Reusable crewed spacecraft. The first was launched 12 April 1981 by the US. It was developed by NASA to reduce the cost of using space for commercial, scientific, and military purposes. After leaving its payload in space, the space-shuttle orbiter can be flown back to Earth to land on a runway, and is then available for reuse.
Four orbiters were built: Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, and Atlantis. Challenger was destroyed in a midair explosion just over a minute after its tenth launch 28 Jan 1986, killing all seven crew members, the result of a failure in one of the solid rocket boosters. Flights resumed with redesigned boosters in Sept 1988. A replacement orbiter, Endeavour, was built, which had its maiden flight in May 1992. At the end of the 1980s, an average of $375 million had been spent on each space-shuttle mission.
The USSR produced a shuttle of similar size and appearance to the US one. The first Soviet shuttle, Buran, was launched without a crew by the Energiya rocket 15 Nov 1988. In Japan, development of a crewless shuttle began 1986.
The space-shuttle orbiter, the part that goes into space, is 37.2 m/122 ft long and weighs 75 tons. Although most of its cargoes will be unmanned, two to eight crew members may occupy the orbiter's nose section for up to 30 days. In its cargo bay the orbiter can carry up to 32 tons of satellites, scientific equipment, Spacelab, or military payloads. At launch, the shuttle's three main engines are fed with liquid fuel from a cylindrical tank attached to the orbiter; this tank is discarded shortly before the shuttle reaches orbit. Two additional solid-fuel boosters provide the main thrust for launch, but are jettisoned after two minutes. + prikaži više