Plans were well underway to launch the Space Shuttle at Vandenberg in the early 1980s.. The shuttle was what a rocket could never be: A flying aircraft with a human pilot. The insulting phrase for ...

All 135 Space Shuttle Launches happened from Florida. There are two launch pads - 39a and 39b. First the space shuttle is taken to the Orbital Processing Facility (OPF) where maintenance takes place.

When the space shuttle program was initially developed, NASA expected to fly dozens of missions per year, not just from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but also from a launch site on the West Coast.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. – On a cold Jan. 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger lifted off from a Kennedy Space Center launch pad. Seventy-three seconds into the launch, the shuttle broke ...

Each shuttle launch cost about $1.5 billion on average, according to a 2018 paper from a researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center. That’s hundreds of millions of dollars more than what the ...

After test glide and landings upon release from aircraft in 1977, the Space Shuttle began orbital flights in April 1981. The shuttle would launch 135 times from Florida — but only 133 would land ...