Space Shuttle Program

The Space Shuttle was NASA’s reusable spaceplane and the workhorse of American human spaceflight for thirty years. From 1981 to 2011 it launched like a rocket, worked in orbit like a spacecraft, and landed like a glider on a runway, a combination nothing had done before.

Quick facts

• Operated: 1981 to 2011, by NASA.
• Missions: 135 flights in total.
• Orbiters: five that flew in space, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour.
• Crew: typically up to seven astronauts per flight.
• Launch system: a winged orbiter, a large orange external fuel tank, and two reusable solid rocket boosters.

What it did

The shuttle was designed to make spaceflight more routine by reusing its hardware. Its large payload bay could carry satellites, science labs, and station parts, and a robotic arm let astronauts grab and repair spacecraft in orbit. The fleet launched the Hubble Space Telescope and later serviced it five times, deployed planetary probes, flew the Spacelab science missions, and carried up most of the pieces of the International Space Station, assembling the largest structure ever built in space.

Why it mattered, and its cost

The program expanded what humans could do in orbit and trained a generation of astronauts. But it also carried hard lessons. Two orbiters were lost with their crews: Challenger broke apart shortly after launch in 1986, and Columbia disintegrated during re-entry in 2003. Those tragedies, fourteen astronauts in all, reshaped how NASA thinks about risk and safety. The shuttle never became as cheap or as frequent as hoped, and it was retired in 2011, but its three decades of work left a permanent mark, most visibly in the space station that still orbits overhead.