ShuttleGood-bye
APRIL 1981: Shuttle
Columbia becomes the
;rst to ;y into orbit.
MAY 1989: Atlantis launches the ;rst
space probe from a shuttle: Magellan,
a mission to Venus.
Looking back at
the space plane’s
scientific legacy
By Alexandra Witze
Three decades and 135 flights after its first launch, the space shut- tle is ending its reign. After the final orbiter, Atlantis, touches
down — on a trip scheduled to begin no
earlier than July 8 — NASA will officially
close the books on the shuttle program.
For the near term, the agency will buy
seats aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft
to get U.S. astronauts to the Interna-
tional Space Station. For the long term,
private businesses are trying to develop
ways to fly crews into low-Earth orbit,
as NASA focuses on designing a new
heavy-lift rocket to take astronauts
deeper into space.
APRIL 1990: Discovery launches the
Hubble Space Telescope. In December
1993, astronauts ;x its ;awed primary
mirror.
APRIL 1998: For Spacelab’s
;nal ;ight, Columbia devotes an
entire mission, dubbed Neurolab,
to neuroscience.
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1. The orbiter, roughly 37 meters long
and weighing as much as 80 metric
tons, houses the crew and the payload
bay, where cargo is packed. NASA has
built six orbiters, ;ve of which have ;own
in space. Orbital altitudes typically reach
300 to 500 kilometers and speeds
are roughly 28,000 kilometers per hour. Shuttle’s parts
Neuroscience
Neurolab tackled brain devel-
opment, plasticity, motor
balance and other neural sys-
tems. Researchers learned,
for instance, that cells in the
inner ears of rats made more
connections in microgravity
than on Earth, and that parts
of the rat brain receiving
balance signals changed
during a 16-day space;ight.
Findings from such basic
studies may offer insight into
brain-related problems such
as Alzheimer’s disease and
motion sickness.
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TOP: NASA; NASA; JPL/NASA, NIMA; JACK PFALLER, NASA; ICONS: E. FELICIANO
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2. The solid rocket boosters provide the
shuttle, weighing 2,000 metric tons at
launch, with lift for the ;rst two minutes
of ;ight. Before the shuttle reaches an
altitude of 50 kilometers, the spent
boosters are jettisoned; later they are
recovered from the ocean for reuse.
3. The external tank contains the
fuel for the main engines, about 720
metric tons of liquid oxygen and liquid
hydrogen. It is released once the main
engines are shut off and then breaks
apart in the Earth’s atmosphere.
