In its nearly 30-year history, the space shuttle program has seen exhilarating highs and devastating lows. The fleet has taken astronauts on dozens of successful missions, resulting in immeasurable scientific gains. But this success has had a serious cost. In 1986, the Challenger exploded duri...
In its nearly 30-year history, the space shuttle program has seen exhilarating highs and devastating lows. The fleet has taken astronauts on dozens of successful missions, resulting in immeasurable scientific gains. But this success has had a serious cost. In 1986, the Challenger exploded duri...
The space shuttle Challenger disaster is a case study of the untimely use of a rubber packing ring by mechanical engineers. The supplier engineers knew that the rubber packing seal had very limited application capability at low-temperature use but they could not prove this in a space shuttle lau...
"I am able now to treat the event as history rather than avoiding the public scrutiny that overcame us during our private grieving," said June Scobee Rodgers, whose husband, Francis "Dick" Scobee, commanded the 25th shuttle mission. "I'm envious when I look back at Dick Scobee's pictur...
NASA's Magellan spacecraft is deployed from the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1989. Magellan was the first planetary spacecraft launched from a space shuttle.(Image credit: NASA) One idea to get around the naming issue, de los Reyes says, is to stop naming things after people...
The space shuttle represented not just a change in accessing space but also how NASA interacted with the public. Jeff Foust reviews a book that examines how the agency sought to involve the public more in spaceflight to help secure its support.Monday, June 24, 2024 Things that almost go boom...
this year, 60-year-old Valery Polyakovbroke the recordwith 1,1110 days in space — by far the most total time spent off Earth by any human in history. Polyakov also holds the record for most consecutive days in space. In the mid-1990s, he spent 438 days on Russia's ...
History and Benefits of Engine Level Testing Throughout the Space Shuttle Main Engine Program Rocket engine testing is important throughout a program s life and is essential to the overall success of the program. Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) testing can be divided into three phases: developme...
Chandra was launched by the Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-93) on 23 July 1999. Deployed into low Earth orbit by the space shuttle crew, the telescope used an Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) to significantly raise its orbit. The spacecraft operates in a highly elliptical Earth orbit with a period...
It also carried Yuri Gagarin on board Vostok 1 for the first human spaceflight in 1961. ADVERTISEMENTAfter the first 20 years of exploration, the emphasis shifted from one-off trips to durable gear, like the Space Shuttle program, and from rivalry to collaboration, like with the International ...