STS-123 was a Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station (ISS) which was flown by Space Shuttle Endeavour. STS-123 was the 1J/A ISS assembly mission. The original launch target date was February 14, 2008, but after the delay of STS-122, the shuttle was launched on March 11, 2008. It was the twenty-fifth shuttle mission to visit the ISS, and delivered the first module…
The Space Shuttle Enterprise (Orbiter Vehicle Designation: OV-101) is the first orbiter of the Space Shuttle system. Rolled out on September 17, 1976, it was built for NASA as part of the Space Shuttle program to perform atmospheric test flights after being launched from a modified Boeing 747. It was constructed without engines or a functional heat shield. As a result, it was not capable of spaceflight. Originally, Enterprise had been intended to…
STS-116 (also known as ISS-12A) was a Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station (ISS) flown by Space Shuttle Discovery. Discovery lifted off on December 9, 2006 for her 33rd flight at 20:47:35 EST. A previous launch attempt on December 7 had been canceled due to cloud cover. It was the first night launch of a Space Shuttle since STS-113 in November 2002. The mission…
STS-61 was NASA’s first Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission, and the fifth flight of the Space Shuttle Endeavour. The mission launched on December 2, 1993, from Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. The mission restored the space-borne observatory’s vision (marred by spherical aberration in its mirror) with the installation of a new main camera and a corrective optics package (COSTAR). This correction occurred more than three and a…
Buran was the first spaceplane to be produced as part of the Soviet/Russian Buran program. The Buran orbiters were similar in design to the U.S. Space Shuttle.Buran completed one uncrewed spaceflight in 1988, and was destroyed in 2002 due to the roof collapse of its storage hangar at Baikonur Cosmodrome. The Buran-class orbiters used the expendable Energia rocket, a class of super heavy-lift launch…
STS-66 was a Space Shuttle program mission that was flown by the Space Shuttle Atlantis. STS-66 launched on November 3, 1994, at 11:59:43.060 am EDT from Launch Pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Atlantis landed at Edwards Air Force Base on November 14, 1994, at 10:33:45 am EST. The Atmospheric Laboratory for Applications and Sciences – 3 (ATLAS-03) was the primary payload aboard STS-66. It continued…
Space Shuttle Discovery (Orbiter Vehicle Designation: OV-103) is a retired American Space Shuttle orbiter. The space-plane was one of the orbiters from NASA’s Space Shuttle program and the third of five fully operational orbiters to be built. Its first mission, STS-41-D, flew from August 30 to September 5, 1984. Over 27 years of service…
The final phase of flight testing involved free flights. These saw Enterprise mated to the SCA and carried to a launch altitude, before being released to glide to a landing on the runways at Edwards AFB. The intention of these flights was to test the flight characteristics of the orbiter itself, on a typical…
STS-85 was the 23rd flight of Space Shuttle Discovery that performed multiple space science packages. It was launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on 7 August 1997. The main STS-85 payloads included the satellite known as Cryogenic Infrared Spectrometers and Telescopes for the Atmosphere-Shuttle Pallet Satellite-2 CRISTA-SPAS-02. During the flight, Davis used Discovery’s robot…
STS-57 was a NASA Space Shuttle-Spacelab mission of Space Shuttle Endeavour that launched June 21, 1993, from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. The mission was launched on the summer solstice. During the ten-day flight, the astronauts successfully conducted scores of biomedical and materials sciences experiments inside the pressurized SPACEHAB module. Two astronauts participated in a…
Sally Ride (May 26, 1951 – July 23, 2012) was an American astronaut and physicist. Born in Los Angeles, she joined NASA in 1978, and in 1983 became the first American woman and the third woman to fly in space, after cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. She was the…
The Hubble Space Telescope’s (HST) Servicing Mission 4 (SM4), flown by the Shuttle Atlantis in May 2009, was the last scheduled shuttle mission for HST (launched 11th of May 2009, STS-125). SM4 installed the replacement data-handling unit, repaired the ACS and STIS systems, installed improved nickel hydrogen batteries, and replaced other components including all…
The Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA) are two extensively modified Boeing 747 airliners that NASA used to transport Space Shuttle orbiters. One (N905NA) is a 747-100 model, while the other (N911NA) is a short-range 747-100SR. Both are now retired. The SCAs were used to ferry Space Shuttles from landing sites back to the Shuttle Landing…