Thursday, April 28, 2011

New Space shuttle program 2011 nears its final launch

New Space shuttle program 2011 nears its final launch : After 30 years, 135 launches and the completion of goals once only dreamed about, NASA's space shuttle program is coming to a close with no immediate replacement in sight.

The first shuttle mission, STS-1, took off on April 12, 1981, from Cape Canaveral in Florida. This program was developed several years after the Apollo program ended.

The Apollo program had successfully completed its goal of getting a man on the moon, but was an expensive system to use. NASA saw this as the right time to develop a new more versatile space vehicle.

The shuttle transportation system was designed with a few different goals in mind. It was built to perform a variety of different mission types, and, according to nasa.gov, is the most complex machine ever built.

"It's an amazing machine. The fact that it can take things the size of a school bus into space. The fact that it has a work platform - it has an overhead crane, if you will.

The fact that it can bring things down too, which is really important. It's just an amazing, amazing vehicle," Purdue alumnus Mark Craig, a NASA engineer, said.

One of the unusual aspects of the shuttle is that it is reusable, which makes it cost less to operate and allows for more frequent missions.

"The shuttle lands at the end of the runway every time, within a foot of where it needs to land," Craig said.

Because the entire shuttle lands intact, it can bring large payload back with it, something previous space craft were not capable of doing.

These capabilities contributed to the creation of the International Space Station and the Hubble Telescope.

"I think the shuttle era was great. It gave us the International Space Station and Hubble Telescope. Without it, it would have been extremely difficult for those projects to be possible," said Sarah St. Clair, a sophomore in the College of Engineering and the assistant director of Purdue Space Day, an annual program that brings children to Purdue to learn about science and technology through a variety of different activities.

This summer, the shuttle Atlantis will take off and land for the last time, ending the shuttle program. There are mixed opinions about what this means for the space program.

"It's been a vehicle that, once it's gone, we'll never have that capability again, at least not for a long period of time," Purdue alumnus Jerry Ross, a former astronaut, said.

Not all see the end of the shuttle era as a negative thing. Astronaut and Purdue alumna Janice Voss thinks there was a lot learned from the shuttle.

"We learned an enormous amount from flying the shuttle; it's time to take that knowledge and move on. I'm very excited that the shuttle is ending on a strong note," Voss said. "The program has accomplished amazing things."

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