Tag: Apollo Atlantis Endeavour Discovery Challenger Columbia Spaceflight Spacecraft

In April of 1972, John Young and Charlie Duke landed Apollo 16, the next to last Apollo lunar mission, in the Descartes highlands. It was during one of the moonwalks that the word came from Mission Control in Houston – Congress had approved the NASA budget for fiscal year 1973...

It did not take long to figure out that the concept of ferrying the shuttle like an airplane between ground destinations was not going to fly.  The numbers just were not adding up, but the risk factors were rising.  The idea was to install six airbreathing jet engines beneath...

If the shuttle could not fly itself across the country then how do you get a spacecraft that weighs as much as a Boeing 757 from California to Florida? One idea proposed by Lockheed was to “tow” the Orbiter behind a C-5. This method would be used to ferry the vehicle...

Thirty three times the Space Shuttle Atlantis journeyed into space before finally coming to rest and now on permanent display at the Kennedy Space Center’s Visitor Complex.  I have been down to KSC many times over the years and I have seen Atlantis launch, land, and I walked under...

It was estimated that between 750,000 and 1,000,000 people were at the Space Coast to catch a fading glimpse of American history.  They crowded parks and straddled roadsides jamming into any available space that offered a line of sight to the last launch of the Space Shuttle Program. Several...