Space Shuttle

Quick Facts About the Space shuttle rocket system:

- Type: Crewed orbital launch and reentry.

- Origin : United States.

- In service : April 12, 1981 - July 21, 2011.

- Mass : 2,030,000 kg (4,470,000 lb.

- Length/Height : 56.1 m (184 ft 1 in).

- Diameter : 8.7 m (28 ft 7 in).

- Payload to LEO : 27,500 kg (60,600 lb).

- Payload to GTO : 10,890 kg (24,010 lb) with.

- Payload to Earth return : 14,400 kg (31,700 lb).

- Propellant: Boosters: Solid (ammonium perchlorate composite propellant). First stage: LH2 / LOX

- Engines: Boosters: 2 solid-fuel rocket motors with thrust of 12,500 kN (2,800,000 lbf) each, sea level liftoff, First stage: 3 RS-25 engines located on Orbiter with thrust of 5,250 kN (1,180,000 lbf) total, sea level liftof.

The official program name was Space Transportation System (STS), taken from a 1969 plan for a system of reusable spacecraft where it was the only item funded for development. The first of four orbital test flights occurred in 1981, leading to operational flights beginning in 1982. Five complete Space Shuttle orbiter vehicles were built and flown on a total of 135 missions from 1981 to 2011, launched from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Operational missions launched numerous satellites, interplanetary probes, and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), conducted science experiments in orbit, participated in the Shuttle-Mir program with Russia, and participated in construction and servicing of the International Space Station (ISS). The Space Shuttle fleet's total mission time was 1,322 days, 19 hours, 21 minutes and 23 seconds.

Space Shuttle components include the Orbiter Vehicle (OV) with three clustered Rocketdyne RS-25 main engines, a pair of recoverable solid rocket boosters (SRBs), and the expendable external tank (ET) containing liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The Space Shuttle was launched vertically, like a conventional rocket, with the two SRBs operating in parallel with the orbiter's three main engines, which were fueled from the ET. The SRBs were jettisoned before the vehicle reached orbit, and the ET was jettisoned just before orbit insertion, which used the orbiter's two Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) engines. At the conclusion of the mission, the orbiter fired its OMS to deorbit and reenter the atmosphere. The orbiter was protected during reentry by its thermal protection system tiles, and it glided as a spaceplane to a runway landing, usually to the Shuttle Landing Facility at KSC, Florida, or to Rogers Dry Lake in Edwards Air Force Base, California. If the landing occurred at Edwards, the orbiter was flown back to the KSC on the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, a specially modified Boeing 747.

The first orbiter, Enterprise, was built in 1976 and used in Approach and Landing Tests, but had no orbital capability. Four fully operational orbiters were initially built: Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, and Atlantis. Of these, two were lost in mission accidents: Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003, with a total of 14 astronauts killed. A fifth operational (and sixth in total) orbiter, Endeavour, was built in 1991 to replace Challenger. The Space Shuttle was retired from service upon the conclusion of Atlantis's final flight on July 21, 2011. The U.S. relied on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to transport astronauts to the ISS from the last Shuttle flight until the launch of the Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission in May 2020 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as part of the Commercial Crew Program