US Space Shuttle orbiters played vital roles in building the International Space Station But the Shuttles pioneering reusable spaceplane designs would prove costly in both resources and human lives
INTRODUCTION The dream of spaceflight has been with us since the 17th century Johannes Kepler decoded planetary motion and Isaac Newton formulated force motion and gravity Another great visionary was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky an early 20th-century schoolteacher who described practical methods for getting into space To achieve those dreams it took two World Wars hard-won engineering know-how and a dangerous rivalry between two great superpowers And it took guts the personal courage of pioneer astronauts who rode their towering rockets into the unknown US astronaut Alan Shepard takes a bow on the deck of rescue ship USS Lake Champlain May 5 1961 The first American and second person into space he should have launched seven months earlier But his Mercury capsule in the background was not ready 05
