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Shuttle's Lessons Will Endure For Decades
Jul 1, 2011
Shuttle's Lessons Will Endure For Decades | AVIATION WEEK
[TD="class: storyAuthor"]By Frank Morring, Jr.
Washington[/TD]
[TD="class: storyBody"]
Even after the three surviving spaceshuttle orbiters have gathered a few decades of dust in their respective museums, mid-century spacefarers from around the Earth will be using tools and techniques for operating in space that were incubated on the historic U.S. spaceplanes.
The 30-year shuttle era—which draws to a close with the upcoming flight of Atlantis (see p. 59)—saw indelible advances in human spacefaring skills, most of them enabled by the shuttle. On April 12, 1981, two Soviet cosmonauts were in orbit as the shuttle Columbia lifted off for the first time. They had traveled to the 90-cubic-meter Salyut-6 space station in a Soyuz capsule that was a relatively modest evolution of the Vostok 3KA capsule Yuri Gagarin flew on the first human spaceflight 20 years earlier, to the day.[/TD]
Jul 1, 2011
Shuttle's Lessons Will Endure For Decades | AVIATION WEEK
[TD="class: storyAuthor"]By Frank Morring, Jr.
Washington[/TD]
[TD="class: storyBody"]
Even after the three surviving spaceshuttle orbiters have gathered a few decades of dust in their respective museums, mid-century spacefarers from around the Earth will be using tools and techniques for operating in space that were incubated on the historic U.S. spaceplanes.
The 30-year shuttle era—which draws to a close with the upcoming flight of Atlantis (see p. 59)—saw indelible advances in human spacefaring skills, most of them enabled by the shuttle. On April 12, 1981, two Soviet cosmonauts were in orbit as the shuttle Columbia lifted off for the first time. They had traveled to the 90-cubic-meter Salyut-6 space station in a Soyuz capsule that was a relatively modest evolution of the Vostok 3KA capsule Yuri Gagarin flew on the first human spaceflight 20 years earlier, to the day.[/TD]
