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The Space Shuttle program originated in the late 1960s as an attempt to reduce the cost of spaceflight by introducing a reusable spacecraft.The final agreed design would feature a reusable spaceplane, a disposable external tank and reusable solid-fuel rocket boosters.
Space Shuttle Columbia (OV-102) was a Space Shuttle orbiter manufactured by Rockwell International and operated by NASA.Named after the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe, and the female personification of the United States, Columbia was the first of five Space Shuttle orbiters to fly in space, debuting the Space Shuttle launch vehicle on its maiden flight on April 12, 1981 and ...
Space Shuttle Discovery as it approaches the International Space Station during the STS-114 on 28 July 2005. The Space Shuttle thermal protection system (TPS) is the barrier that protected the Space Shuttle Orbiter during the extreme 1,650 °C (3,000 °F) heat of atmospheric reentry. A secondary goal was to protect from the heat and cold of ...
Buran was designed to be capable of both piloted and fully autonomous flight, including landing. The Space Shuttle was later retrofitted with automated landing capability, first flown 18 years after the Buran on STS-121, but the system was intended to be used only in contingencies. [87] [disputed – discuss]
In 1976, NASA selected Northrup Strip as the site for shuttle pilot training. A second runway was added crossing the original north-south landing strip, and in 1979 both lakebed runways were lengthened to 35,000 ft (10,668 m), which includes 15,000 ft (4,572 m) usable runway with 10,000 ft (3048 m) extensions on either end, to allow White Sands Space Harbor to serve as shuttle backup landing ...
The X-37 lands automatically upon returning from orbit and is the third reusable spacecraft to have such a capability, after the Soviet Buran shuttle [52] and the U.S. space shuttle, which had automatic landing capability by the mid-1990s, but never tested it. [53]
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 April 1983.
Simulating the exact conditions of a Space Re-entry vehicle's landing - high speed, unmanned, autonomous, precise landing from the same return path Validating the landing parameters such as the ground relative velocity, the sinking rate of landing gears and precise body rates as might be experienced by an orbital re-entry space vehicle on its ...