennedy Space Center , Florida .
Buran could return 20 tons from orbit, [90] [91] vs the Space Shuttle's 15 tons. Buran included a drag chute, [92] the Space Shuttle originally did not, but was later retrofitted to include one. The lift-to-drag ratio of Buran is cited as 5.6, [93] compared to a subsonic L/D of 4.5 for the Space Shuttle. [94]