Find out more on the Voyager website. It launched satellites and served as an orbiting science laboratory. Its crews repaired and improved other spacecraft, such as the Hubble Space Telescope. The shuttle also flew missions for the military. On its later missions, the space shuttle was mostly used to work on the International Space Station. The space shuttle program was retired in July after missions, including the catastrophic failures of Challenger in and Columbia in that killed a total of 14 astronauts.
As a result, astronauts are weightless and can sleep in any orientation. With next week's historic SpaceX launch, this era of reliance may be coming to an end.
But why did NASA retire the space shuttle even though the space agency had no alternative launch vehicle? In February, , the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it reentered the atmosphere, killing all seven crew members on board, the second fatal shuttle accident after the catastrophic launch failure of Challenger in Following the Columbia disaster, shuttle flights were suspended for more than two years.
And in , President George Bush revealed his administration's Vision for Space Exploration, announcing that the program would be terminated after the end of the construction of the International Space Station. The Columbia accident finally wiped away the facade that the shuttle program was ever going to be what it was originally cracked up to be when President Nixon approved it in And most of the reasons for that were because of compromises made back in the s when the shuttle was being designed due to cutbacks in the budget.
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