Space Shuttles

Space Shuttles were amazing reusable spaceships that worked like flying trucks, carrying astronauts and cargo back and forth to space for 30 years! Unlike earlier spacecraft that could only be used once, the Space Shuttles were designed to launch like rockets, orbit Earth like spacecraft, and then glide back down to land on a runway like airplanes. This made them perfect for building large structures in space, like the International Space Station, and for servicing satellites and telescopes that needed repairs.

NASA built five Space Shuttles that flew a total of 135 missions between 1981 and 2011. The shuttles had names like Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour. Each shuttle was about the size of a large airplane and could carry up to eight astronauts plus 50,000 pounds of cargo in its payload bay. The shuttles deployed the Hubble Space Telescope, built most of the International Space Station piece by piece, and conducted thousands of scientific experiments in the weightless environment of space.

The Space Shuttle program accomplished incredible things that helped make the ISS possible and advanced our understanding of living and working in space. Shuttle astronauts performed spacewalks to repair satellites, conducted experiments that led to new medicines, and even caught broken satellites with a robotic arm to bring them back to Earth for repairs! The shuttles also carried the first teacher in space, Christa McAuliffe, and helped train astronauts from many different countries. Today, you can visit retired Space Shuttles in museums across the United States to see these incredible machines up close.