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Instead they looked to reduce the year-to-year costs of development to a stable figure. That is, they wished to see the development budgets spread out over several more years. This is somewhat difficult to do--you can't build half a rocket. The result was another intense series of redesigns in which the re-usable booster was eventually abandoned as impossible to pay for. Instead a series of simpler rockets would launch the system, and then drop away for recovery. Another change was that the fuel for the shuttle itself was placed in an external tank instead of internal tanks from the previous designs. This allowed a larger payload bay in an otherwise much smaller craft, although it also meant throwing away the tankage after each launch.

With the major Apollo development effort winding down in the second half of the 1960s, NASA started looking to the future of the space program. They envisioned an ambitious program consisting of a large space station being launched on huge boosters, served by a reusable logistics "space shuttle", both providing services for a permanantly manned Lunar colony and eventual manned missions to Mars.

Space Shuttle Enterprise
Space Shuttle Enterprise The Shuttle Orbiter Enterprise (NASA Designation: OV-101) was the first Space Shuttle built for NASA. It was initially constructed without engines or a functional heat shield and was therefore not capable of space operations without a refit. It was intended to be the second space shuttle to fly after the Space Shuttle Columbia even though it was built first, however, it was found to be cheaper to refit a test article (STA-099) into the Space Shuttle Challenger. Originally planned to be called Constitution, the test vehicle was renamed following a write-in campaign after the starship featured on the television show Star Trek, which in turn was named for the various ships named USS Enterprise. Amusingly, in one of the subsequent Star Trek movies

Hubble Space Telescope
Hubble Space Telescope The Hubble Space Telescope (HST, or Hubble) is a telescope located at the outer edges of Earth's atmosphere, about 600 kilometerss above the ground, orbiting the Earth every 100 minutes. It was placed into orbit, in April 1990, as a joint project of NASA and the ESA. The telescope can achieve optical resolutions greater than 0.1 arcseconds. The HST is named after Edwin Hubble. It is scheduled for replacement, by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), in 2009. Every day, the Hubble Space Telescope archives 3 to 5 gigabytes of data and delivers between 10 and 15 gigabytes to astronomers. Working outside the atmosphere has advantages because the atmosphere obscures images and filters out electromagnetic radiation at certain wavelengths, mainly in the infrared. Hubble

Teacher in Space Project
Teacher in Space Project Christa McAuliffe (left) and Barbara Morgan pose in front of the Space Shuttle mission simulator (SMS) after their selection for TISP. The Teacher in Space Project (TISP) is a NASA program designed to educate students and spur excitement in math, science, and space exploration. Christa McAuliffe was selected to be the first teacher in space in 1984 with Barbara Morgan as her alternate. McAuliffe died during the launch of the 25th Space Shuttle mission, STS-51-L, which was to make her the first teacher in space. NASA halted the TISP until 1998 amid concerns surrounding the risk of sending civillians to space. Morgan was selected as the first Educator Astronaut in January, 1998. Morgan is assigned to the crew of STS-118 which may launch NASA's Space Shuttle program is an ongoing endeavor, started in the late 1960s, that has created the world's first partially reusable space launch system, and the first spacecraft capable of carrying large satellites both to and from low Earth orbit. Each shuttle is designed for a projected lifespan of 100 launches. The original purpose of the program was to ferry supplies to a space station. In reality, the Shuttle is the United States' sole manned launch vehicle and has totally dominated NASA's operations since the mid 1970s. With the construction of the International Space Station the Shuttle has finally begun to be used for its original purpose. In January 2004, it was announced that the Shuttle fleet would be replaced by 2010.

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With the budgets being pressed by inflation at home and the Vietnam war abroad, Congress and the Administration generally couldn't care less about anything as long-term as space exploration and were therefore looking to make further deep cuts to NASAs budget. But with a single long term project on the books, there wasn't much they could do in terms of cutting whole projects -- the shuttle was all that was left, cut that and there would be no US manned space program by 1980.

Space Shuttle Discovery
Space Shuttle Discovery Shuttle Orbiter Discovery (NASA Designation: OV-103) is a NASA Space Shuttle. First flown on August 30, 1984, Discovery is the third operational shuttle (excluding test shuttle 'Enterprise'). The orbiter is still operational today, and has performed both research and International Space Station (ISS) assembly missions. The craft takes its name from a ship used by explorer James Cook. Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide") 1 Flights 1..1 Related articles 1..2

With a baseline project now gelling, NASA started to work though the process of obtaining stable funding for the five years the project would take to develop. Here too they found themselves increasingly backed into a corner.