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Space Craft
ffffffThe Space Shuttle Atlantis
The Space shuule is a re-usable manned launch vehicle. The first-generation US shuttle was launched in April 1981 and managed by NASA's Johnson and Marshall Space Centres. The first Soviet shuttle, Buran, was launched in November 1988 for a single test flight without crew, using the Energiya booster, while the European Space Agency shuttle Hermes programme was cancelled after several years' development. The US shuttle carries up to seven crew, and is capable of launching a 24 400-kg /53 700-lb payload into low Earth orbit; and the missions are up to 14 days' in duration. It comprises a delta-winged lifting body orbiter with main engines, a jettisonable external fuel tank, and two auxiliary solid rocket boosters. The fleet comprises four vehicles: Columbia, Discovery Atlantis and Endeavour . It has been successfully used to launch numerous science and applications satellites and on-board experiments, to carry the Spacelab module, and to retrieve spacecraft from orbit. The Challenger explosion on the 25th flight (28 Jan 1986) 73-sec after launch caused the loss of the crew. The first reflight took place in September 1988, and a replacement orbiter, Endeavour , became operational in May 1992. A spacecraft orbit about the Earth is typically used for manned missions and for Earth remote-sensing missions. The minimum altitude above the surface is 200 km/125 miles to minimise drag effects of the Earth's atmosphere. The inclination of orbit is chosen to allow the ground track of the spacecraft to pass over regions of interest e.g polar inclination orbits are needed for complete global coverage. Depending on altitude, the orbit may eventually decay, causing the spacecraft to re-enter Earth's atmosphere and burn up; because of the occasional destruction of spacecraft in LEO there is an increasing accumulation of tiny debris partic les there, a new hazard to spacecraft. The very first man to land on the moon, Neil Armstrong, went there in Apollo 11. Today it looks a little per-historic but at the time it was one of the most advanced pieces of technology around!It fell through the Earths atmosphere so quickly that the bottom got badly burnt!!!
Here is a picture of what it takes to get a rocket up into space, it and others are on display at the science museum.
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