- Why did NASA need to test the Space Shuttle's unpowered glide-and-landing profile before ever flying it in orbit?
- How was Enterprise carried aloft and released for its first free flight on 12 August 1977?
- Why did Enterprise never fly to space despite completing five successful approach-and-landing tests?
Space Shuttle Program
NASA's reusable spacecraft program and its missions.
- Why was STS-1 unusual in carrying astronauts on a spacecraft's very first flight?
- What specific risks worried engineers about Columbia's heatshield tiles before launch?
- How did Columbia land after its two-day mission, and how fast was it going at touchdown?
- What promise did the reusable shuttle design make about the future cost of reaching orbit, and how did that hold up?
- What was Sally Ride's role during the STS-7 mission aboard Challenger in 1983?
- What roles did Sally Ride take on after her spaceflights, including on shuttle accident investigations?
- How did the Manned Maneuvering Unit's nitrogen thrusters let Bruce McCandless II move away from the shuttle without a tether?
- Why had every spacewalk before STS-41-B relied on a physical tether to the spacecraft?
- What warning did Morton Thiokol engineers give NASA the night before the Challenger launch?
- How did a failure in the O-ring seal lead to the destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger?
- How did Richard Feynman demonstrate the O-ring's brittleness to the Rogers Commission using a glass of ice water?
- What organisational lesson did the Rogers Commission draw about flying with known risks until they stop seeming extraordinary?
- How did Feynman use a glass of ice water to demonstrate the cause of the Challenger disaster?
- Why was Magellan the first interplanetary spacecraft to be carried into orbit by a Space Shuttle?
- What did astronauts on STS-61 actually install during Hubble's 1993 servicing mission?
- What struck Columbia's wing at launch, and why had it not been treated as a serious risk before?
- What happened during reentry on 1 February 2003 that caused the shuttle to break apart?
- What organizational failure did the Columbia Accident Investigation Board identify as a root cause?
- How did the Columbia disaster's failure mode compare to what destroyed Challenger in 1986?
- How many people and missions did the Space Shuttle program fly over its thirty-year run?
- What design compromises made the Space Shuttle 'not quite safe enough'?