The main engines are part of the orbiter. What people usually call the “shuttle” is actually the orbiter-the part of the shuttle that held the crew and the cargo, officially called the payloads. The space shuttle was actually made up of several separate components. Space shuttles docked with Russia’s Mir space station nine times, and with the International Space Station more than 35 times. Counted together, the space shuttles have carried 355 people, flown over 500 million miles, and spent over 1,300 days in orbit. Over the thirty-year course of the space shuttle program, the shuttles and their crews assembled parts of the International Space Station, deployed and serviced the Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory, repaired and re-launched satellites, sent probes to Venus and Jupiter, and more.įive different orbiters flew into space as part of the program- Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour-for a total of 135 missions.
When the space shuttle, officially called the Space Transportation System (STS), rocketed off the launch pad for the first time in 1981, it became the world’s first reusable spacecraft to carry humans into orbit. Brief History of the Space Shuttle Program
component to the International Space Station. Anderson Blackbird Exhibit and GardenĮndeavour successfully completed 25 missions into space, including the first service mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as the first mission to add a U.S.
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