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Shuttle description

The Space Shuttle consists of four main components; the reuseable orbiter itself, a large expendable external fuel tank, and a pair of reusable solid-fuel booster rockets. The fuel tank and booster rockets are jettisoned during ascent. The longest the shuttle has stayed in orbit in a single mission is 17.5 days, on mission STS-80 in November 1996.

The Shuttle has a large payload bay taking up much of its length. The payload bay doors have heat radiators mounted on their inner surfaces, and so are kept open while the Shuttle is in orbit for thermal control. Thermal control is also maintained by adjusting the orientation of the Shuttle relative to Earth and Sun. Inside the payload bay is the Remote Manipulator System, also known as the Canadarm, a robot arm used to retrieve and deploy payloads. Until the loss of Columbia, the Canadarm has only been included on missions where it will be used. Since the arm is a crucial part of the Thermal Protection Inspection procedures now required for shuttle flights, it will likely be included on all future flights.

X-Prize
two weeks. This must be essentially the same vehicle: propellant can be replaced, but most of the rest of the vehicle must be reused. Even NASA's space shuttle falls short of this performance requirement, since it takes much more than two weeks to ready a given shuttle between flights. This prize foundation was created to encourage the development of private space travel, which is why government-funded projects are not allowed. The X Prize is designed to help create a space industry, and is modeled after many prizes from the early 20th century that helped prod the development of air flight—notably the $25,000 Orteig Prize that spurred Charles Lindbergh to make his solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. The X-Prize Foundation (based in St. Louis, Missouri) maintains a list of organizations registered

Spirit Approaches "Methuselah" Outcrop on Mars This false-color rendering shows the scene acquired by NASA's Spirit rover on martian day, or sol, 454 (April 13, 2005), using its panoramic camera filters at 750-, 530-, and 430-nanometer wavelengths. In the background is "Clark Hill," nicknamed for one of the Columbia astronauts. Spirit is looking down at the outcrop on the left, nicknamed "Methuselah," from a slightly higher position, and will spend some time studying the outcrop before searching for a different route. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell

NASA had conducted a series of paper-projects throughout the 1960s on the topic of reusable spacecraft to replace their expedient "one-off" systems like Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.

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HAL/S
computer language, best known for its use in the Space Shuttle. It was written by Intermetrics in the 1970s for NASA. HAL/S is written in a dialect of PL/I known as XPL The three key factors in writing the language were reliability, efficiency, and machine-independence. The language is designed to allow tasks such as performing aerospace related vector/matrix arithmetic to be accomplished in a way that is easily understandable to people who have studied the subject. HAL/S is written without functions (such as GOTO in BASIC) that are known to be the cause of many errors. There are no abreviations for keywords, and keywords are all reserved so that they cannot also be used as variables. Considerations such as this are designed to reduce the chances of errors occurring, and also