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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.
STS-51-F (also known as Spacelab 2) was the 19th flight of NASA's Space Shuttle program and the eighth flight of Space Shuttle Challenger.It launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on July 29, 1985, and landed eight days later on August 6, 1985.
During the design of the Space Shuttle, the Phase B proposals were not as cheap as the initial Phase A estimates indicated; Space Shuttle program manager Robert Thompson acknowledged that reducing cost-per-pound was not the primary objective of the further design phases, as other technical requirements could not be met with the reduced costs. [24]:
The space shuttle project was forged in the optimism of NASA’s Apollo program, which landed 12 astronauts on the surface of the moon and bested America’s Soviet rivals during the Cold War.
The completion of the Space Shuttle program and the completion of the B-1 bomber program had led to a decline in revenues, and Beall sought to diversify the company away from government contracts. The end of the Cold War and the perceived " peace dividend ", however, prompted accelerated divestitures and sweeping management reforms.
The "Space Transportation System" (NASA's formal name for the overall Shuttle program) was created to transport crewmembers and payloads into low Earth orbits. [10] It would afford the opportunity to conduct science experiments on board the shuttle to be used to study the effects of space flight on humans, animals and plants.
The Shuttle-C concept would theoretically cut development costs for a heavy launch vehicle by re-using technology developed for the Shuttle program. End-of-life and Space Shuttle hardware would also have been used. One proposal involved converting the Columbia or Enterprise into a single-use cargo launcher.
The Orion spacecraft, which was developed to follow the Space Shuttle program, uses a Mercury and Apollo-style escape rocket system, while an alternative system, called the Max Launch Abort System (MLAS), [4] was investigated and would have used existing solid-rocket motors integrated into the bullet-shaped protective launch shroud.