Tag Archives: space shuttle program

While many instances of NASA launch may be immediately memorable to the American citizen who has lived through the Space Race and into the modern age, one of the most prominent would have to be the Apollo missions designed for lunar landing and analysis. However, in terms of being a space shuttle launch, to insist that, say, the Apollo 13 mission was just that would be to commit an error. While we might think the terms interchangeable after almost 30 years of manned space shuttle launch events – after all, time may cause one to forget – not every rocket launched by NASA has been a space shuttle. In fact, the first manned space shuttle did not take off until the 1980′s, well after Neil Armstrong’s world-famous romp on the surface of the moon. The space shuttle program is merely a subcategory of the general NASA launch heading. Including non-operational flights, the space shuttle program has been in gear for even longer than 30 years. Using the Enterprise model of orbiter, tests were conducted in the late 70′s to get a feel for how the space shuttle performed when attached to a space shuttle carrier and later in missions of … Continue reading