Abstract
Even before the last Apollo crew left the Moon on December 14, 1972, the American aerospace industry had already begun to assign their design offices to the next space program. Although it would travel to low Earth orbit only, and therefore might look less exciting than reaching Earth’s natural satellite, the new spaceship promised to be something radically different from its predecessors. In fact, it would be the chance to make a longstanding dream come true. The idea had been conceived several decades earlier, even before the Space Age began.
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Notes
- 1.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) is a trade association of most of the world’s airlines to support aviation with global standards for airline safety, security, efficiency, and sustainability.
- 2.
In all previous capsules, the astronauts were surrounded by control panels full of switches and dials.
- 3.
A solid rocket is simpler than a liquid-fueled one because it does not require tankage, a propellant feeding system, thermal insulation to maintain the propellants at cryogenic temperatures, engine turbomachinery, etc.
- 4.
The US Air Force had intended to launch a Gemini spacecraft as part of the Manned Orbital Laboratory (MOL) using a Titan-IIIM rocket which had twin solid boosters which were smaller than those developed for the Space Shuttle, but this project was canceled in 1969 before any missions were flown.
- 5.
For this reason, the four major subassemblies were also called solid rocket motor segments.
- 6.
A bending load is a tendency to change the radius of a curvature of the body.
- 7.
The largest crew of a single Shuttle mission had eight astronauts.
- 8.
Generally speaking, for all sections of the Orbiter’s wing these tubular struts acted as ribs to maintain the airfoil of the wing, whereas in a conventional aircraft the ribs are holed webs. The tubular strut configuration was chosen to save weight.
- 9.
The Space Shuttle program tallied 135 flights, but STS-51L in January 1986 did not make it to orbit because it suffered a catastrophic failure some 72 seconds after lifting off, destroying the Challenger and killing its seven crew members.
- 10.
In order of appearance they were called Columbia , Challenger , Discovery , Atlantis , and Endeavour .
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Sivolella, D. (2017). A Remarkable Flying Machine. In: The Space Shuttle Program. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54946-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54946-0_1
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