When you take gravity away, you find things you didn’t expect.” Read more: 'Rose' galaxies captured by Hubble telescope “We’ve learned things about the human body that we didn’t expect… from human physiology to combustion… how a flame burns… and how materials behave. “One of the most basic things we have learnt is literally how to do work in space, how to reliably fly people, keep them healthy and know how to conduct experiments,” Michael Barratt, a Nasa astronaut who flew on Discovery as recently as this year, told Channel 4 News. The book of what the shuttle has brought us is very thick and covers a tremendous breadth – Astronaut Michael Barratt ![]() As such, the shuttle has become synonymous with its cargo.īut in addition to these milestones, 30 years of shuttle exploration has provided scientists with a wealth of insights in a range of fields, from biology and medicine to physics and materials science. The space shuttles launched (and continued to fix and upgrade) Nasa’s famous telescopes and observatories – Hubble, Chandra and Compton – and since 1998 have played a critical role in the construction of the $100bn ISS. If they had to turn back every time they lost somebody, just think of what we’d be doing now: we would be a pitiful species if we didn’t expand beyond our horizons.” “Think of what the early explorers had to encounter. But despite the loss that we felt personally, both my son and I feel that the loss was worth it,” Dr Clark said. “It cost my wife’s life and my son no longer had a mother, and for me it was a truly personal cost. So much so that Dr Jonathan Clark, a Nasa surgeon who lost his wife Laurel when she was killed in the Columbia disaster, told Channel 4 News that the shuttle programmes’ accomplishments justified their monumental costs, both financially, and personally. But all five shuttles achieved much in their 30-year history. Scarcely a minute after launching for what was intended to be its 10th mission in January, 1986, key structural components of Challenger disintegrated due to a faulty seal on one of its rocket boosters, and its seven astronauts died.Īnd in 2003, as Columbia attempted to return home at the end of its 28th flight, its heat shield was damaged re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, resulting in the deaths of its seven-strong crew.īoth disasters brought the programme to a temporary halt, with major questions being raised about the safety of such missions. It cost my wife’s life and my son no longer had a mother, both I feel that the loss was worth it – Dr Jonathan Clarkĭiscovery completed its final mission in March, Endeavour launched for the last time in April and Atlantis will be the programme’s swan song on Friday.īut in two separate tragedies, 17 years apart, Challenger and Columbia broke up, and their crews perished. Since Columbia’s maiden launch in April 1981, the five shuttles – Atlantis, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery and Endeavour – have completed 134 flights between them, and travelled a combined total of 537,114,016 miles (864,401,218km), spending 1,320 days in orbit. ![]() Over the past three decades, the agency’s shuttles have played a crucial role in constructing the International Space Station (ISS), launching the Hubble telescope and sending astronauts and millions of tons of hardware into space.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |