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– NASA Day of Remembrance – Each January NASA pauses to honor members of the NASA family who lost their lives while furthering the cause of exploration and discovery, including the crews of Apollo 1 and space shuttles Challenger and Columbia. In 2023, the Day of Remembrance will be observed on Jan. 26, and will also mark the upcoming 20th anniversary of the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia on Feb. 1, 2003.– Day of Remembrance Video –NASA Remembers Fallen Heroes– Remembering Columbia – The seven-member crew of the STS-107 mission was just 16 minutes from landing on the morning...

Though it was actually the first operational space shuttle to be retired from NASA service, the Orbiter Vehicle-103 (OV-103) Space Shuttle Discovery certainly earned that retirement after more than 27 years in service. As the third operational orbiter – preceded only by Columbia and Challenger – Discovery actually launched and landed successfully 39 times, more spaceflights than any other craft to date.

Rather than dismissing billionaires’ space adventures, we should celebrate their risk-taking endeavors and be inspired to take risks in our lives.Billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos both rocked to the edge of space and safely landed back on Earth this month. Another billionaire, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla, plans to make a similar trip.Many here on Earth dismissed these billionaire entrepreneurs’ space travel and competition as a waste of time, money, and other valuable resources, which could be better spent solving earthly problems such as hunger and poverty. Critics shrug off such space travel as billionaires one-upping each...

On Jan. 27, 1986, Allan McDonald stood on the cusp of history. McDonald directed the booster rocket project at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol. He was responsible for the two massive rockets, filled with explosive fuel, that lifted space shuttles skyward. He was at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the launch of the Challenger "to approve or disapprove a launch if something came up," he told me in 2016, 30 years after Challenger exploded. His job was to sign and submit an official form. Sign the form, he believed, and he'd risk the lives of the seven astronauts set...

A Engineer for the maker of the shuttle’s booster rockets, he opposed letting it take off, worried that cold weather might affect them. He was right.Allan J. McDonald, an engineer who on a chilly January morning in 1986 tried to stop the launch of the Challenger space shuttle, citing the possible effect of the cold on its booster rockets, and who, after it broke apart on liftoff, blew the whistle when government officials tried to cover up his dissent, died on Saturday in Ogden, Utah. He was 83. The cause was complications of a recent fall, his daughter Meghan McDonald...

First commercial, manned space flight in history. First American manned space flight since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011.

Jan 28, 1985: I was one of the accident investigators. NASA knew there were serious problems but launched anyway. @NASA wanted publicity & the press was leaving after waiting a couple days. Well, they got their publicity. #Challenger #Challengeraccident

Michelle Williams is set to star as Christa McAuliffe in The Challenger, a feature film about the 1986 space shuttle tragedy being produced by John and Art Linson and Argent Pictures’ Ben Renzo. Land of Mine director Martin Zandvliet will direct the biopic of sorts that is penned by Jayson Rothwell. A May 2019 production start is being eyed. The Challenger will follow the true story of McAuliffe, a New Hampshire high school teacher who was selected to join NASA’s Teacher in Space Project. She eventually became part of the astronaut crew on the Space Shuttle Challenger, which launched from...

Test shuttles found inside derelict Soviet warehouse near Cosmodrome Baikonur, 125 miles east of Aral Sea The space craft were both developed as part of Moscow's Buran programme which was shut down in 1993 Same building home to vast Energia rocket, designed to propel the unmanned space plane Buran into orbit Russian model had striking external similarities to the US Space Shuttle Columbia sparking espionage claims These eerie photographs show how USSR-era space craft have been left to rust in an abandoned desert hangar in Kazakhstan. Two test shuttles were found inside a derelict Soviet warehouse near the Cosmodrome Baikonur,...

India successfully launched a scale model of a reusable spacecraft on Monday, a project that in time could pit the nation against billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in the race to make access to space cheaper and easier. The winged vessel -- one-fifth of full size -- blasted off on a rocket from Sriharikota base on the southeastern coast, the Indian Space Research Organisation said. The spacecraft reached an altitude of 65 kilometers (40 miles) and glided back at supersonic speeds for a splashdown in the Bay of Bengal. The test took about 13 minutes.

