Abstract
In all, 133 of the 135 Shuttle launches returned successfully; the crews of the other two missions were lost along with their vehicles: Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. Returning an Orbiter to Earth was as difficult, dynamic, and dangerous as getting it into orbit in the first place.
Although we got to take the ride, we sure hope that everybody who has ever worked on, or touched, or looked at, or envied, or admired a Space Shuttle was able to take just a little part of the journey with us.
Post-landing comments by STS-135 CDR Chris Ferguson, Shuttle Landing Facility, KSC, Florida, July 21, 2011
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This is described in the companion volume Linking the Space Shuttle and Space Station: Early Docking Technologies from Concept to Implementation.
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To lessen the mass, unlike Progress and similar returning supply ships which are disposed of by a fiery re-entry. Ideally no trash or unwanted equipment would be placed in the crew compartment of the Orbiter, depending on the real-time situation.
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In November 1985 cosmonaut Vladimir Vasyutin became so ill aboard Salyut 7 that the residency he was commanding was curtailed. FE Viktor Savinykh took command of the Soyuz T-14 ferry for their re-entry and landing.
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Incredible as it may seem, prior to the loss of Challenger in 1986 it was intended that astronauts would serve aboard Space Station Freedom between Shuttle visits, without any means of escape in an emergency. Studies had been completed on effective rescue systems but no commitment had been made. Following a reduction of Shuttle flights to transport crews to Freedom and the budget to support them, together with the loss of Challenger, it was realized that had Freedom been in space with a crew on board they would have been stranded while the Shuttle fleet was grounded. In Challenger ’s case the STS-26 Return-To-Flight mission was launched thirty-two months after the accident. These concerns resulted in a Crew Rescue Vehicle proposal for the ISS, but this was later canceled in favor of using Russian Soyuz craft instead.
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On April 23, 2012 OV-103 Discovery was flown on top of SCA #905 from KSC to Washington DC for permanent display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, Chantilly, Virginia. On October 14, OV-105 Endeavour arrived on SCA 905 in Los Angeles, California for permanent display at the California Science Center there. Finally on November 2, OV-104 Atlantis was transferred to the KSC Visitor Complex.
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Shayler, D.J. (2017). Getting Back. In: Assembling and Supplying the ISS . Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40443-1_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40443-1_10
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