All seven astronauts on board perished.Īfterward, the shuttle fleet was grounded until July 2005, when Discovery was launched on the program’s 114th mission. The shuttle program experienced its second major disaster on February 1, 2003, when just minutes before Columbia was scheduled to land at Kennedy Space Center and conclude its 28th mission, it broke apart while re-entering the atmosphere over Texas. Atlantis entered the fleet in 1985, and was followed by Endeavour in 1992. The program’s third shuttle, Discovery, made its first flight in 1984. In the aftermath of the disaster, the shuttle program was grounded until 1988. civilian to fly aboard the space shuttle. All seven crew members were killed, including high school teacher Christa McAuliffe, who had won a national contest to be the first U.S. It flew nine missions before breaking apart shortly after the launch of its 10th mission, on January 28, 1986. In 1983, a second shuttle, Challenger, was put into service. Over the course of the next 54 hours, the two astronauts aboard NASA’s first reusable spacecraft successfully tested all its systems and orbited the Earth 37 times before landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California. In January 1972, two-and-a-half years after America put the first man on the moon in July 1969, President Richard Nixon publicly announced that NASA would develop a space transportation system featuring a space vehicle capable of shuttling “repeatedly from Earth to orbit and back.” Nine years later, on April 12, 1981, at Kennedy Space Center, the first shuttle, Columbia, lifted off on its inaugural mission. NASA retired the shuttles to focus on a deep-space exploration program that could one day send astronauts to asteroids and Mars. During the program’s 30-year history, its five orbiters-Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour-carried more than 350 people into space and flew more than 500 million miles, and shuttle crews conducted important research, serviced the Hubble Space Telescope and helped in the construction of the International Space Station, among other activities. On July 21, 2011, NASA’s space shuttle program completes its final, and 135th, mission, when the shuttle Atlantis lands at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
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