A Lone Morton Thiokol Engineer tried to convince NASA and Thiokol management that their booster rocket is flawed. Both NASA and Thiokol ignore his warnings.The next day The Space Shuttle Challenger explodes over Florida and the Rogers Commission is formed to find out what exactly happened.

Images from Jan. 28, 1986, are seared into the memories of former schoolchildren, teachers, parents, and pretty much any American now older than 30 - the Challenger space shuttle, meant to carry school teacher Christa McAuliffe into orbit, reduced to a snaky tunnel of smoke in the sky near Cape Canaveral. In the years that followed, a lot would come out about a disaster watched in countless classrooms across the nation: about faulty O-rings, about dangerously cold temperatures, and about how five crewmen, an engineer and a New Hampshire teacher meant to represent NASA in its finest hour became the...

I was working with NASA as a public information officer attached to the press site at Kennedy Space Center. My job that morning was to deliver pre-launch commentary at the communication console inside the Launch Control Center at the Cape. I began my shift at the microphone at about 3am, about the time the tanking operations got underway when millions of pounds of pressurized hypergolic fuels were being pumped into the behemoth at Launch Pad 39-B as the seven astronauts breakfasted before suiting up for the big event.

Here is a quick timeline of what occurred around the time of the video: Video recording started at 08:41:35 a.m. (EST) February 1, 2003... Video ends at 08:48:14 a.m. Shuttle is moving at mach 24.66 (18,771 mph) at an altitude of 230,348 ft. The first indication that something is wrong occurs at 08:48:39 a.m ( 25 seconds after video ends ) when one of the Strain (correlates to force) gauge sensors on the left wing Fails (this is close to where a piece of foam had hit the space shuttle during launch) Followed by the first sign of unusual Heating...

Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion (GRAPHIC)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – As families of the lost Challenger astronauts gather with NASA to mark the space shuttle accident's 30th anniversary, there's a new voice to address the crowd. June Scobee Rodgers -- widow of Challenger commander Dick Scobee and longtime spokeswoman for the group -- is passing the torch to daughter Kathie Scobee Fulgham. [....] The event will honor the Columbia Seven as well, along with the three Apollo 1 astronauts killed during a launch pad test on Jan. 27, 1967. NASA also plans observances at Arlington National cemetery, Johnson Space Center in Houston and elsewhere.

January 28th marks 30 years since the Challenger Disaster. Seems so long ago, yet it is one of those days people never forget. School was out that day, probably because of bad weather, and I remember watching on television the news showing the explosion over and over. I will never forget. We didn’t give up on spaceflight that day, but I wish more would have seen the real promise of the Final Frontier. Instead, many in government still see it as another “get-elected-for-a-few-years” opportunity. The vision of government sees only through the next election cycle, not seven generations hence. There...

NASA has apparently been stripping and reusing parts from old spacecraft, because when you have lofty goals and a limited budget, you gotta do what you gotta do. For instance, it's salvaging the four water tanks installed on the space shuttle Endeavour this week, so the agency can use them to build a new storage system for the International Space Station. Those tanks can store 300 liters in all that can last for 25 to 27 days: they're expected to help free more time for the crew to spend on their experiments. Also, according to NASA spokesperson Daniel Huot, they...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA is offering up wreckage from the Challenger and Columbia for public view after hiding it from the world for decades.

Explanation: What's that rising from the clouds? The space shuttle. Sometimes, if you looked out the window of an airplane at just the right place and time, you could have seen something very unusual -- a space shuttle launching to orbit. Images of the rising shuttle and its plume became widely circulated over the web shortly after Endeavour's final launch in 2011 May. The above image was taken from a shuttle training aircraft by NASA and is not copyrighted. Taken well above the clouds, the image can be matched with similar images of the same shuttle plume taken below the...