NASA Space Shuttle Orbiters

The Space Shuttle orbiter was the winged, reusable spacecraft component of NASA's Space Shuttle program, the vehicle that carried crew and cargo into low Earth orbit and returned to land on a runway like an aircraft. Built by Rockwell International, five orbiters flew in space: Columbia, the first to fly, in 1981; Challenger, destroyed in a 1986 launch disaster; Discovery, the most flown orbiter in the fleet; Atlantis, the second to last built; and Endeavour, constructed as Challenger's replacement and the last orbiter to fly. Each orbiter combined a crew cabin, a large cargo bay, and three main engines fed by an external tank, with two solid rocket boosters providing additional launch thrust, and each was designed for repeated flights rather than a single use, a defining departure from earlier expendable American crewed spacecraft. Over three decades of operation the orbiter fleet flew 135 missions, deployed and serviced satellites including the Hubble Space Telescope, and assembled the International Space Station, before the program ended in 2011.