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On Saturday, February 1, 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it reentered the atmosphere over Texas and Louisiana, killing all seven astronauts on board. It was the second Space Shuttle mission to end in disaster, after the loss of Challenger and crew in 1986. The mission, designated STS-107, was the twenty-eighth flight for the ...
The Luna programme (from the Russian word Луна "Luna" meaning "Moon"), occasionally called Lunik by western media, [1] was a series of robotic spacecraft missions sent to the Moon by the Soviet Union between 1959 and 1976. The programme accomplished many firsts in space exploration, including first flyby of the Moon, first impact of the ...
Landing is the last part of a flight, where a flying aircraft or spacecraft (or animals) returns to the ground. When the flying object returns to water, the process is called alighting , although it is commonly called "landing" and "touchdown" as well.
Space Shuttle Challenger ( OV-099) was a Space Shuttle orbiter manufactured by Rockwell International and operated by NASA. Named after the commanding ship of a nineteenth-century scientific expedition that traveled the world, Challenger was the second Space Shuttle orbiter to fly into space after Columbia, and launched on its maiden flight in ...
v. t. e. A reusable launch vehicle has parts that can be recovered and reflown, while carrying payloads from the surface to outer space. Rocket stages are the most common launch vehicle parts aimed for reuse. Smaller parts such as rocket engines and boosters can also be reused, though reusable spacecraft may be launched on top of an expendable ...
The Cold War-inspired "space race" and "Moon race" between the Soviet Union and the United States of America accelerated with a focus on the Moon. This included many scientifically important firsts, such as the first photographs of the then-unseen far side of the Moon in 1959 by the Soviet Union, and culminated with the landing of the first humans on the Moon in 1969, widely seen around the ...
McDonnell Douglas DC-X. The DC-X, short for Delta Clipper or Delta Clipper Experimental, was an uncrewed prototype of a reusable single-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle built by McDonnell Douglas in conjunction with the United States Department of Defense 's Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) from 1991 to 1993.
A Mars landing is a landing of a spacecraft on the surface of Mars. Of multiple attempted Mars landings by robotic, uncrewed spacecraft, ten have had successful soft landings. There have also been studies for a possible human mission to Mars including a landing, but none have been attempted. As of 2023, the Soviet Union, United States and China ...