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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 ...
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 experience during the disaster, and the debris and remains recovery efforts. [17] [91]
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. [51] [21]: III–489–490
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. There were over 1,200 active suppliers to the program throughout the United States.
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). [193]
The latter task resulted in a higher-than-usual media interest in and coverage of the mission; the launch and subsequent disaster were seen live in many schools across the United States. The cause of the disaster was the failure of the primary and secondary O-ring seals in a joint in the shuttle's right solid rocket booster (SRB). The record ...
In/by 2010 the Shuttle was formally scheduled for retirement with Atlantis being taken out of service first after STS-132 in May of that year, but the program was once again extended when the two final planned missions were delayed until 2011. [3] Later, one additional mission was added for Atlantis for July 2011, extending the program further.
Space Shuttle Atlantis lifted off on its maiden voyage STS-51-J on October 3, 1985. This was the second shuttle mission that was a dedicated Department of Defense mission. [8] It flew one other mission, STS-61-B (the second shuttle night launch) before the Challenger disaster temporarily grounded the shuttle fleet in 1986.