The Space Shuttle Era: A Review

(RTTNews) - The 30-year-old space shuttle program came to a final stop this month, following Atlantis' last touchdown on Earth. As curtains are drawn on this spaceflight program, it seems timely to take a look back at the manned program, its triumphs and its tragedies:

The plans for NASA's space shuttle program, officially called the Space Transportation System, or STS for short, were formally endorsed by President Richard Nixon in January 1972. It took nearly a decade before the first shuttle would blast off into space, beginning three decades of flights that included 133 successful missions. There were also two deadly accidents, leading to 14 deaths.
Apart from functioning as a space laboratory, the STS was engaged in launching numerous satellites and interplanetary probes, conducting space science experiments, and servicing and construction of space stations.
According to the NASA, over 2,000 experiments in the fields of Earth, astronomy, biological and materials sciences were conducted by the space shuttle program, whose cost has been pegged at $209 billion over the course of its history.
The space shuttle, a reusable orbital vehicle, consisted of three main components - a winged orbiter that carried crew and cargo; a large external fuel tank that held fuel for the main engines; and two solid rocket boosters which provided most of the shuttle's lift during the first two minutes of flight.

NASA's fleet of space shuttle orbiters in the STS program included Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour - all named after famous sailing ships.
Columbia, launched on April 12, 1981, was the first orbiter to fly into space with a crew aboard. It made 28 flights and flew 125 million miles. The space shuttle would complete 27 successful missions, but will be remembered for its fateful 28th trip into space. On February 1, 2003, Columbia broke up on re-entering Earth's atmosphere, killing all 7 crew members.
The second orbiter, Challenger, also will go down in history for its tragic end. The ship made its maiden voyage to space on April 4, 1983 and completed nine missions. On January 28, 1986, only 73 seconds after liftoff, the ship exploded, killing all 7 crew members. The Challenger disaster became one of the defining moments of the era and certainly provided one of the darkest chapters in NASA's history, as an investigation into the accident led many experts to believe that it could have been avoided by taking simple safety precautions.
Discovery was NASA's third orbiter to head to space. It undertook its first mission on August 30, 1984. This space shuttle, which made its last-ever landing on March 9, 2011, successfully completed 39 missions and logged 148 million miles in space - the most of any of the shuttles.