Touching the Sky
By the time it reached an altitude of 235 miles, the orbiter would be travelling at a speed of 17,500 mph, covering the length of 75 football pitches every second!
A tribute to the space shuttle On the morning of 8 July 2011, more than a million people gathered at Cape Canaveral, Florida to see the final launch of the space shuttle program. With the help of two giant solid rocket boosters, each providing several million pounds of thrust, the orbiter Atlantis lifted slowly off the launchpad for the last time. Used to carry large payloads into orbit, the shuttle was NASA’s workhorse for 30 years. Both the orbiter and rocket boosters were designed to be used repeatedly, making the shuttle the world’s first reusable spacecraft. But in the face of rising costs, and after 135 missions and the Challenger and Columbia disasters, NASA has finally retired the ageing space shuttle. Join us as we explore the machine that helped to construct the International Space Station (ISS), put the Hubble Telescope into orbit and inspired a generation to dream of space.
A 15-metre mechanical arm was used to deploy and retrieve satellites and other equipment.
The shuttle’s external fuel tank separated from the orbiter nine minutes into the flight, and would burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
The orbiter was made up of more than 2.5 million components, including over 200 miles of wire.
The SRBs were jettisoned two minutes into the flight, at an altitude of 44 km. Their momentum carried them up to 65 km before they fell back to Earth.
There were two smaller engines for manoeuvring and making orbital adjustments. Each shuttle launch cost NASA $450 million. The total cost of the program was about $200 billion.
When in orbit around the Earth, the crew experienced a sunrise or sunset every 45 minutes.
Columbia makes its first orbital flight
Challenger explodes shortly after launch
Challenger sees first spacewalk by a space shuttle crew
1981
1983
The onboard flight computer ran on only 1 MB of RAMabout a hundredth of that of a Nintendo Wii. There were about 25,000 heat-resistant tiles on the orbiter, which had to withstand a temperature range of almost 1800 °C.
Hubble Telescope is launched by Discovery
Atlantis launches Magellan probe to Venus
1986
The orbiter’s three main englines ran on liquid hydrogen and oxygen, generating a total of 37 million horsepower.
1989 1990
Atlantis sees first shuttle docking to Russia’s MIR space station
1995
Endeavour launches ISS module during space shuttle’s first ISS mission
1998
Columbia disintegrates upon re-entry
2003
Europe’s Columbus laboratory carried to ISS by Atlantis
2008
Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis make their final flights
2011
Fully-fuelled, the shuttle weighed 2000 tonnes. Two-thirds of the thrust needed for lift-off was provided by the solid rocket boosters (SRBs). The orbiter’s main engines provided the remainder.
Text and art by Samuel Pilgrim.
The five orbiters travelled a combined distance of 513 million miles. That’s 1.3 times the distance from the Earth to Jupiter.