History of Space Shuttle

SPACE SHUTTLE HISTORY:

 

In 1969 President Richard M. Nixon formed the Space Task Group, chaired by vice president Spiro T. Agnew. They evaluated the shuttle studies to date, and recommended a national space strategy including building a space shuttle.

During early shuttle development there was great debate about the optimal shuttle design that best balanced capability, development cost and operating cost. the current design was chosen, using a reusable winged orbiter, solid rocket boosters, and expendable external tank.

The Shuttle program was formally launched on January 5, 1972, when President Nixon announced that NASA would proceed with the development of a reusable Space Shuttle system. The final design was less costly to build and less technically ambitious than earlier fully reusable designs.

The prime contractor for the program was Rockwell International, the same company responsible for the Apollo Command/Service Module. The contractor for the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters was Morton Thiokol (now part of Alliant Techsystems), for the external tank, Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin), and for the Space shuttle main engines, Rocketdyne.

The first complete Orbiter was originally named Constitution, but a massive write-in campaign from fans of the Star Trek television series convinced the White House to change the name to Enterprise. Amid great fanfare, the Enterprise was rolled out on September 17, 1976, and later conducted a successful series of glide-approach and landing tests that were the first real validation of the design.

The first fully functional Shuttle Orbiter was the Columbia, built in Palmdale, California. It was delivered to Kennedy Space Centre on March 25, 1979, and was first launched on April 12, 1981—the 20th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's space flight—with a crew of two. Challenger was delivered to KSC in July 1982, Discovery in November 1983, and Atlantis in April 1985. Challenger was destroyed when it disintegrated during ascent on January 28, 1986, with the loss of all seven astronauts on board. Endeavour was built to replace her (using spare parts originally intended for the other Orbiters) and delivered in May 1991; it was launched a year later. Seventeen years after Challenger, Columbia was lost, with all seven crew members, during re-entry on February 1, 2003, and has not been replaced.