NASA's space shuttle fleet began setting records with its first launch on April 12, 1981 and continued to set high marks of achievement...
NASA's space shuttle fleet began setting records with its first launch on April 12, 1981 and continued to set high marks of achievement and endurance through 30 years of missions. Starting with Columbia and continuing with Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour, the spacecraft has carried people into orbit repeatedly, launched, recovered and repaired satellites, conducted cutting-edge research and built the largest structure in space, the International Space Station. The final space shuttle mission, STS-135, ended July 21, 2011 when Atlantis rolled to a stop at its home port, NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. As humanity's first reusable spacecraft, the space shuttle pushed the bounds of discovery ever farther, requiring not only advanced technologies but the tremendous effort of a vast workforce. All the 5 space shuttles has accumulated a total of 135 flights, 1300 days in space,traversed 550 million miles and delivered more than 3 million pounds of payload to orbit. The space shuttle is an engineering marvel, a testament of the ingenuity and perserverance of its designs and builders. The goal of the shuttle program was to create a reusable vehicle that could reduce the cost of delivering humans and large payloads into space. A fully reusable system was going to be expensive to design, with initial estimates running at $10 billion. A reusable system would have higher developmental costs, but the per launch cost would be less because of hardware reuse. The no of launches that would justify the developmental cost over an expected life of 15 years ranges between 500 to 900, or a maximum of more than one flight per week. But in reality the shuttle is an incredibly complex machine that requires a massive support infrastructure and people to maintain it, even in 1985 its best year, it never achieved more than nine flights. It has been estimated that the entire shuttle program cost $209 billion, averaging $1.5 billion per flight. There is no doubt that the designers of space shuttle oversold its capabilities and underestimated its costs, but actually they had nothing to base their estimates, except on concepts. A reusable space launch system didnt exist, and they were tasked to create it. Through their innovation, persistence and dedication these engineers created and sustained an incredible vehicle that carried 500-plus astronauts , launched more than 100 payloads and made possible the construction of ISS.
