Space Shuttle Program

NASA's partially reusable crewed launch system. 135 flights, 1981–2011. Two catastrophic failures — Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003) — killed fourteen astronauts. Launched Hubble and assembled the ISS.

The Space Shuttle was a compromise. The original design called for a fully reusable system; budget constraints produced a partially reusable system that was ultimately more expensive to operate than a throwaway rocket would have been. The orbiters were extraordinary vehicles. The program's economics were broken from the start. STS-1 launched April 12, 1981 — the twentieth anniversary of Gagarin's flight — with John Young and Robert Crippen. It was the first time NASA had ever launched a crewed vehicle without an uncrewed flight test. Young called it 'the boldest test flight in history.' On January 28, 1986, Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch. An O-ring seal had failed in cold weather that NASA engineers had warned against. Seven crew members died, including school teacher Christa McAuliffe. The Rogers Commission found that the failure mode was known. Richard Feynman demonstrated the O-ring's temperature sensitivity at the hearing by dropping a piece of it into a glass of ice water. Columbia disintegrated on reentry February 1, 2003. Foam insulation had struck and damaged the leading edge of the left wing during launch. Seven crew members died. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board found a NASA culture that had learned to accept anomalies as normal until they killed someone. The program flew 135 missions and retired in 2011 with Atlantis.