page_title: Space Shuttle program
section_title: Program history
hierarchical_section_title: Space Shuttle program / Program history
caption_attribution_description: English: The two crews for the Space Shuttle Approach and Landing Tests (ALT) are photographed at the Rockwell International Space Division's Orbiter assembly facility at Palmdale, California on the day of the rollout of the Shuttle Orbiter 101 "Enterprise" spacecraft. They are, left to right, Astronauts C. Gordon Fullerton, pilot of the first crew; Fred W. Haise Jr., commander of the first crew; Joe H. Engle, commander of the second crew; and Richard H. Truly, pilot of the second crew. The DC-9 size airplane-like Orbiter 101 is in the background. Image ID: S76-29562
context_page_description: The Space Shuttle program was the fourth human spaceflight program carried out by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which accomplished routine transportation for Earth-to-orbit crew and cargo from 1981 to 2011. Its official name, Space Transportation System, was taken from a 1969 plan for a system of reusable spacecraft of which it was the only item funded for development.
  The Space Shuttle—composed of an orbiter launched with two reusable solid rocket boosters and a disposable external fuel tank—carried up to eight astronauts and up to 50,000 lb of payload into low Earth orbit. When its mission was complete, the orbiter would reenter the Earth's atmosphere and land like a glider at either the Kennedy Space Center or Edwards Air Force Base.
  The Shuttle is the only winged crewed spacecraft to have achieved orbit and landing, and the only reusable crewed space vehicle that has ever made multiple flights into orbit. Its missions involved carrying large payloads to various orbits, providing crew rotation for the space station, and performing service missions on the Hubble Space Telescope.
context_section_description: All Space Shuttle missions were launched from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Some civilian and military circumpolar space shuttle missions were planned for Vandenberg AFB in California. However, the use of Vandenberg AFB for space shuttle missions was canceled after the Challenger disaster in 1986. The weather criteria used for launch included, but were not limited to: precipitation, temperatures, cloud cover, lightning forecast, wind, and humidity. The Shuttle was not launched under conditions where it could have been struck by lightning.
  The first fully functional orbiter was Columbia (designated OV-102), built in Palmdale, California. It was delivered to Kennedy Space Center (KSC) 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 (OV-099) was delivered to KSC in July 1982, Discovery (OV-103) in November 1983, Atlantis (OV-104) in April 1985 and Endeavour in May 1991. Challenger was originally built and used as a Structural Test Article (STA-099), but was converted to a complete orbiter when this was found to be less expensive than converting Enterprise from its Approach and Landing Test configuration into a spaceworthy vehicle.
  On April 24, 1990, Discovery carried the Hubble Space Telescope into space during STS-31.
  In the course of 135 missions flown, two orbiters (Columbia and Challenger) suffered catastrophic accidents, with the loss of all crew members, totaling 14 astronauts.
  The accidents led to national level inquiries and detailed analysis of why the accidents occurred. There was a significant pause where changes were made before the Shuttles returned to flight. The Columbia disaster occurred in 2003, but STS took more than a year off before returning to flight in June 2005 with the STS-114 mission. The previously mentioned break was between January 1986 (when the Challenger disaster occurred) and 32 months later when STS-26 was launched on September 29, 1988.
  The longest Shuttle mission was STS-80 lasting 17 days, 15 hours. The final flight of the Space Shuttle program was STS-135 on July 8, 2011.
  Since the Shuttle's retirement in 2011, many of its original duties are performed by an assortment of government and private vessels. The European ATV Automated Transfer Vehicle supplied the ISS between 2008 and 2015. Classified military missions are being flown by the US Air Force's uncrewed space plane, the X-37B. By 2012, cargo to the International Space Station was already being delivered commercially under NASA's Commercial Resupply Services by SpaceX's partially reusable Dragon spacecraft, followed by Orbital Sciences' Cygnus spacecraft in late 2013. Crew service to the ISS is currently provided by the Russian Soyuz while work on the Commercial Crew Development program proceeds; the first crewed flight of this was on May 30th, 2020, on the SpaceX Falcon 9 with Dragon 2 crew capsule. For missions beyond low Earth orbit, NASA is building the Space Launch System and the Orion spacecraft, part of the Artemis program.
caption: Shuttle approach and landing test crews, 1976
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