Reduce the very high cost, air breathing engines (for landing) and a crew Orbiter to the top of the tank, in place of a piloted rocket plane. (SRBs) attached to either side of the expendable fuel tank and moved the The designers replaced the piloted booster with two solid rocket boosters The first orbiterīuilt was named Enterprise and was used for flight and landing tests.īut it never moved past the test phase and is now part of the Smithsonian'sĪir and Space display at Dulles International Airport.Įxternal tanks saves a whopping half a tonne! (Courtesy of NASA) The orbiter is the main component of the space shuttle. While the cheapest to operate this design was the costliest to develop. The booster then returned to a runway for landing. The booster, approximately the size of a Boeing 747, would fly to a high altitude, where the orbiter would detach and fly into orbit. The group decided that the best design consisted of two rocket-powered aircraft - a booster and an orbiter, one sitting on top of the other. In April 1969, a space shuttle task group was formed. In 1981 the space shuttle became the world's first re-usable spacecraft launched into space. The idea of the space shuttle was first conceived in the 1960's, and was seen as a natural progression from the successful Apollo Moon program. (including orbiter, external tank, and solid rocket boosters) being The entire Shuttle Orbiter Enterprise complement
The Space Shuttle Files: Anatomy of a Space Shuttle - ABC Science OnlineĪnatomy of a space shuttle The components
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