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Original North American Rockwell Shuttle delta wing design, 1969: fully reusable, with a flyback crewed booster Maxime Faget's DC-3 concept employed conventional straight wings. During the early shuttle studies, there was a debate over the optimal shuttle design that best-balanced capability, development cost, and operational cost.
The X-37 lands automatically upon returning from orbit and is the third reusable spacecraft to have such a capability, after the Soviet Buran shuttle [52] and the U.S. space shuttle, which had automatic landing capability by the mid-1990s, but never tested it. [53]
The historic Space Shuttle reused its Solid Rocket Boosters, its RS-25 engines and the Space Shuttle orbiter that acted as an orbital insertion stage, but it did not reuse the External Tank that fed the RS-25 engines. This is an example of a reusable launch system which reuses specific components of rockets.
The Space Shuttle is a retired, partially reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated from 1981 to 2011 by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Space Shuttle program.
In the early 1990s, NASA engineers planning a crewed mission to Mars included a Shuttle-C design to launch six non reusable 80-ton segments to create two Mars ships in Earth orbit. After President George W. Bush called for the end of the Space Shuttle by 2010, these proposed configurations were put aside. [2] HLLV
The intention was that rather than operate space transport systems as it has with the Space Shuttle, NASA would instead look to private industry to operate the reusable launch vehicle and NASA would purchase launch services from the commercial launch provider. Thus, the X-33 was not only about honing space flight technologies, but also about ...
Space Shuttle Endeavour landing from orbit on STS-126, its 22nd spaceflight Reusable spacecraft are spacecraft capable of repeated launch, atmospheric reentry, and landing or splashdown. This contrasts with expendable spacecraft which are designed to be discarded after use.
Skylon has its origins within a previous space development programme for an envisioned single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) spaceplane, known as HOTOL. [14] In 1982, when work commenced on the HOTOL by several British companies, there was significant international interest to develop and produce viable reusable launch systems, perhaps the most high-profile of these being the NASA-operated Space Shuttle.