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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 cold morning shrunk an O-Ring on the right Solid Rocket Booster causing the external fuel tank to explode.
Columbia would have launched from Kennedy Space Center, then executed a 180-degree turn at a speed of 8,400 kilometres per hour (5,200 mph), or 6.7 times the speed of sound, in order to land at the Kennedy Space Center runway. The mission was canceled when astronauts refused to fly it, having deemed the plan to be too dangerous.
For Space Shuttle missions, in the firing room at the Launch Control Center, the NASA Test Director (NTD) performed this check via a voice communications link with other NASA personnel. The NTD was the leader of the shuttle test team responsible for directing and integrating all flight crew, orbiter, external tank/solid rocket booster and ...
Shuttle Carrier Aircraft ferry flights generally originated at Edwards Air Force Base in California or on one occasion White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico following missions which landed there, especially in the early days of the Space Shuttle program or when weather at the Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF) at Kennedy Space Center prevented ...
Space Shuttle Discovery as it approaches the International Space Station during STS-114 on July 28, 2005. This was the Shuttle's "return to flight" mission after the Columbia disaster The Shuttle program operated accident-free for seventeen years and 88 missions after the Challenger disaster, until Columbia broke up on reentry , killing all ...
Building the complete station required more than 40 assembly flights. As of 2020, 36 Space Shuttle flights delivered ISS elements. Other assembly flights consisted of modules lifted by the Falcon 9, Russian Proton rocket or, in the case of Pirs and Poisk, the Soyuz-U rocket. Some of the larger modules include:
The Soyuz was chosen as the ISS lifeboat during the development of the International Space Station. [70] The first NASA astronaut to launch on a Soyuz rocket was Norman Thagard, as part of the Shuttle-Mir program. [71] Launching on March 14, 1995, on Soyuz TM-21, he visited the Mir however he returned to Earth on the Space Shuttle mission STS ...
The Space Shuttle will be in a 20-story-tall display mounted on with the ET-94 tank, and solid rocket boosters, as it looks like its were about to make one more flight. Once finished, it will be the only Space Shuttle mounted vertically in launch position. Originally slated to open in 2015, construction on the new building started on June 1, 2022.