Then in January 1986, Challenger exploded 73 seconds into its flight, killing its seven crew members, which included schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe.
Outwardly, NASA retained the bulletproof image of its halcyon Apollo days.Īstronauts flew jet-powered backpacks, captured and repaired satellites and by 1985 the four-strong fleet of Columbia, Challenger, Discovery and Atlantis - all named for seafaring vessels - was flying almost every month. One Shuttle suffered seized brakes and a burst tyre on the runway, another endured a main engine failure at the edge of space and an overstretched workforce was pressured to meet breakneck launch schedules. Heat-resistant tiles fell off during launch and the solid-rocket boosters showed worrying signs that hot gas was leaking through sealed joints. The Shuttle programme was declared operational the following year, but despite turning a profit by launching satellites commercially its veneer of respectability masked many cracks.
Credit: NASAįollowing several approach-and-landing tests with the pathfinder Enterprise in 1977, Young and Bob Crippen piloted Shuttle Columbia into space in April 1981: the first Shuttle spaceflight. Those troubles, never fully resolved, would haunt the Space Shuttle in later life.Īstronaut Mae Jemison became the first African American woman in space during mission STS-47, September 1992. Its technology proved notoriously difficult to tame, forcing NASA to fix problems with the main engines and thousands of heat-resistant tiles on its airframe to guard against temperature extremes of 1,650 Celsius during re-entry. On the pad, the 184-foot-tall ‘stack’ cut a peculiarly asymmetric figure one astronaut likened it to a butterfly bolted onto a bullet. Launched like a rocket, the Shuttle glided unpowered to a 200 mph runway landing, whilst the boosters parachuted into the ocean for retrieval.Ī 15-story external tank fed liquid oxygen and hydrogen to the Shuttle’s three main engines but was discarded after each flight. In addition to two launch pads at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a military site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California (eventually never used) was built for classified flights.Īnd despite being touted ‘reusable’, only the Shuttle and its twin solid-rocket boosters-which together produced 7.5 million pounds of liftoff thrust-were recoverable. Space Shuttle astronauts worked from the ten-windowed flight-deck, whilst a mid-deck provided living quarters including galley, toilet and sleep stations.īut powerful Air Force support for the Shuttle came at the cost of a compromised design and the need to cater for military customers. Story Musgrave pictured on the Canadarm during STS-61 as he prepares to be hoisted onto the top of the Hubble Space Telescope during the telescope's first servicing mission, December 1993.
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