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The answer within those groups dedicated to the shuttle was to show that as long as you have enough launches, the development cost of the system would be overwhelmed by the cost of the rockets you would otherwise throw away. One factor that needs to be considered is inflation though, and in the 1970s this was high enough that the payback from the development had to happen very quickly or that money would never pay for itself. In other words you needed a very high launch rate to make the system work.

A number of designs were proposed, but many of them were complex and varied widely in their systems. An attempt to re-simplify was made in the form of the "DC-3" by one of the few people left in NASA with the political clout to pull it off, Maxime Faget, who had designed the Mercury capsule, among others. The DC-3 was a small craft with a 20,000lbs (or less) payload, a four-man crew, and limited manuverability. At a minimum, the DC-3 provided a baseline "workable" (but not terribly advanced) system by which other systems could be compared for price/performance tradeoffs.

Spacelab
Spacelab is a microgravity laboratory flown into space on the Space Shuttle. It consists of a large cylindrical main laboratory that is flown in the rear of the Space Shuttle cargo bay, connected to the crew compartment by a long tube. In April 1973 NASA and the ESA (then known as the ESRO) agreed to build a modular science package. Construction of Spacelab started in 1974 by the ERNO (represented by VFW-Fokker GmbH, later bought by MBB, and since 2003 part of EADS Space Transportation). The first lab, LM1, was given to NASA free of charge in exchange for flight opportunities for european astronauts. A second lab, LM2, was bought by NASA for its own needs. The system also included a system of external pallets for experiments in vacuum, built by

John F. Kennedy Space Center
John F. Kennedy Space Center The John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC) is the NASA space vehicle launch facility (spaceport) at Cape Canaveral on Merritt Island in Florida, United States. The site is midway between Miami and Jacksonville, Florida. It is 55 km long and around 10 km wide, covering 56,700 hectares. Around 17,000 people work at the site. There is a visitor center and public tours and KSC is a major tourist destination for visitors to Florida. Because much of KSC is off limits to development, the site also serves as an important wildlife sanctuary. Operations are currently controlled from Launch Complex 39, the location of the Vehicle Assembly Building. 6 km to the east of the assembly building are the two launch pads. 8 km south

Shuttle development

The shuttle program was launched on January 5, 1972, when President Richard M. Nixon announced that NASA would proceed with the development of a reusable low cost space shuttle system.

The project was already to take longer than originally anticipated due to the year-to-year funding caps. Nevertheless work started quickly and several test articles were available within a few years.

Most notable among these was the first complete Orbiter, originally to be known as Constitution. However a massive write-in campaign on the part of fans of the TV show Star Trek convinced the White House to change the name to Enterprise. Enterprise was rolled out on September 17, 1976 and later conducted a very successful series of landing tests which was the first real validation of the gliding abilities of the design.

The first fully functional shuttle orbiter was the Columbia, which was delivered to Kennedy Space Center on March 25, 1979 and was first launched on April 12, 1981 with a crew of two. Challenger was delivered to KSC in July 1982, Discovery was delivered in November 1983, and Atlantis was delivered in April 1985. Challenger was destroyed in an explosion during launch in January 1986 with the loss of all seven astronauts on board, and Endeavour was built as a replacement (using spare parts originally built for the other orbiters) and delivered in May 1991. Columbia was lost, with all seven crew, in a re-entry mishap on February 1, 2003.

Discover NASA

James Webb Space Telescope
James Webb Space Telescope The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a planned orbital infrared observatory, intended (in part) to replace the aging Hubble Space Telescope. Formerly called the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST), it was renamed after NASA's second administrator, James E. Webb, in 2002. The telescope's launch is planned for sometime between 2009 and 2011. Its orbit (at the L2 lagrangian point point, around 1.5 million km from Earth) is considerably beyond the maximum altitude achievable using the Space Shuttle, so JWST will probably be placed in orbit using a European Ariane 5 launcher. This height also means that, unlike Hubble, it will not be possible to repair or upgrade the observatory during its 5-10 year design life. Although JWST has a planned weight half that

Space Camp
Space Camp Space Camp is a 1986 movie which was based on a book written by Patrick Bailey and Larry B Williams and a screenplay by WW Wicket and Casey T Mitchell. In the movie, four teenagers and a twelve year old boy go to a NASA space camp, to spend three weeks of their summer training as astronauts and learning about the space program in general. There, they will meet a female instructor who is frustrated at the fact she still hasn't gotten a chance to be up there, despite this being her life's dream. But things start to unravel when the 12 year old boy, Max, saves the life of a robot named Jinx, and, to return the favor, Jinx decides to send Max

Spirit Approaches "Methuselah" Outcrop on Mars This false-color rendering shows the scene acquired by NASA's Spirit rover on martian day, or sol, 454 (April 13, 2005), using its panoramic camera filters at 750-, 530-, and 430-nanometer wavelengths. In the background is "Clark Hill," nicknamed for one of the Columbia astronauts. Spirit is looking down at the outcrop on the left, nicknamed "Methuselah," from a slightly higher position, and will spend some time studying the outcrop before searching for a different route. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell

NASA had conducted a series of paper-projects throughout the 1960s on the topic of reusable spacecraft to replace their expedient "one-off" systems like Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.

Space Shuttle Enterprise
Space Shuttle Enterprise The Shuttle Orbiter Enterprise (NASA Designation: OV-101) was the first Space Shuttle built for NASA. It was initially constructed without engines or a functional heat shield and was therefore not capable of space operations without a refit. It was intended to be the second space shuttle to fly after the Space Shuttle Columbia even though it was built first, however, it was found to be cheaper to refit a test article (STA-099) into the Space Shuttle Challenger. Originally planned to be called Constitution, the test vehicle was renamed following a write-in campaign after the starship featured on the television show Star Trek, which in turn was named for the various ships named USS Enterprise. Amusingly, in one of the subsequent Star Trek movies