NASA’s Space Shuttle was a wild engineering experiment. It launched straight up like a rocket strapped to two huge solid boosters and a giant orange fuel tank, then orbited Earth for days or weeks, and finally glided back through the atmosphere to land on a runway like a regular airplane. The first flight launched in 1981 and the last in 2011.
Five orbiters flew during the program: Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour. Together they made 135 missions, launched the Hubble Space Telescope, helped build the International Space Station, and carried 355 different astronauts into space. Two - Challenger and Columbia - were lost in tragic accidents, killing 14 crew members in total.
Coming home was the hardest part. Reentering Earth’s atmosphere heated the shuttle’s belly to over 3,000°F. To survive, the orbiter was covered in about 24,000 ceramic tiles, each individually cut and glued in place to handle the heat. After landing, the shuttle was checked piece by piece and prepped for the next mission.
