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Space Shuttle Columbia
Space Shuttle Columbia Shuttle Orbiter Columbia (NASA Designation: OV-102) was the first space shuttle in NASA's orbital fleet, first flying mission STS-1 from April 12 to April 14, 1981. It was lost with all crew when it disintegrated during re-entry on its 28th mission, STS-107, which lasted from January 16 to February 1, 2003. Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide") 1 History 2 Final Mission 3 Cultural Reaction 4 Missions 5 Related articles 6

Space Shuttle program
Space Shuttle program Space Shuttle Columbia, 1981 (NASA) NASA's Space Shuttle program is an ongoing endeavor, started in the late 1960s, that has created the world's first partially reusable space launch system, and the first spacecraft capable of carrying large satellites both to and from low Earth orbit. Each shuttle is designed for a projected lifespan of 100 launches. The original purpose of the program was to ferry supplies to a space station. In reality, the Shuttle is the United States' sole manned launch vehicle and has totally dominated NASA's operations since the mid 1970s. With the construction of the International Space Station the Shuttle has finally begun to be used for its original purpose. In January 2004, it was announced that the Shuttle fleet would

With the major Apollo development effort winding down in the second half of the 1960s, NASA started looking to the future of the space program. They envisioned an ambitious program consisting of a large space station being launched on huge boosters, served by a reusable logistics "space shuttle", both providing services for a permanantly manned Lunar colony and eventual manned missions to Mars.

Instead they looked to reduce the year-to-year costs of development to a stable figure. That is, they wished to see the development budgets spread out over several more years. This is somewhat difficult to do--you can't build half a rocket. The result was another intense series of redesigns in which the re-usable booster was eventually abandoned as impossible to pay for. Instead a series of simpler rockets would launch the system, and then drop away for recovery. Another change was that the fuel for the shuttle itself was placed in an external tank instead of internal tanks from the previous designs. This allowed a larger payload bay in an otherwise much smaller craft, although it also meant throwing away the tankage after each launch.

Hubble Space Telescope
Hubble Space Telescope The Hubble Space Telescope (HST, or Hubble) is a telescope located at the outer edges of Earth's atmosphere, about 600 kilometerss above the ground, orbiting the Earth every 100 minutes. It was placed into orbit, in April 1990, as a joint project of NASA and the ESA. The telescope can achieve optical resolutions greater than 0.1 arcseconds. The HST is named after Edwin Hubble. It is scheduled for replacement, by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), in 2009. Every day, the Hubble Space Telescope archives 3 to 5 gigabytes of data and delivers between 10 and 15 gigabytes to astronomers. Working outside the atmosphere has advantages because the atmosphere obscures images and filters out electromagnetic radiation at certain wavelengths, mainly in the infrared. Hubble

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