When a spacecraft comes home without people on board, it is not a cinematic failure but a carefully choreographed engineering choice. From military spaceplanes to commercial capsules, uncrewed returns ...

When the Space Shuttle lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in 1981, it was the first reusable spacecraft. The massive orange external fuel tank was the major component designed to be destroyed on ...

SHANNON AIRPORT WAS proposed as a potential “emergency landing” site for the NASA Space Shuttle after a change in the launch plans for the now-defunct spacecraft some thirty years ago. According to ...

The Boeing 747 has taken many forms in its decades of service. First introduced in 1970, the Queen of the Skies has flown for airlines all over the world. It has also had a handful of side gigs over ...

The space shuttle system has been modified many times since the first launch of space shuttle Columbia in 1981. During the 1980s, major upgrade programs were established to respond to problems and ...

Atlantis astronaut John Grunsfeld rides the shuttle arm with the Earth and Hubble in view in this image from a video still from an exterior camera during a May 18, 2009 spacewalk - the last ever at ...

Preface; Acknowledgements; Foreword; Dedication; Prologue; 1: An Alternative Plan; Shuffling the Shuttle to Assemble the Station; NASA's Tier-2: An Alternative Assembly Plan; The Interim Control ...