Using Columbia to begin bringing the moon to America (1996)

Assembly of NASA's first spaceworthy Space Shuttle orbiter, OV-102 Columbia (middle image above), commenced in November 1975. The 111-ton reusable winged spaceship first reached low Earth orbit on STS-1 (April 12-14, 1981), the Space Shuttle Program's first mission. Named for the first American sailing ship to circle the globe and the Apollo 11 Command and Service Module, Columbia completed 27 successful flights.

NASA's oldest Orbiter was also its heaviest. Unlike its sisters Atlantis, Discovery, and Endeavor, Columbia could not reach the 51.6° orbital inclination of the Russian Mir station and the International Space Station (ISS) with a useful payload in its 15-by-60-foot payload bay. This performance constraint meant that, in the Shuttle-Mir/ISS era, NASA increasingly relegated to Columbia its few remaining low-inclination, non-space station missions, such as Hubble Space Telescope servicing. Extended-Duration Orbiter modifications also permitted Columbia to remain in orbit for more than two weeks to serve as a science research platform, but such missions would become increasingly rare after research commenced on board ISS.

In an April 1996 paper presented at the 33rd Space Congress in Cocoa Beach, Florida, Carey McCleskey of the Vehicle Engineering Directorate at NASA's Kennedy Space Center proposed using the oldest Orbiter's ...